Videos and witness statements are gradually escaping Iran, suggesting authorities are executing one of the most brutal repressions of popular unrest in more than a decade, The New York Times reported. Tehran has imposed an almost total communications blackout as mass protests convulse the nation.
Automatic weapons fire has been directed at peaceful demonstrators by government forces, sometimes appearing indiscriminate, eyewitnesses told The New York Times. Hospital staff report a dramatic shift from pellet wounds in earlier casualties to gunshot injuries and skull fractures now. One physician called it a "mass-casualty situation."
Despite the information blockade, one image keeps emerging from Iran: row after row of body bags. Social media footage posted by opposition activists shows families sobbing over bloodied corpses in unzipped bags, according to The New York Times. State television broadcast images of a morgue official in blue scrubs standing amid neatly arranged bags on a white floor under fluorescent lights.
Government broadcasters framed the visuals as evidence that protests endanger Iranian society, The New York Times reported. The voice-over reporter stated: "There are individuals in these gatherings who want to drag ordinary people, people who have nothing to do with these events, and their families into this situation. So that they too are drawn into the chaos." The reporter added: "I have never seen images like these in my life before."
Supporters of Iran's theocratic leadership and protesters calling for its overthrow agree on one point: The current violence surpasses anything in their experience. Casualty figures remain unclear nationwide, according to The New York Times. Human rights organizations are having difficulty reaching Iranian contacts and applying standard verification methods, but have counted more than 500 dead.
US intelligence agencies have conservatively estimated that more than 600 protesters have been killed, multiple American officials told The New York Times. The agencies noted that both the current protests and the government response are far more violent than the 2022 demonstrations or other recent anti-government movements.
About 3,000 people have been killed across the country, according to a senior Iranian health ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity to The New York Times. The official attempted to blame "terrorists" for fomenting unrest. The figure included hundreds of security officers, the official said. The death toll, if confirmed, would rank among the worst in recent Iranian history, The New York Times reported.
Accounts from witnesses paint a grim picture. Snipers positioned on rooftops in downtown Tehran fired into crowds. Peaceful protests turned suddenly to carnage and panic as bullets pierced heads and torsos, toppling bodies to the ground. One emergency room treated 19 gunshot patients in a single hour.
Protester Yasi described the crackdown as a killing campaign by the regime, The New York Times reported. "The regime is on a killing spree," she said. Like other Iranians interviewed by the newspaper, she requested her full name be withheld for safety.
Friday night, Yasi, a publishing company employee in her 30s, marched with friends along Andarzgoo Boulevard in Tehran, according to The New York Times. Security forces stormed in and shot a teenage boy in the leg as his mother looked on, she said. Yasi recalled the woman's cries: "My son! My son! They shot my son!"
A large crowd of protesters in Tehran appeared in videos posted to social media Monday night and verified by The New York Times. Gunfire could be heard, and the cry: "Death to the dictator!"
Iranian authorities have shut down the internet, international phone lines, and sometimes even domestic mobile phone connections for the past five days, The New York Times reported. Rights groups, journalists, and families are struggling to understand the scope of what has happened.
Country-wide footage trickling out and messages from some Iranians who occasionally get satellite internet connections offer a devastating picture of bloodshed. Tehran businessman Saeed told The Times he was using a Starlink internet connection late Sunday, the newspaper reported. "I managed to get connected for a few minutes just to say it's a blood bath here," he said.
On December 28, protests erupted in Tehran's marketplace over Iran's dire economy, The New York Times reported. Saeed took to the streets to join them. He had done the same during the 2022 protest movement and those before it, he said. Iran's descent into deeper isolation has made clear that this crackdown differs from previous ones, he told The New York Times. "Unlike any of the protests that came before," he said.
Recorded audio messages to The Times captured Saeed's firsthand accounts, the newspaper reported. "I personally saw a young man get shot in the head," he said. "I witnessed someone get shot with a bullet to the knee. The person fell to the ground unconscious, and then security forces gathered over him."
Officials acknowledged protester grievances as legitimate two weeks ago when sharp currency devaluation sent demonstrators into the streets, The New York Times reported. They warned protesters not to be swayed by "rioters."
