Hamid Kashani: What to know about the massacre in Iran

Following a sharp collapse of Iran’s currency in late December, protests erupted by shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. This was a trigger which quickly set off mass demonstrations across the country. Outraged by decades of repression, people took to the streets demanding fundamental change, respect for human rights and dignity and calling for an end to the Islamic Republic system.

Instead of attempting to de-escalate the public outrage, Iranian authorities responded with unprecedented violence.

Early last month, the government cut off all internet access in an effort to conceal its criminal atrocities from the rest of the world. Since then, the Islamic regime’s security forces have used extreme lethal force, including military-grade weapons, against unarmed protesters. This has resulted in the mass killing of thousands and serious injuries and arrests of tens of thousands of protestors.

Verified videos and eyewitness accounts gathered by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations and news agencies show security forces positioned in the streets and on rooftops of buildings, firing indiscriminately at the protesters. The forces involved in this deadly crackdown include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its Basij thugs and various divisions of Iran’s security forces. They carried out massacres in multiple cities, primarily on Jan. 8 and 9, making January 2026 the deadliest period of repression by Iranian authorities in decades.

Amid the ongoing militarized clampdown and a de facto nighttime curfew imposed in major cities, large-scale mass protests are no longer taking place. However, the grievances and demands expressed by protesters, including calls for an end to the Islamic Republic, continue to reverberate throughout the country.

Impunity for repeated commission of such crimes by the Iranian authorities during previous protest crackdowns has fueled this latest round of violence. Human rights organizations have documented how Iran’s security forces used lethal force to suppress the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022, and the nationwide protests of November 2019.

Despite the internet shutdown, footage of many horrifying scenes began to emerge, including images of a makeshift morgue set up outside the Legal Medicine Organization (a state forensic institute) in Kahrizak, near Tehran, after the facility’s morgue overflowed with bodies. Videos showed distraught families seeking to identify their dead loved ones among a sea of body bags. To make this trauma even more abhorrent, the regime’s cruelty was at full display — it demanded that grieving families pay for the bullets used to kill their loved ones before it released the bodies for burial. Similar videos have emerged from morgues in other cities.

On Jan. 17, in a public speech, Ali Khamenei, the so-called Supreme Leader, admitted that “thousands of people” had been killed. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Mai Sato, has reported that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that information from medical sources suggested the death toll could be as high as 20,000.

The latest figures from Iran “Human Rights Activists News Agency”; HRANA, have documented at least 6,700 killed, while it is investigating another 17,000 deaths, more than 11,000 injured and 42,486 arrested.

Due to the ongoing internet blackout and with the Iranian authorities’ well-documented pattern of carrying out reprisals against families of the victims who speak out, the actual scale and number of victims of this massacre is most likely much higher.

Amid the current crackdown, there are grave concerns that authorities will resort to swift sham trials and arbitrary executions of the protestors, to intimidate people who might dissent. The head of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary has since ordered prosecutors to show “no mercy” toward protesters and to expedite their trials. This has heightened fears for the lives of thousands of detained protesters and other dissidents across the country. These fears are well-founded, as authorities have previously executed many protesters following grossly unfair trials, while many others remain on death row.

The Iranian-American community in Minnesota echoes its consistent voice of support and solidarity with the people of Iran, calling on all freedom-loving individuals and organizationsto support their struggle for freedom and justice by all means possible.

Silence in the face of such brutalities and atrocious crimes is not an option. Let us raise the consciousness for the humanity of the Iranian people and for their suffering in these critical moments, and for their movement for justice, basic human rights and a democratic government.

Hamid Kashani is an Iranian-American and a longtime resident of the Twin Cities. He is a University of Minnesota graduate and a business owner as a practicing architect in Edina. Through the years, he has continued the effort to raise the public awareness about the state of human rights in Iran and maintained support for the people’s democratic aspirations for freedom.