After the Slaughter

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing. It’s the fourth week since protests began, quickly spread across Iran, and were brutally put down by the regime. Reliable sources are speaking of thousands of deaths. We look at the human cost of the security forces’ behavior.

The Islamic Republic covered up its actions by shutting down the internet and other communications. I’ll be sharing highlights of my conversation with an expert, who explains how the shutdown worked and what might happen next. We close with one eyewitness account of the attacks on protesters.

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Quote of the week

“If you look in their eyes, you see no humanity.”

— an Iranian describing security forces’ brutal crackdown of the protests

Top of the News

Iran is quieter on the surface but broken underneath. This past week highlighted three facts: the bloodletting was huge; the internet blackout was an effective weapon; and the Islamic Republic and its system are now boxed in at home and abroad.

First, the human toll is out in the open. On Jan. 17, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei spoke of “several thousands” killed and blamed the deaths on the United States and Israel. Hospital staff and human rights groups describe far higher numbers of dead and injured. Cases of close‑range fire were reported in cities across the country, including Kermanshah and Mashhad. The big marches have thinned. The anger has not. People chant from windows at night. Strikes and work slowdowns keep flickering.

Second, the internet blackout is now part of the story of the killings. Independent internet watchdogs NetBlocks and Cloudflare show traffic collapsing to almost zero after Jan. 8, right as the crackdown peaked. Connectivity briefly crept back in over the past few days. Unsurprisingly, state bodies, banks, and vetted firms saw more access than ordinary users. However, NetBlocks data today now shows traffic far below normal and sliding backwards again.

Third, the general view of the outside world is one of horror now that the facts are emerging about the violence of the regime’s crackdown. The UN Security Council has held a briefing on the protests and their brutal suppression by the government. The European Parliament is debating Iran in Strasbourg. What happens next is less clear.

Aftermath of the protests: the state tax building in Tehran. Photo: Reuters

The human toll. “If you look in their eyes, you see no humanity.” These are the chilling words of one Iranian who described the security forces involved in the regime’s harsh response, as reported by MBN’s Ringo Harrison in an article entitled “‘They’re Killing Everyone’: Voices From Inside Iran’s Blackout.”

Details of the crackdown have been trickling out. The descriptions are vivid and grisly. A report by Amnesty International provides links to shocking material: “Verified audiovisual evidence depicts severe and, in some cases, fatal injuries, including gunshot wounds to the head, including eyes, as well as individuals lying motionless on streets or being carried away amid what is believed to be continued sound of gunshots. Other footage shows patients bleeding profusely or appearing lifeless on hospital floors. In several videos, the people filming state that individuals have been killed. At least two videos show security forces chasing and directly firing at fleeing protesters who appear to pose no threat warranting the use of force, let alone firearms or other prohibited weapons.”

As for the death toll, Khamenei’s own numbers now sit at the low end of a wide and very grim range. His Jan. 17 comments alluded to the deaths of several thousand people,” blamed “rioters” and foreign enemies, and suggested that some of the dead were killed “brutally and inhumanely.” Regime‑linked reporting puts the number of arrests at 3,000 so far.

Rights organizations and sources in hospitals talk about a much larger pool of injured and arrested, in the tens of thousands, though precise numbers are impossible to verify under the internet blackout and other measures put in place by the regime. One compilation by doctors inside Iran, cited by The Sunday Times and increasingly quoted by activists, speaks of 16,500 killed and around 330,000 injured, a figure others treat as plausible but unconfirmed.

 

 

The most vivid picture comes from medics and protesters on the ground. BBC interviews with hospital staff in Tehran describe “direct gunfire to the heads of the youth, as well as to their hearts,” and wards overwhelmed with gunshot wounds from both live rounds and pellets. Amnesty’s fieldwork in Kermanshah includes an injured protester saying: “Kermanshah feels like a war zone. It’s a field of bullets. Officers came from the surrounding alleys and started shooting… I was hit by 20 metal pellets and took refuge in a nearby house… The security forces even fired at the homes of people who sheltered those fleeing gunfire.”

And yesterday, the BBC reported that leaked photos from a Tehran mortuary show at least 326 people killed during Iran’s recent protest crackdown, many with faces so disfigured their families struggled to identify them. The images, gathered by BBC Verify despite a near-total internet blackout, offer a small but indicative glimpse of the much larger human cost of the crackdown.

The regime’s admissions look like an attempt to acknowledge that widespread killing occurred but on a lower scale. The eyewitness accounts, hospital testimonies, and higher rights‑group figures suggest a much larger, still only partially visible, catastrophe.

Tehran’s campaign to cast the uprising as a foreign plot continues unabated. The Supreme Leader blamed U.S. President Donald Trump specifically, the United States generally, and Israel for inciting “riots.” State media calls the demonstrators “terrorists” and “agents” of Western and regional intelligence services. At the UN Security Council, Tehran’s representatives again described the events as externally orchestrated and accused hostile states of waging “hybrid war” through sanctions, media, and social networks. Officials now routinely use this narrative to justify lethal force and the nationwide blackout.