Smaller demonstrations in city markets and universities have exploded into a broader popular movement in the past week, according to The New York Times. Throngs of protesters now fill major city squares and rural town centers. Iranian officials have begun describing them as taken over by "terrorists," and foreign agents loyal to Iran's enemies, the US and Israel.
Authorities have taken the unusual step of acknowledging large numbers of casualties, signaling the crackdown's scale, The New York Times reported. They have sought to portray the dead as victims of violent protesters and members of the security forces.
Iranian Attorney General Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei addressed a Supreme Judicial Council meeting on Monday, according to semi-official news agency Tasnim, The New York Times reported. "Take firm and effective measures to avenge the martyrs and those killed," he said.
Security forces firing a hail of bullets at protesters in eastern Tehran appeared in a video posted online Tuesday and verified by The Times, the newspaper reported. The six-minute video, dated January 9, captures the sound of hundreds of gunshots and shows muzzle blasts of weapons atop the police station in Tehranpars. A person is dragged inside the station courtyard at one point. A convoy of security forces on motorcycles enters the station at another stage.
Interviews revealed that two people saw snipers firing down at crowds in Tehran's Sattarkhan and Pasvaran neighborhoods, The New York Times reported. One recounted a security agent in the Aghdasieh neighborhood indiscriminately shooting at the crowd while driving by.
Security forces opened a barrage of gunfire with machine guns into a crowd of young men and women Saturday night in Sattarkhan, according to a Tehran resident who went there with his wife, The New York Times reported. They dropped to the ground on top of one another, he said.
Medical workers at Nikan Hospital in northern Tehran were overwhelmed when 19 gunshot victims came in almost at once, a nurse told The New York Times. At Shohada Hospital in Tehran's Tajrish neighborhood, many protesters were declared dead upon arrival, a doctor said. Many had been shot at close range in the head, neck, lungs, and heart.
Protesters were being treated for tear gas exposure and pellet gun wounds earlier in the protests, the doctor told The New York Times. Then Thursday arrived, he said, and he started hearing heavy machine gunfire from the hospital. The doctor's account continued: "This was a mass-casualty situation. Our facilities, space, and personnel were far below the number of injured people arriving. The trauma cases I saw were brutal, shoot to kill."
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said his team had pieced together accounts from Karaj, west of Tehran, and Kermanshah in western Iran, The New York Times reported. The accounts indicate that hospitals and clinics had been occupied by security forces searching for wounded protesters and collecting their personal information.
The Tehran businessman Saeed described a similar experience in the capital. Saeed told The Times what happens to injured protesters, the newspaper reported. "They take the injured protesters to the hospital and if they recover, they arrest them," he said. "If their families arrive first, they try to somehow help them escape. The families who come to receive the bodies of those killed are forced into humiliating confessions: They have to say that the 'terrorists' have killed them."
Hospital reports suggest that in some cases, security officials were detaining protesters even before they had been treated for their wounds, according to activists at Washington-based Iranian rights group HRANA, The New York Times reported.
The organization's death toll has jumped in fits and starts over the past two days as people sporadically managed to get online and share what they had learned, HRANA Deputy Director Skylar Thompson told The New York Times. The group put the toll at 70 dead on Saturday. The number grew to 1,850 protesters and 135 members of the government and military killed by Tuesday. There will most likely be another spike once the group has verified 770 other cases.
Ghaemi said the Center for Human Rights has chosen not to keep a toll because it has been unable to reach enough people to follow its usual procedures, The New York Times reported. Those procedures involve corroborating the accounts of local rights activists with those of victims' families. An interview with Ghaemi captured his assessment. "We can't confirm detailed numbers, but all indications so far point to large-scale killings over the past few days," he said. "We estimate at least 1,000 deaths nationwide and potentially higher. But the current information is just the tip of the iceberg."
Monday saw fewer videos of the unrest appear than in previous days. Whether the violent crackdown will succeed in intimidating protesters into silence remains to be seen. Saeed insisted the killings would not stop the protesters. "People are not afraid anymore," he said, according to The New York Times.
