In Tehran, Iran’s capital, security forces opened fire on protesters from the roof of a police station. In Karaj, they fired live rounds at a march and shot one person in the head. In Isfahan, young people barricaded themselves in an alley as gunshots and explosions were heard.
Scattered protests had filtered in since late December, beginning with a strike in Tehran’s bazaar and fueled by a sagging economy. By early January, Iranians had revolted en masse and security forces began cracking down with lethal force.
It was not just the protests that made the regime nervous. US President Donald Trump encouraged protesters and threatened military intervention. In many places, riots broke out alongside peaceful protests; Government buildings, commercial properties, mosques and police stations were set on fire.
On Jan. 9, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and show no mercy, officials said. The death toll increased.
Even as Iran shut down the Internet and disrupted phone service, some Iranians managed to evade restrictions by sharing eyewitness accounts and hundreds of videos, many of which The New York Times was able to collect and authenticate.
He Times has verified videos of security forces opening fire on protesters in at least 19 cities and at least six different neighborhoods in Tehran in early January.
The videos show the breadth and ferocity of the regime’s repression. So do the testimonies of doctors and a nurse who work in hospitals in Iran, and the photographs shared by a witness and authenticated by the Times of hundreds of victims taken to a Tehran morgue.
He Times He also interviewed two dozen Iranians in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Rasht and Ahvaz who had attended protests, as well as relatives of people killed. Protesters, residents and medical staff interviewed for this article asked that their names or full names not be published for fear of retaliation.
By January 12, the protests had been virtually crushed.
As more information emerges from Iran, the death toll has reached at least 5,200 people, including 56 children, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group that also monitors the situation in Iran, has confirmed at least 3,400 deaths. Both organizations say the numbers could turn out to be two or three times higher as verification continues.
Iran’s National Security Council said in a statement that 3,117 people had been killed, including 427 members of its security forces. Officials, including Khamenei, have blamed terrorist cells linked to Israel and the United States for the uprising and killings.
“This is not simply a violent repression of protests,” said Raha Bahraini, a lawyer and Iran researcher at Amnesty International. “It is a massacre orchestrated by the State.”
Bell
On January 8, Nasim Pouraghayee, 45, a mother of two, and her husband, Ali, marched with large crowds in the Sadeghiyeh neighborhood of Tehran. He called his mother to tell her that the atmosphere was bustling and that the attendance was huge.
Suddenly, things turned deadly.
Her husband walked behind her, with his hands around her shoulders to protect her, according to a cousin of Pouraghayee who, in an interview, recounted the events of the night described by Ali. A bullet hit Nasim Pouraghayee in the neck; He fell to the ground and began vomiting blood, the cousin said.
“Nasim, Nasim, Nasim!” her husband shouted, holding her face. But she didn’t answer. “Help, help,” he pleaded with other protesters fleeing the chaos, but no one came forward. He felt his wife’s body grow cold as he picked her up, the cousin said, and walked for an hour and a half to get to his car. When they arrived at the hospital, they pronounced her dead.
A video verified by the Times captured the sound of live fire directed at protesters in Sadeghiyeh. Protesters turn, flee and scream when gunshots are heard.
Some 40 verified videos show armed men and security forces suppressing demonstrations. In the footage, they are seen traveling in pairs on motorcycles and using a variety of weapons, including firearms, batons and tear gas. In a video filmed in Tehran’s Haft Howz Square, men and women flee to the sound of gunfire.
Tehran January 8
Mohammad, 40, a shop owner, said he and his younger brother were among protesters in Tehran Pars, a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Tehran, on Jan. 9, when they heard the sound of gunshots. “I saw two young men who were fleeing collapse; they were shot in the back,” Mohammad said.
Security forces fired at protesters from the rooftop of a police station in Tehran Pars for more than six minutes, video shows. The protesters flee down an adjacent street. Minutes later, a person is dragged into the police station courtyard.
Another video filmed further down the same street (and in the direction in which security forces were shooting) shows protesters taking cover from the gunfire.
The sound of bullets impacting nearby can be heard amid chants of “Death to Khamenei.”
A video that Times The confirmed image was filmed at Tehran’s nearby Pars Hospital and showed several body bags lined up on the floor outside the entrance to an emergency room as people could be heard crying.
Tehran January 9
hospitals
Across the country, hospitals overwhelmed by thousands of wounded protesters were unprepared for the magnitude of the gunshot wounds they were seeing, according to interviews and text messages with eight doctors and one nurse in Iran.
Gun violence is rare in Iran and private citizens cannot own guns. Doctors and nurses who shared their experiences in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Zanjan described scenes of chaos: medical staff desperately trying to save lives, white uniforms soaked in blood. They said patients were lying on benches and chairs, and even on bare floors, in crowded emergency rooms.
They said hospitals were short of blood and were looking for vascular and trauma surgeons. The internet outage prevented medical staff from verifying patients’ names and medical histories, they said.
A nurse at Tehran’s Nikan Hospital said in an interview that the hospital looked like a war zone. A doctor at Shohada Tajrish Hospital in northern Tehran, a sprawling government medical center, said that, on average, medical staff treated about 70 protesters with gunshot wounds per hour on the two days of peak violence, Jan. 9 and 10. Many patients died upon arrival or shortly after, he said.
Farabi Eye Hospital in Tehran, a national center for ophthalmology, recorded about 500 cases of eye injuries from pellet bullets on Jan. 8 and several hundred eye injuries from live bullets in the following two nights, a surgeon said in a text message. He was in the operating room for three nights in a row and said he wanted death when he had to empty both eye sockets of a 13-year-old boy.
Photos, videos, and text conversations shared with the Times performed by Dr. Kayvan Mirhadi, an Iranian-American doctor in Rochester, New York, who has been in regular contact with medical teams and hospitals in Iran, showed dozens of apparent gunshot and pellet wounds to the torso, extremities, head and eyes.
“They are basically executing people in the streets,” Mirhadi said. “As of Thursday, the injury reports I received changed significantly. They went from brute force, fractures and tear gas to skull fractures and gunshot wounds.”
Some images shared by Mirhadi were sent by people asking how to treat their own wounds or those of their family members. One person asked about a gunshot wound to his brother’s leg. Another sent a photo of an eye, with blood coming from a cut just above it.
He Times sent a representative sample of 17 images to experts from the Independent Group of Forensic Experts coordinated by the International Council for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, who determined that the injuries appeared to have been caused by pellets or pellets fired at point-blank range.
HRANA, Washington’s human rights agency, documented a significant number of injuries from pellet shots during recent protests, including shots to the eyeball. It said 7,402 people suffered serious injuries.
funeral
Funerals are being held across Iran. Parents are burying their children. Children are burying parents. Siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates and teammates attend funeral processions.
As the faces and stories of the victims emerge, told by family or friends and posted on social media, so does the story of the uprising. The slain protesters represent a wide swath of Iran, ethnically, economically and socially.
Tehran January 10: Warning graphic content
Many were very young. Teenagers and people in their early 20s took to the streets with dreams of a better life, a prosperous future and freedom, their families say.
A 21-year-old basketball star who played on a national team; a 17-year-old Kurdish footballer who plays for a national youth club; a 15-year-old swimming champion; a 19-year-old college student majoring in Italian; 26 year old English teacher.
At these funerals and that of Ahmad Khosravani, the basketball star, the crowd abandoned the traditional mourning rituals of crying and reciting the Koran.
Instead, they clapped, cheered and chanted in unison, saying, “This fallen flower is a gift to the nation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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