WarSclerotic

A day after riot police in Iran beat protesters and fired tear gas to contain the most significant street protests since the end of the 2009 uprising there, protests continued on Tuesday in other parts of the region as demonstrators clashed with security forces in Bahrain and Yemen.

In all three countries, the eruptions had been inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, where predominantly young protesters mobilizing their supporters with digital technology succeeded in ousting entrenched authoritarian regimes that had once seemed untouchable.

In Bahrain, where a Sunni Muslim elite rules a largely Shiite nation, police clashed with mourners following the body of a protester killed on Monday. As the police fired tear gas in an attempt to block the funeral procession, a second demonstrator was killed by gunfire, human rights organizations said.

The largest Shiite bloc in the Parliament, the Wefaq National Islamic Society, announced it was suspending its participation in the body. ‘This is the first step. We want to see dialogue,” Ibrahim Mattar, a Wefaq parliamentarian, told Reuters. “In the coming days, we are either going to resign from the council or continue.”

In Yemen, demonstrators emulating the protesters in Cairo scuffled with police, The Associated Press reported, as thousands marched in Sana, the capital, for a fifth consecutive day demanding political reforms and the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who promised to step down by 2013 in response to earlier protests.

But that pledge has not been enough to defuse anger with his American-backed rule. Some 2,000 supporters of the government also gathered, The A.P. said, raising concern about clashes similar to those that seized the capital on Monday. Riot police blocked the main road leading to the city center and clashed with protesters throwing stones. Three protesters were injured and rushed to the hospital in ambulances.

The protests followed clashes on Monday when the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of peaceful protesters from the Shiite majority population. So much tear gas was fired that the officers themselves vomited.

Yemen, too, witnessed a fourth straight day of protests on Monday when hundreds of student protesters clashed with pro-government forces.

In Tehran, a spokesman for Mir Hussein Moussavi, a leading opponent of the government, said Monday’s protests had shown that the so-called Green Movement, formed to challenge the disputed election in 2009, had scored a “great victory” and was “alive and well” despite a huge government crackdown when the government quashed dissent through the shooting of demonstrators, mass trials, torture, lengthy jail sentences and even executions of some of those taking part.

Breaking an official silence on the demonstrations, the Fars news agency, a semiofficial service linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the demonstrations had been conducted by “hypocrites, monarchists, hooligans and seditionists” whose leaders were puppets of Britain and the United States. It ridiculed them for not chanting slogans about Egypt, the nominal reason for the protests, and said an unspecified number of people had been arrested.

Iranian human rights activists and police said on person was killed and several injured in protests that continued until close to midnight. The authorities had refused to issue a permit for the demonstration but Amir Arjomand, the spokesman for Mr. Moussavi said: “If the government had issued a permit and guaranteed the safety of the people there would certainly have been millions of people out in Tehran and other cities.” The size of the protests in Iran was unclear. Witness accounts and news reports from inside the country suggested that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 demonstrators in several cities defied strong warnings and took to the streets.

The unrest was an acute embarrassment for Iranian leaders, who had sought to portray the toppling of two secular rulers, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, as a triumph of popular support for Islam in the Arab world. They had refused permission to Iranian opposition groups seeking to march in solidarity with the Egyptians, and warned journalists and photographers based in the country, with success, not to report on the protests.

Iranian demonstrators portrayed the Arab insurrections as a different kind of triumph. “Mubarak, Ben Ali, now it’s time for Sayyid Ali!” Iranian protesters chanted in Persian on videos posted online that appeared to be from Tehran, referring to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian authorities have shown that they will not hesitate to crush demonstrations with deadly force. Other governments across the Middle East and the Persian Gulf also moved aggressively to stamp out protests on Monday.

In Egypt, the army stuck to its promise not to attack demonstrators, but the death toll during the protests leading to Mr. Mubarak’s downfall reached about 300 people, according to the United Nations and human rights organizations. Most fatalities appeared to have occurred when pro-government thugs attacked demonstrators.