As more information trickles out of Iran, the sheer scale of the massacres committed by the regime against unarmed protesters is becoming clearer by the day. While the precise death toll remains to be definitively determined, it’s already abundantly clear that this is one of the worst atrocities committed against civilian protesters in Iran in generations, if not in all time.
TIME reported on Sunday that as many as 30,000 people could have been massacred in Iran on January 8 and 9, citing senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials. Furthermore, the regime’s paramilitary forces slaughtered so many people in those two days that “it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead.”
The same day, the London-based Iran International news outlet reported that security forces killed 36,500 Iranians in those two days, citing classified documents reviewed by its Editorial Board. Furthermore, the outlet stated, this marks “the largest and bloodiest massacre of civilians during street protests, over a two-day period, in history.”
“It has to be remembered that Iran International is an opposition source, and therefore the information they provide has to be treated with caution,” James Devine, associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Mount Allison University, told me.
“At this point, we simply do not know what the numbers are,” he said. “In part because of the information blackout directed by the Iranian regime, but also because the protests and deaths were in several thousand locations spread across the country.”
Nevertheless, Devine pointed out that the Human Rights Activists News Agency has been taking a “systematic, evidence-based approach to documenting the victims” of this unprecedented crackdown. As of writing, they report at least 6,000 confirmed deaths and are still investigating another 17,000 cases.
“If those cases are confirmed, it would put the death toll at 23,000,” Devine said. “That is lower than the Iran International estimate but still an absolutely horrific number.”
“And, of course, it could still go higher.”
The latest protests in Iran began in late December over unbearable economic conditions and the collapse of the national currency, the rial. They rapidly grew into countrywide street demonstrations, from the largest cities to the smallest of villages, pushing for replacing the oppressive ruling clerical regime that has brought debilitating economic and environmental ruin upon the country. Otherwise disparate segments of Iranian society, such as the conservative Bazaari merchants hitherto largely loyal to the clerics and more liberal and secular Iranian youth, shared this overarching goal.
Even lower estimates indicate the massacres were wholly unprecedented in their scale and ferocity than some of the most infamous protest massacres of modern times. Syria’s horrific civil war killed more than 500,000 people over a 14-year period starting in 2011. However, even Bashar al-Assad, whom Iran’s regime heavily backed as he committed his worst crimes, never killed nearly this many unarmed civilians in a single incident or over a two-day period. For example, the higher estimates for the infamous August 2013 East Ghoutta chemical weapons attack, which saw sarin nerve gas unleashed on an urban civilian area, are 1,500 dead. The massacre committed by his late father, Hafez al-Assad, against the city of Hama in February 1982 saw up to 40,000 killed by state security forces over the course of 26 days. And those forces used artillery and warplanes against civilian-populated urban areas.
Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary are the enforcers and protectors of the ruling regime in Tehran, not the regular national army, known in Iran as the Artesh. Accordingly, the IRGC and Basij committed these massacres. Iran defense analyst Farzin Nadimi noted that the latter paramilitaries used DShK 12.7mm heavy machine guns—the Soviet equivalent of America’s M2 Browning—against unarmed civilians on the typically crowded streets of Tehran, home to 12 million people.
“The heavy and powerful 12.7x108mm bullet used by this machine gun obliterates (the) unprotected human body,” he wrote on X on January 14. “No wonder they managed to kill so many unarmed people so quickly.”
In an earlier X post on January 10, Nadimi wrote that the IRGC and Basij were massacring “unarmed civilians with machine guns at point blank” while “the national armed forces, the Artesh are sitting in their barracks and just watching (and that is another ugly story).”
Other eyewitnesses in Tehran reported witnessing “a blood bath” on the capital’s streets. In a disturbing incident in the northern city of Rasht, regime forces shot unarmed civilians trying to escape an inferno engulfing its bazaar. Consequently, those trapped either faced burning alive by the fire or death by bullets fired from the outside.
All of these massacres transpired under an unprecedented internet and communications blackout. The regime even blocked landline communications as its forces committed widespread massacres. Such a complete blackout seems incongruent in the hyperconnected second quarter of this 21st century. In Iran’s history, the telegraph played a significant role in political movements, organized protests, and civil disobedience as far back as the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“It will take some time before we have a final number, but this is, without a doubt, the most brutal and deadly suppression of protesters in Iranian history,” Arash Azizi, a visiting fellow at Boston U and author of ‘What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,’ told me.
“It is easily the deadliest deed of the Islamic Republic in its history — and that is quite something given how brutal the regime has been.”
“On a global level, too, this is a notable and rare show of brutality,” he said. “Many Iranians now know someone who was killed. Some families have lost a dozen.”
“The whole face and psyche of society has changed,” he added. “As time passes, more stories come out.”
Devine is unsure where this crackdown “ranks in human history” but believes even the preliminary tolls conclusively confirm it’s already “certainly higher than the death toll from the protests during the 1979 revolution.”
One of the bloodiest moments in that revolution, which deposed the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and led to the rise of the incumbent Islamist regime, occurred on September 8, 1978. On that day, the Iranian Army opened fire on protesters in Jaleh Square in Tehran. The mass shooting killed fewer than 100 people altogether but ultimately sealed the fate of the Shah’s foundering regime. Today’s massacres, whether one believes the most conservative or liberal casualty estimates, are on an order of magnitude deadlier in every conceivable aspect.
“The latest historical example that comes anywhere close to this brutality is the regime’s mass executions of its opponents in the 1980s (both earlier in the decade and the infamous summer of 1988),” Azizi said.
“Nothing on this scale happened under the Pahlavis,” he added, referring to the dynasty of the last Shah and his father before him.
One has to go back several generations and centuries to find any remotely comparable mass killing of Iranian civilians.
“The only other period in which Iranians have been killed at anything close to these numbers is at the time of civil wars (like Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar’s conquering of southern Iranian cities in the 1790s),” Azizi said.
“This is not counting the brutal Mongol invasions of the 13th century, which actually killed a majority of Iranians!”