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At the height of the street battles, in Sadaat Abad, a middle-class neighborhood in east Tehran, young men and women organized themselves into an unofficial militia to fight the Basij, with a "commander" taking responsibility for each street. Every afternoon, they would meet to prepare for the evening's expected battle, according to a 25-year-old student who was involved with the group.

Mr. Moradani remembers field trips to war monuments, Shiite shrines and so-called martyrs' cemeteries, where those who died in the Iran-Iraq war are buried. He received his first military training before he turned 14, learning how to handle a gun and fight from trenches, he says. When he was 14, the Basij forces piled Mr. Moradani and 100 other youths into buses and took them around the dormitories of Tehran University. At the time -- 10 years ago this week -- students had been orchestrating large, antigovernment protests. The demonstrations were among the most significant since the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic. Basij commanders ordered the teenagers to beat up student organizers, Mr. Moradani says. They did. In 2003, when student uprisings erupted again, he rushed to help quash them.

A few hours after Mr. Khamenei's sermon, Mr. Moradani got a call at home. The local Basij headquarters was holding an emergency meeting. About four hundred members showed up. A top Basij commander briefed them on the riots and their responsibilities going forward. He called protesters "havoc makers" and accused them of having ties to Western countries aiming to sow chaos in Iran. The commander said the protests were no longer a matter of election unrest, but had become a serious, national-security threat.

Mr. Moradani lined up with his comrades to receive an official letter of deployment, signed and bearing the seal of the Revolutionary Guard. He was given new equipment: a camouflage vest to wear over his clothes, a plastic baton, handcuffs and a hand-held radio. Depending on rank, some members received shields and hard hats, and others were given chains and tear gas, according to Messrs. Gholami and Moradani. Mr. Moradani says no one in his division carried knives or guns.

A surgeon at Pars Hospital in central Tehran, where many of the fallen were taken, confirmed casualties on both sides. He said the hospital had operated on three young people from the opposition who were shot in the head and abdomen by security forces. He also treated scores who were badly beaten or stabbed, he said. Among them were Basij and government supporters, he said -- including Basij members who had acid thrown on their faces.

onservative opponents have also made moves to outflank him in the theological sphere by courting the support of one of Shi’a Islam’s most influential clerics, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq. Larijani met with Ayatollah Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, on March 25.

Larijani on March 25 occupied the hardliner high ground from Ahmadinejad by coming out forcefully against US President Barack Obama’s recent olive branch address, made in connection with the Iranian new year on March 21.

Orumieh, the capital of West Azerbaijan Province, and the place where he once served as governor. Several people flung shoes at his motorcade in an evident display of anger over his economic bungling. Ahmadinejad then cut short his appearance when he was vociferously booed while attempting to address local residents. Since then, the president has not made another trip into Iran’s provinces. And according to knowledgeable sources in Tehran, media outlets have been threatened with punishment if they report on the Orumieh embarrassment.

Earlier in March, another bitter rival of Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, met with Ayatollah Sistani and other top Iraqi Shi’a clerics.