Bodies outside the Kahrizak morgue in Tehran, January 2026
EA on WION: After Deadly Repression of Protests, Iran’s Regime is Nervous
UPDATES: Iran’s Regime Brutally Suppresses Protests…For Now
On Friday, January 9, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was facing one of the greatest challenges to his 36-year rule.
Twelve days earlier, shopkeepers and merchants had come out on strike in markets and bazaars across the country, including in the capital Tehran. The catalyst was the collapsing Iranian currency, which had fed inflation and undermined business.
The demonstrations soon expanded to include the long-standing desire of Iranians for rights, justice, and political and social space.
The regime had cut down mass protests after the disputed 2009 Presidential election; in 2017 and 2019 over economic conditions; and in 2022 over “Woman, Life, Freedom” after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. It had decapitated the opposition through violence, repression, and detentions: the leader of the Green Movement and possible winner of the 2009 election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has been under strict house arrest since February 2011.
Now the challenge had been renewed. It was magnified on January 8 when the son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, made a high-profile call for Iranians to turn out in all cities and towns.
The following day, the Supreme Leader issued his order to the Supreme National Security Council: crush the protests by any means necessary. “Two Iranian officials briefed” on the directive said security forces were deployed to shoot to kill and to show no mercy.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s confirmed the deadly use of force that escalated on the night of January 8. Throughout the following day and over the weekend, the Iranian military, paramilitary Basij, and security personnel unleashed their full assault.
The extent of the killings is still not established. Human rights activists have confirmed the slaying of more than 5,200 people, including 36 children. Unconfirmed claims put the figure as high as 36,500.
The New York Times confirmed more than 40 videos of security forces opening fire on protesters in at least 19 cities and in at least six different neighborhoods in Tehran. In one case, security personnel shot at protesters from the rooftop of a police station in Tehran Pars for more than six minutes.
Times journalists interviewed dozens of witnesses and family members in Iran, reviewed more than 160 videos and photos, and spoke with Iranian officials, rights groups, and medical workers.
Eight doctors and a nurse spoke of hospitals swamped by thousands of injured protesters in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Zanjan. As medical staff frantically tried to save lives amid shortages of blodd, patients lay on benches, chairs, and bare floors. Medics desperately sought trauma and vascular surgeons,, but the regime’s shutdown of the Internet prevented staff from checking patients’ names and medical histories.
A Tehran surgeon wrote in The Guardian:
Very quickly, the hospital became a mass casualty zone. We did not have enough of anything: not enough surgeons, not enough nurses, not enough anaesthesiologists, not enough operating rooms, not enough blood products. Not enough time. Patients kept arriving faster than we could treat them. Stretchers lined up. Operating rooms turned over again and again.
In a hospital that would normally perform two emergency surgeries in a night, we carried out about 18 operations between 9pm and 6am. When morning came, some patients from that night were still on the operating table.
There was no pause. No moment to step back and assess. You moved from one patient to the next, from one operating room to another. I have worked through earthquakes and seen mass casualties after major accidents. I have never experienced anything like this.
In Tehran’s main morgue, the Kahrizak Forensic Center, several hundred bodies in black plastic bags were stacked in refrigerators, placed on the floor, and scattered in rows on the ground in the parking lot and courtyard.
By January 12, the mass killings across Iran had scattered the demonstrations.
Lawyer Raha Bahreini summarized, “This is not merely a violent protest crackdown. It is a state-orchestrated massacre.”
