Rows of bodies in Tehran, Iran amid regime’s mass killing during nationwide protests, January 2026

Co-written with Tess McClure and originally published by The Guardian:

Supreme Leader’s Deadly Order: Crush The Protests Across Iran

On Thursday 8 January, in a midsize Iranian town, Dr Ahmadi’s phone began to buzz. His colleagues in local emergency wards were getting worried.

All week, people had taken to the streets and had been met by police with batons and pellet guns. With treatment, their injuries should not have been too serious. But emergency room staff believed many wounded young people were avoiding hospitals, terrified that registering as trauma patients would lead to their identification and arrest.

Quietly, Ahmadi — who remains anonymous due to fear of reprisals, but whose identity, credentials and presence within Iran during the unrest have been verified by the Guardian — and his wife began treating patients at a location outside Iran’s government hospital system. Alerted by a local whisper network, wounded young people flocked to them. Mostly, they brought superficial injuries – laceration wounds needing stitches and antibiotics. As Thursday evening wore on, more and more arrived to be patched up.

The next day, everything abruptly changed. Protesters kept coming, but their injuries were close-range gunshots and severe stab wounds, typically to the chest, eyes and genitals. Many proved fatal.

Ahmadi was shocked by the number being killed – more than 40 in his small town alone – but with the internet blacked out, no one knew what the national picture was. To piece it together, Ahmadi assembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces to share observations and data, and to build a clearer picture of the violence.

Their observations, shared with the Guardian and combined with accounts from morgues and graveyards across the country, begin to reveal the vast scale of violence inflicted on Iranians during the state’s crackdown. Ahmadi and his colleagues are hesitant to provide a figure for the toll but agree “all publicly cited death tolls represent a severe underestimation”. Comparing the number of dead they witnessed with hospital baselines, they estimate it could exceed 30,000, far surpassing official figures. This is based on the conclusion that “officially registered deaths related to the crackdown likely represent less than 10% of the real number of fatalities”.

Estimates of the number killed vary substantially, hampered by the ongoing internet shutdown. The Iranian government has acknowledged more than 3,000 dead, and the US-based organisation Human Rights Activists News Agency, whose figures have been reliable during previous crackdowns, says it has verified more than 6,000 dead and has more than 17,000 more recorded deaths under investigation, giving a possible total of about 22,000. Other estimates from doctors based outside Iran range up to 33,000 or more.

Testimony from morgues, graveyards and hospitals around the country reveal concerted efforts by authorities to conceal the true size of the toll: bodies being transported in ice-cream vans and meat trucks; piles of the dead being hastily buried; and hundreds of bodies apparently disappearing from Iran’s network of forensic facilities.

The language Ahmadi uses is measured and clinical, but he is brought to tears describing the violence the doctors documented. “From a medical standpoint, the injuries we observed demonstrate a brutality without limit – both in scale and in method,” he says. Another doctor, who is based in Tehran, tells the Guardian: “I am on the verge of a psychological collapse. They’ve mass murdered people. No one can imagine … I saw just blood, blood and blood.”

The Piles of Bodies

Across Iran in morgues and cemeteries, the bodies piled up – overwhelming many hospitals and forensic units, which were forced to turn trucks filled with corpses away. Graveyard and forensic medical staff describe chaos, with reports of authorities pushing for fast, mass burials to conceal the number dead.

At one morgue, staff say they were confronted with several trucks loaded with bodies, far exceeding the facility’s refrigeration and storage capacity. When staff protested that they could not process the volume of corpses, two trucks loaded with the dead were moved elsewhere – but when the morgue workers tried to track down where the bodies had been taken, they found none of the large forensic facilities in the region had received them. The doctors “expressed suspicion that this was linked to dafn-e dast-e jam’i [mass burial]”.

In a written account shared with the Guardian, Reza, a witness who says he was present at Behesht-e Sakineh, says: “On January 10 and 11, they brought in hundreds of bodies which were said to be unclaimed and unidentified.” Many of the dead, he says, were transported in small pickup trucks typically used for fruit and vegetables, and not all were sealed in body bags.

“These vehicles make dozens of trips back and forth from storage facilities … I have seen bodies in these trucks so stuck together it required strength to pull them apart. The blood was still fresh and dried up when they overcrowded them in piles.”

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