Maryam finished her morning errands in Tehran on Thursday, January 8 before heading home to change and meet friends for coffee. By evening, she was among the crowds protesting the dire economic conditions in the country. What happened over the next two days could prove pivotal in Iran’s history.
Those heading to the protests were expecting violence, but what transpired that evening went beyond what they had imagined. It was the twelfth day of nationwide unrest, yet the atmosphere at demonstrations remained upbeat and determined – at least initially.
“Thursday night was beautiful,” Maryam recalled, as friends and families filled the streets on what is a weekend day in Iran, protesting for better living conditions and the end of a repressive regime.
“It felt dystopian and eerily strange,” the 30-year-old artist said. “Life was normal in the morning, but at night everyone was out for the protests.” CNN is using a pseudonym for her and other protesters quoted in this piece for their safety.
On Shariati Street, a major north-south artery in the Iranian capital, 33-year-old Hasan made his way to a roundabout where friends had gathered to join protests. “There was a feeling that we are going to make a difference, that perhaps a revolution was actually going to happen,” he said. The bloodshed that followed was quick to kill that hope.
It was the night that Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of Iran’s deposed monarch, urged Iranians to take to the streets starting at 8 p.m. Many of those who protested chanted in his favor.
As protesters rallied in more than 100 cities across the country after nightfall, Iran went dark.
At 8 p.m., the authorities shut down internet access and blocked international phone calls, imposing an unprecedented communications blackout on the nation’s 92 million people. In that darkness, the security forces cracked down.
What unfolded over the next 48 hours has since been revealed as the deadliest assault by the Iranian state on its own people since the founding of the Islamic Republic nearly 47 years ago.
As the blackout has slowly been lifted, CNN has pieced together the events of that weekend through firsthand accounts from protesters who have left the country since, and through videos of the carnage shared by activist groups.
Witnesses, human rights activists and medical professionals told CNN that security forces unleashed widespread violence over the Iranian weekend of January 8 and 9, turning streets across Iran into what resembled a warzone and pointing to a coordinated armed assault.
By the end of the weekend, thousands were dead, a shocking toll later acknowledged by the regime. In the aftermath, hospitals struggled to treat the injured, women were heard wailing from cemeteries overwhelmed by the dead and morgues were filled with bags holding unidentified bodies.
Blood-covered streets
Other videos show blood-covered streets, protesters lying motionless with apparent gunshot wounds, green laser dazzlers designed to disorient crowds, the sound of semi-automatic gunfire, and screams.
A protester in another city near Tehran, Kiarish, told CNN how he’d left his family home to join thousands in a large but peaceful protest which turned deadly as security forces opened fire.
“I’ve heard the shooting… It was totally different,” Kiarish said, recalling protests he had attended in the past.
In Tehran, Hasan returned to the streets on Friday despite the bloodshed he’d witnessed the previous day.
“You couldn’t actually get away from the violence,” he said.
The Basij, an ideologically driven volunteer paramilitary force often deployed to police protests and enforce social controls, used handguns, shotguns and so-called pellet bombs that scatter pellets on impact, said Nazanin, a 38-year-old woman who joined the protests on Tehran’s Ashrafi Esfahani Boulevard the following night.
Rifle-mounted laser sights pointed at protesters as drones with green, red and blue lights hovered overhead. Some protesters were shot in the face, she told CNN.
Demonstrators, in turn, set fires in the streets to try to block the spread of tear gas, and create barriers against the security forces, she added.
By Friday evening, grisly footage captured in Tehran surfaced online. In one video, a protester fashions his belt into a makeshift tourniquet to stem the bleeding from a leg wound as he sits on the sidewalk, while others retreat from the area amid clashes illuminated by lasers sweeping through the crowds.
‘Different energy’
In dozens of cities across Iran, chaos was spiraling. Protesters were setting vehicles and buildings ablaze, hurling rocks as they fought security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. The government claimed protests were infiltrated by “rioters” working on behalf of Israel and the United States, both of which had launched an unprecedented military attack on Iran just seven months prior.
In the days leading to the January 8 violence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly warned that Washington would “hit very hard” if Iranian authorities violently suppressed demonstrations, saying the US was “locked and loaded.” Even after that weekend, he called on Iranians to “keep protesting,” promising that “help is on its way.”
For Hasan as well, this round of unrest felt different, reflecting both the brutality of an increasingly paranoid regime and a new level of public anger and appetite for confrontation. “It had a totally different energy to it,” he said. “People are so angry and they just want to be in the streets.”
As casualty figures began surfacing over the following days, it became clear that the death toll was significantly higher than in any previous protests. By one estimate, more than 5,000 people were killed in the unrest, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) – the highest death toll of any major protest wave Iran has seen.
Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei acknowledged the heavy toll, saying thousands had been killed, and blaming “those linked to Israel and the US” for the carnage. The Iranian National Security Council said Wednesday that 3,117 people had been killed in the protests, with 2,427 of those termed “innocents” killed by “terrorists” hoping to sow unrest.
Authorities also accused them of targeting banks, mosques, medical centers and gas stations, showing images of burnt-out buildings on state television. Without providing evidence they also accused protesters of committing “ISIS-like atrocities” such as “burning people alive, beheadings, stabbing.”
‘Worse than we could even imagine’
Activists said the authorities were trying to send a message to protesters in employing such violent force.
“It is as if it was planned and coordinated, the way authorities started the crackdown,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group told CNN, adding that witnesses from different locations described seeing authorities use live ammunition and military-grade weapons “with the aim of killing as many as possible.”
A doctor who treated some of the injured told CNN the type of injuries changed starting that weekend of January 8 to 9, as authorities began intensifying the use of lethal force.
“It was as if an order had been given: ‘Use live rounds now,’” the doctor said.
An image has surfaced showing an Iranian military vehicle equipped with a mounted machine gun on the capital’s streets that Thursday night. CNN verified its location in Sadeghieh Square, just over 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) south of where the largest crowds would gather on Ashrafi Esfahani Boulevard.
Other videos circulating showed armed men chanting support for Khamenei while riding on trucks mounted with machine guns.
Despite the blackout and with only a trickle of information coming out of Iran, Amiry-Moghaddam said what had emerged showed a “massacre” still “worse than we could even imagine.”
By Saturday, January 10, Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, the country’s biggest, was crowded with families trying to bury loved ones, according to Kiarish and Maryam. Kiarish, who was there searching for Nasim – a family friend he had heard was shot in the neck on Thursday night – said two warehouses at the cemetery held hundreds of bodies. He described seeing layers of corpses stacked in black, zipped body bags.
The scene was repeated in other locations too. In Kahrizak, south of Tehran, videos showed large crowds gathering around dozens of body bags on the pavement near a morgue.
In the 1980s, during its first decade in power, the Islamic Republic executed thousands of people in a sweeping crackdown on opposition—a wave of violence that, according to Amiry-Moghaddam, traumatized an entire generation.
“It took years until they rose again,” he said.
The goal of the regime now, Amiry-Moghaddam said, appears once more to be “to traumatize a generation.”
Credits:
OSINT reporters: Oliver Sherwood, Avery Schmitz, Farida Elsebai
Supervising editor, OSINT: Gianluca Mezzofiore
Reporter: Kareem El Damanhoury
