Today marks six months since security forces killed thousands of protesters over two days in January. Within Iran, the regime’s account of martyred soldiers and foreign-backed terror cells has hardened into unchallenged official doctrine. Dozens of prisoners tied to the unrest sit under sentence of death.
Also in this edition: how the war that began in February compounded the crackdown, and where international accountability efforts stand six months on.
Find out more below, and share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition of the MBN Iran Briefing podcast I’m joined by Ken Pollack, Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute, as we take up whether the U.S. deterrence strategy regarding Iran has succeeded or failed, how Iran built its own deterrent around the Strait of Hormuz and its regional proxies, and what regime change could realistically look like now. Ken also tells me the three things that keep him up at night and why his thinking changed after the pivotal day of March 17, 2000. Watch here.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Six months after Iran’s security forces unlawfully killed thousands of men, women and children across the country over a two-day period, the international community’s failure to take meaningful action to pursue international justice is indefensible.
Diana Eltahawy, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International
TOP OF THE NEWS
Half a Year on from the Massacres
When the sun rose on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 8, Iran was entering the twelfth day of protests that had spread across the country after an initial walkout by Tehran shopkeepers on Dec. 28. By nightfall, thousands of Iranians from every walk of life would lie dead after a massacre by the forces of the state.
As I reported at the time in this newsletter, an Iranian doctor treating the incoming injured commented: “It was as if an order had been given: ‘Use live rounds now.’” Days after the massacres, U.S. president Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!!”
Six months on, as the world’s focus is drawn to the passage of ships in the Strait of Hormuz and to the extravagant, weeklong funeral proceedings for the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the toll exacted on those two days continues to be felt across all segments of Iranian society.
The late Iranian rapper Aria Honarmand, killed by the regime on Jan. 8. The word shown above him is “freedom.” https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/2015331062679781421
The Toll
In early January, days before the massacres, Khamenei had called for protesters to be “put in their place.” Rights groups describe a coordinated escalation in lethal force beginning Jan. 8, with security forces positioned on rooftops and streets firing on protesters and deliberately targeting their heads and torsos, while metal pellet shotguns caused widespread head and eye injuries documented by medical staff treating the wounded. One report describes the regime’s policy of targeting eyes as follows: “[T]he use of blinding is now widespread, denied by the authorities, carried out using weapons termed ‘non-lethal.’” Iranian security forces have engaged in this practice for years. An article on the website of the American Academy of Ophthalmologists in 2023 described police using “weapons with paint balls to mark protestors’ faces for identification and later arrest. Hollow-point metal bullets expand on impact, ensuring that they wreak maximum damage on orbital structures and remain lodged in soft tissues … The injuries include mutilated retinas and punctured irises.”
Six months on, there is no agreed death toll for the two nights of Jan. 8 and 9. The Iranian Supreme National Security Council’s own accounting puts total deaths at 3,117, with 2,427 of those classified as “martyrs,” including both civilians and security personnel. A separate list issued by the president’s office ran to 2,986 names.
The killing was not limited to those two days, of course, and independent efforts to tally the dead during that protest period have encountered the usual obstacles of official obfuscation and prevarication, compounded by a nationwide internet shutdown. Nonetheless, independent observers have done their best. Their tallies run far higher than the official toll. One documentation effort logged over 7,000 confirmed deaths, with nearly 12,000 additional cases still under review. The compilers stressed that these figures constituted a floor, not a ceiling, given the blackout conditions under which the numbers were gathered.
UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato cited between 5,000 and 20,000 dead, based on information from medical sources inside the country. An official UK government assessment put the death toll between 12,000 and 20,000. RFE/RL’s Radio Farda cites individuals who place the toll from the two days alone at possibly as high as 30,000. One press estimate suggested that fewer than one in ten deaths may ever be officially recorded.
How the Regime Treats It
The domestic narrative was set within days and has barely shifted since. Domestic reporting described the dead security personnel as martyrs of an ISIS-style terrorist campaign, describing beheadings and mass casualties perpetrated by foreign-trained cells. Senior military officials went even further, characterizing the unrest as the work of organized Mossad and CIA-linked cells embedded among protesters, a claim repeated across state-aligned commentary as the primary explanation for the violence.
