‘We all know someone who was killed’: Iranian protesters describe personal toll of repression

Soroush Negahdari,BBC monitoringAnd

Ghoncheh Habibiazad,Persian BBC

“My friends are all like me. We all know someone who was killed during the protests.”

For Parisa, a 29-year-old from Tehran, the crackdown by security forces in Iran earlier this month was unlike anything she had witnessed before.

“During the most widespread previous protests, I didn’t personally know any people who were killed,” she said.

Parisa said she knew of at least 13 people who had been killed since protests against deteriorating economic conditions erupted in the capital on Dec. 28 and later turned into one of the deadliest periods of anti-government unrest in the Islamic Republic’s history.

As a human rights group reports the number of people killed has topped 6,000, several young Iranians able to speak to the BBC in recent days, despite a near-total internet blackout, have described the personal toll.

Parisa said a 26-year-old woman she knew was killed by “a hail of bullets in the street” when protests intensified across the country on Thursday (Jan. 8) and Friday (Jan. 9), and authorities responded with deadly force to crush them.

She herself took part in demonstrations in northern Tehran on Thursday, which she described as peaceful.

“No one was violent and no one confronted the security forces. But on Friday evening, they still opened fire on the crowd,” she said.

“The smell of gunpowder and bullets invaded the neighborhoods where the clashes took place.”

Mehdi, 24, also from Tehran, echoed his assessment of the scale of the protests and violence.

“I have never seen anything close to this level of participation, such killing and such violence by the security forces,” he said.

“Despite Thursday’s killings [8 January] and the threats of further killings on Friday, people came out, because many of them could not take it anymore and had nothing left to lose,” he added.

Mehdi described witnessing multiple killings of protesters at point-blank range by security forces.

“I saw a young man killed before my eyes with two live bullets,” he said.

“Motorcyclists shot a young man in the face with a shotgun. He fell where he was and never got up.”

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) says it has so far confirmed the killing of at least 6,159 people since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. It is also investigating an additional 17,000 reported deaths.

Skylar Thompson, from Hrana, told the BBC the confirmed death toll was most likely to rise.

“We are really committed to ensuring that every piece of verified information that we report on is next to a name and a location,” she added.

Another group, Iran Human Rights (IHR), based in Norway, warned that the final death toll could exceed 25,000 people.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people had been killed, but that the majority were members of security forces or bystanders attacked by “rioters.”

Most international news outlets, including the BBC, are barred from reporting in Iran. But videos showing security forces firing live ammunition into crowds were verified by the BBC.

Sahar, a 27-year-old from the capital, said she knew of seven people who had been killed.

She described how the security forces’ response to the unrest quickly escalated on January 8.

That evening, during a protest, Sahar and his friends sought shelter in a nearby house after tear gas was fired.

“My friend stuck his head out the window to see what was happening and they shot him in the neck,” she said.

Another friend was injured by pellets and then bled to death after avoiding going to the hospital for fear of being arrested, according to Sahar.

Sahar said a third friend died while in the custody of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“They [officers] told his family to go to the IRGC intelligence office. After a few days, they called and said, “Come and collect the body.” » »

On January 9, Sahar said, live ammunition was fired openly and “mercilessly” by members of the uniformed security forces.

“They were pointing lasers at people and residents were opening their parking lot doors so we could hide,” she said.

The communication breakdown compounded the trauma.

“As of now, there is no news,” Sahar said. “Without internet or phone lines, we had no idea what was happening to anyone. We could barely make calls just to get news.”

Parham, 27, described the widespread use of pellet guns by security forces in Tehran, particularly targeting protesters’ faces and eyes.

One of her friends, Sina, 23, was shot in the forehead and eye on January 9.

“We took him to the hospital, but the doctor could only give us a prescription and told us to leave as soon as possible,” Parham said.

At an eye hospital, he added, injured protesters were constantly arriving.

“Every 10 minutes it was like they brought in someone else who had been hit by a pellet.”

A hospital cafe worker reported seeing “70 people with eye injuries come in over the course of a single day,” according to Parham.

Sina – who still has pellets stuck behind one eye and in his forehead – said they were afraid of being arrested at the first hospital because of the requirement to give their identification numbers, so they went to a private eye hospital.

He said he was “lucky” compared to others he saw at the eye hospital, who had “bullets all over their face and in both eyes.”

The BBC has seen a medical document in Sina’s name which says “there is a 5mm metallic foreign body” behind his eye.

The medical records of a number of other protesters with gunshot wounds were also received and verified by the BBC.

Protesters and activists also described a pattern of authorities refusing to release the bodies of those killed to their families.

Mehdi said his friend’s cousin had been killed and authorities had asked the family to pay a large sum of money to recover his body or agree to have him registered as a member of the security forces.

“They said: ‘Either pay 1 billion tomans [more than $7,000; £5,000] so that we hand over the body to the family, or else we must say that he was a member of the Basij and that he was martyred for public security and against riots.'”

Navid, a 38-year-old man from Isfahan, also said that two close friends whose relatives were killed had received such an ultimatum.

“They say you have to pay the equivalent of several thousand dollars or be issued a Basij card so that they are counted among the dead of the security forces,” he said, quoting his friends.

Human rights groups have warned that the practice serves both to punish protesters’ families and to hide the true death toll.