I’m currently making my way through the monumental King of Kings, a history of the fall of the Shah of Iran published a few months ago. This quote about the population’s attitude toward some of the pronouncements of the Shah in the face of growing protests in 1978 jumped out at me: “Why believe anything coming from a regime that continued to assert its opponents were led by foreign saboteurs when this was demonstrably false to every Iranian who knew someone who’d joined the protests?”

A rally in support of the protests in Iran in Vienna, Austria. Photo: Reuters

The blackout. With the severe restrictions placed on reporting in Iran, the only real way we can know what’s going on in is through the eyewitness accounts and images and videos sent from inside. The regime’s internet shutdown has made this nearly impossible.

As I noted in my newsletter last week, the internet can’t be cut off indefinitely in Iran: it plays a crucial role in the economy. The regime can’t seem to decide how long the blackout will continue. Since blocking began on Jan. 8, officials have kept shifting their story about restoring the internet. They first called the blackout a short “security” measure and spoke vaguely of a gradual reopening, with no clear dates. Soon, state media said Iran was “easing bans on global internet” and bringing back some services. On Sunday, a headline in state-controlled Press TV crowed that “Iran begins easing bans on global internet,” and on Monday, a regime official announced on state television that “the internet will gradually return to normal operations this week.”

These statements contradicted a statement by regime spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani that the internet wouldn’t be restored until Nowruz, the Iranian new year in late March.

There is still no real internet access in Iran after nearly two weeks offline.

To make sense of all these conflicting reports, I turned to a DC-based expert on Iranian internet who asked to remain unnamed so that he could speak freely about this evolving story.

“It’s important to realize that Iran already has one of the harshest internet environments in the world. It’s probably only more open than Turkmenistan or North Korea,” he explained.

Why, then, can’t the regime just leave the internet shut off permanently? “This is the most extreme internet shutdown ever in Iran,” he said. “The last one was during the 2019 protests, but even that one wasn’t as bad as this. But it’s not sustainable. Airports, banks, even pharmacies – doctors can’t communicate with pharmacies, for example – don’t work under an internet shutdown.” He added, “There’s too much collateral damage with a complete shutdown. Sure, you can be like North Korea and allow one hundred people in the whole country to have access to the internet, but the whole economy will collapse.”

He continued: “They have no choice but to bring the internet back to some extent. But you also can’t decide to basically sabotage your own network and then simply switch it back on. It’s not as easy as that.”

As for the regime’s much-vaunted “National Information Network” (a country-wide intranet cut off from the world), he chuckled. “You can’t expect a system as corrupt and mismanaged as the Islamic Republic to pull that off. They can’t even provide gas properly to their own people. How are they going to implement an NIN?”

Network data still shows only minimal traffic.

Iranian-American journalist, author, and political activist Masih Alinejad speaks during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Iran at the request of the United States. Photo: Reuters

The global view. U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken of standing with the Iranian people and punishing Tehran, and the administration has pushed for new sanctions and made clear statements at the UN. At the same time, the world’s attention is now focused on other fights, and Iran is but one crisis among many. Although Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi was disinvited from this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos (“the tragic loss of civilian lives in Iran over the past few weeks means it is not right for the Iranian government to be represented at Davos this year,” the organizers said), Iran is not a notable item on the agenda. Greenland, of course, is, and then there are Ukraine, Gaza, climate change, and myriad other pressing items competing for global attention.

What’s likely to happen next? For one thing, more sanctions: Western governments will probably add more names to sanctions lists, including IRGC commanders, intelligence chiefs, judges and media figures, and others tied to the killings. These moves will hurt the Tehran elites who travel and bank abroad. They’re unlikely to change the regime’s basic calculus or quickly improve life for people inside the country.

Tomorrow, the U.N. Human Rights Council is scheduled to hold an emergency session on Iran. Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has decried the regime’s violence against demonstrators.

 

 

So now what?

What now hangs over this uprising is uncertainty rather than closure. Iranians know the immediate wave of protests has been brutally beaten back at gunpoint, but nothing about the country’s underlying crisis has been resolved. The economy is still a disaster. The rial is scarcely stronger than it was when its slide precipitated the initial protests by Tehran bazaaris on Dec. 28. The middle class lives below the poverty line. Even by the regime’s own accounting, inflation is running wild.

The leadership is ageing and brittle, and the security forces have crossed another psychological line by turning entire cities into live‑fire zones, mowing down their own fellow citizens indiscriminately.

An important change, though, may be on the information front. Even after two weeks of near‑silence online, enough images and testimonies have escaped to make denial impossible. That is the one thing the regime cannot roll back. It can jail people, cut cables, seize phones. It cannot unshow the world what it has just done.

Closer

Last week, I posted video testimony from Iranian rapper Meraj Tehrani, who had just escaped the country following the regime’s massacre of protesters. Here are two interviews that he’s given in English about what he saw, one with Sky News and one with ABC News.

And, finally, behind the figures of thousands killed by the regime, there are names and lives. Here is the story of Sanam Pourbabai, a 26-year-old musician who lost her life at the hands of the authorities:

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