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, in a televised interview, claimed that protesters had beheaded members of the security forces, while insisting demonstrators he labeled as rioters who took orders from the United States and Israel. Iran’s Prosecutor General announced that all protesters would be viewed as moharebeh, “waging war against God,” an accusation that carries the death penalty under Islamic Republic law.
The government did eventually publish a province-by-province breakdown of security force deaths and opened an online portal for families to dispute entries on its victim list, though independent reviewers cited by RFE/RL’s Radio Farda found the list to be filled with mistakes and duplicate entries. As I reported here in March, state media were airing confession footage from men executed for killing two police officers during the unrest.
Saleh Mohammadi, Mehdi Ghasemi and Saeed Davodi at their trial. All three were executed in March. Photo: https://iranhr.net/en/articles/8656/
Human Rights in Iran Since the Massacres
Tens of thousands were arrested in the weeks that followed the Jan. 8 and 9 massacres. Human Rights Watch reported over a thousand detained in just the first week and a half, including children as young as 14. Later estimates brought the figure up to over 50,000.
Security forces raided at least one hospital, attacking medical staff and attempting to arrest wounded protesters and seize the bodies of those killed. Forced confessions have been broadcast on state television. The head of state broadcasting has acknowledged that most of those confessing are minors. Families of the dead have faced pressure not to engage in public mourning, and security forces moved to disrupt the traditional 40-day memorial gatherings for the dead in several cities.
Rubina Aminian, a 23-year-old fashion student who, according to her family, was shot at close range in the back of the head. CBS/Family of Rubina Aminian.
The killings did not happen in isolation from the Islamic Republic’s broader human rights record. The country carried out more than 2,000 executions in 2025 alone, the highest number since the late 1980s, with a disproportionate share falling on women and ethnic and religious minorities, including several Kurdish men executed on espionage-related charges tied to Israel.
The War Context
The war since Feb. 28 has added a second crisis to the first. Data journalists working through verified victim lists from January have said that the three-month internet blackout accompanying the war stalled or slowed identification work that was already difficult due to the first communications blackout triggered by the protests. That has delayed verification of names, professions, and locations for months.
The war also reshaped conditions for people already in custody from January. Authorities have used wartime conditions as cover to accelerate the same repression, arresting more than 6,000 people since the war began while fast-tracking capital cases against dissidents already in detention. Three young men arrested during the January unrest, including a national wrestling champion who told the court his confession had been extracted under torture, were executed in March on charges tied to the deaths of two security personnel. This is part of a wider pattern in which at least 78 protesters and dissidents remain under sentence of death, 41 of them tied specifically to the January protests and five of whom were children at the time of the alleged offense.
Accountability and Prospects
International bodies have been slow to react. The European Union added the Revolutionary Guard to its terrorist list on Feb. 19. A wider group of countries followed with their own designations in the ensuing weeks, ranging from Ukraine, which cited both the crackdown and Iran’s drone support for Russia, to a cluster of European states including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, and Serbia. The United Kingdom is a holdout. An April pledge to proscribe the Guard, made by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in response to a firebombing at a London synagogue rather than the Iran crackdown specifically, remains unfulfilled.
The 60-day U.S.-Iran negotiation window running through roughly mid-August addresses sanctions and the nuclear issue, but it makes no mention of accountability for domestic human rights violations, and nothing in its structure points toward independent investigation of the January killings.
Who They Were
A cross-referenced analysis of a sample of those killed on Jan. 8 and 9, built by pooling four separate independent trackers to fill in professional details, offers a picture of who was killed. Among the 432 individuals considered, researchers identified professions for 308. Among them were mechanics, welders, taxi and ride-hailing drivers, shopkeepers, athletes, bakers, and salon owners, who significantly outnumbered the nine who held formal government jobs. The dead ranged from children to a 73-year-old woman. Minors made up more than 16 percent of the two days’ toll, and casualties ranged from Isfahan and Tehran provinces down to Mashhad and Karaj.
Both RFE/RL and the BBC have created extensive websites looking at some names and faces behind the numbers.
