Iran protests: Eyewitnesses describe deadly crackdown across country

Roja AssadiAnd

Sarah Namjoo,Persian BBC

“I saw it with my own eyes: they fired directly at the lines of demonstrators, and people fell where they stood.”

Omid’s voice shook as he spoke, fearful of being found. Breaking the wall of silence between Iran and the rest of the world requires immense courage, given the risk of reprisals from the authorities.

Omid, in his early 40s and whose name we have changed for his safety, has been protesting in the streets of a small town in southern Iran in recent days against worsening economic difficulties.

He said security forces opened fire on unarmed protesters in his town with Kalashnikov-style assault rifles.

“We are fighting a brutal regime empty-handed,” he said.

The BBC has received similar accounts of the crackdown by security forces following widespread protests across the country last week.

Since then, internet access has been cut off by authorities, making reporting on Iran more difficult than ever. The government bans BBC Persian from reporting in Iran.

One of the largest nationwide anti-government protests took place on Thursday, the twelfth night of protests. Many people appear to have joined the protests on Thursday and Friday after calls from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The next day, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said: “The Islamic Republic will not back down“It appears that the worst bloodshed took place after this warning, as security forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took their orders from him.

Iranian authorities accused the United States and Israel of fomenting unrest and condemned “terrorist actions,” state media reported.

A young woman from Tehran declared last Thursday that it was “judgment day”.

“Even remote areas of Tehran were filled with protesters – places you wouldn’t believe,” she said.

“But on Friday, the security forces just killed, killed and killed. Seeing it with my own eyes made me so sick that I completely lost my morale. Friday was a bloody day.”

She said that after Friday’s killings, people were afraid to go out and many were now chanting slogans in alleys and inside their homes.

Tehran was a battlefield, she explained, with protesters and security forces taking up positions and sheltering in the streets.

But she added: “In war, both sides have weapons. Here, people just sing and get killed. It’s a one-sided war.”

Eyewitnesses in Fardis, a town just west of Tehran, said that on Friday, members of the Basij paramilitary force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) suddenly attacked protesters after hours without a police presence on the streets.

The forces, who were in uniform and riding on motorcycles, fired live ammunition directly at the demonstrators, according to witnesses. Unmarked cars were also driven into alleys, and their occupants shot at residents who were not involved in the protests, they said.

“Two or three people were killed in each alley,” said a witness.

Those who testified to the BBC in Persian say the reality in Iran is difficult for the outside world to imagine, and that the death toll reported so far by international media is only a fraction of their own estimates.

International media are not allowed to work freely in Iran and rely mainly on Iranian human rights groups active outside the country. On Monday, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization (IHRNGO) said at least 648 protesters had been killed in Iran, including nine people under the age of 18.

Some local sources and eyewitnesses report very high numbers of people killed in different cities, ranging from several hundred to thousands.

The BBC is currently unable to independently verify these figures and, so far, Iranian authorities have not provided official or transparent statistics on the death toll among protesters.

However, Iranian media reported that 100 members of the security forces were killed during the protests, saying the demonstrators – whom they described as “rioters” – had burned down dozens of mosques and banks in various cities.

Videos verified by BBC Persian’s fact-checking team also show police vehicles and some government buildings being set on fire at different locations during the protests.

The testimonies and videos sent to BBC Persian mainly come from major cities such as Tehran, near Karaj, Rasht in the north, Mashhad in the northeast and Shiraz in the south. These areas benefit from better internet access via the Starlink satellite network.

Reports from small towns – where many of the first casualties occurred – are rare because their access to Starlink is very limited.

But the volume, consistency and similarity of testimonies received from different cities testify to the severity of the repression and the widespread use of deadly violence.

Nurses and doctors who spoke to the BBC said they saw many dead bodies and injured protesters.

They reported that hospitals in many cities were overwhelmed and unable to treat seriously injured peopleespecially to the head and eyes. Some witnesses reported bodies “piled on top of each other” and not handed over to families.

Graphic videos posted on Telegram activist channel Vahid Online on Sunday showed large numbers of bodies at Tehran’s Kahrizak forensic center, with many families crying or trying to identify the corpses.

In one of the videos apparently from Kahrizak, relatives are seen looking at photos of unidentified bodies displayed on a screen.

Numerous bodies in black bags were visible in the facility and on the street outside, only some of which appear to have been identified.

One video showed the inside of a warehouse containing several bodies, while another showed a truck being unloaded with people while removing the corpses.

A morgue worker at a cemetery in Mashhad said that before sunrise Friday morning, between 180 and 200 bodies with serious head injuries were brought in and buried immediately.

A source in Rasht told the Persian BBC that 70 bodies of protesters were transferred to the morgue of a hospital in the city on Thursday. According to the source, the security forces demanded “payment for the bullets” before handing over the bodies to the families.

Meanwhile, a medical staff member at a hospital in eastern Tehran told BBC Persian that around 40 bodies were brought there on Thursday the same day. The name of the hospital has not been released to protect the identity of the doctor.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Sunday he was “shocked by reports of violence and excessive use of force by Iranian authorities against demonstrators, leading to deaths and injuries in recent days.”

“I want to emphasize that regardless of the number of deaths, the use of lethal force by security forces is concerning,” Mai Sato, UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, told BBC Persian.