There is a slow, steady death count going on outside of Iran and the veil its internet blackout has drawn over the extent of the regime’s violent crackdown on anti-government protesters earlier this month.
Even with what’s only known so far, analysts say it is the most brutal crackdown since the founding of the Islamic Republic nearly 50 years ago.
The number of protesters verified dead is at more than 4,000 and climbing, according to NGOs — including the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has provided credible figures during past crackdowns.
Iranian state television on Wednesday put the number of dead at just over 3,000. That’s after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday that “several thousand” had been killed, blaming the United States.
“After connecting to Iranians through internet and after finishing this shutdown, [the number] will be shocking for all of us,” said Iranian exile Soran Mansournia, an activist living in the Netherlands who’s assisting another NGO, the Hiwa Foundation, with tracking the dead, injured, missing and detained.
“We estimate there are around 50,000 Starlink users in Iran, and they send information when they can,” he said, referring to the satellite internet provider that has allowed some people to get around the blackout.
“Based on this information … we expect something horrific and horrible happened in Iran,” he said, adding that Iran’s security forces continue to hunt individuals using portable satellite dishes.
There are also reports of protesters being taken from hospitals where they were being treated for injuries or arrested while giving blood, and of families being asked for “bullet fees,” money for the release of their loved ones’ bodies.
In a televised address, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed not to ‘back down’ to anti-government protests, accusing demonstrators of acting on behalf of opposition groups and the United States. Authorities have largely cut Iran off from the outside world with an internet blackout.
Threat of executions remains: activist
The violence ordered by the regime appears to have done its work, largely quelling protests that began at the end of December with anger over Iran’s failed economy quickly turning into demands for an end to the country’s repressive theocracy.
International reaction to the violence, which ramped up with the internet shutdown on Jan. 8, was largely overshadowed early on by U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge to “send help” to protesters if they were harmed by Iran’s security forces — protesters he also encouraged to take to the streets and take over government institutions.
Last week, despite reports of thousands already dead, Trump praised Iran’s leadership for not proceeding with what he said were the planned executions of 800 political prisoners.
“And I greatly respect the fact that they cancelled that,” he said.
Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, is shown at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 16. (Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press)
Since then, Trump’s threats have tapered off, although the expected arrival in the Middle East of the U.S. navy’s aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and an accompanying strike group has led to some speculation that the threat of American action remains.
Also last week, Iran’s exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, a divisive figure who has been positioning himself for a future role in Iran despite having been outside the country for decades, said he believes Trump is “a man of his word.”
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, who heads the Norwegian-based Iran Human Rights group, said Iranians didn’t risk their lives because Donald Trump asked them to, but because they have had enough of the regime.
Amiry-Moghaddam also said the threat of executions remains very real.
“The international community must also take very seriously the threats by Islamic Republic officials to issue and carry out death sentences against protesters, and must act to prevent another large-scale massacre, this time inside prisons,” he said.
“I think it’s important, within the framework of the international law, to see what the world can do and take action.”
Cars are shown burning in a street during a protest over the collapse of the value of Iran’s currency, in Tehran on Jan.8. (Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Reuters)
Few visible cracks in Iranian regime
The world is busy debating the decline and perhaps fall of the international rules-based order as we know it, with all eyes at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, focused on Trump’s threats to Greenland.
The Davos organizers reportedly rescinded an invitation to Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi to attend in the wake of the crackdown, but Iran hasn’t made many headlines at the Swiss ski resort.
Meanwhile, there have so far been few outward cracks to be seen in Iran’s governing regime or its Praetorian Guard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), charged with protecting the integrity of the Islamic Republic.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt if the Trump administration thinks that they could very easily, for instance, decapitate this regime and do so without any costs in the wider region, then they would do that,” said Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a lecturer at the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
He said even if there were to be an assassination attempt aimed at Khamenei, contingency plans would be in place in the political and security echelons — especially in the wake of the 12-day bombing campaign by Israel and the United States last June aimed at Iran’s nuclear program.
“All of the top echelons of the Revolutionary Guard and the army were taken out, were all killed [during the war], but you saw very rapidly they were replaced,” Sadeghi-Boroujerdi said.
The state tax building, which was burned during protests in Iran over the economy, is shown in Tehran on Monday. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Reuters)
Khamenei’s advanced age of 86 means there will already have been some internal jockeying for position among hardliners in the upper echelons of the clerical regime.
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi said real reformers seeking change within the Islamic Republic were purged in 2009 after protests — dubbed the Persian Spring by some — were put down.
“We have maybe more people who are more pragmatic and realize that the society has made certain demands and just for the sake of stability that they have to make certain concessions,” he said.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks at a meeting in Tehran on Saturday. His advanced age of 86 means there will already have been some internal jockeying for position among hardliners in the upper echelons of the clerical regime. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/The Associated Press)
‘Iranian regime doesn’t really have an out’
Without the lifting of U.S.-led sanctions that have helped cripple Iran’s economy, along with corruption and mismanagement, there is no clear off-ramp for the regime.
“We have this effort to contain and manage mass discontent,” Sadeghi-Boroujerdi said. “And then at the same time, the Iranian regime doesn’t really have an out because the United States isn’t really willing to engage with it in a way that would offer genuine economic alleviation in terms of sanctions removal. So this is why you have this real crunch in Iran.”
But one where the regime is still standing. So where, then, does that leave the protesters who’ve risked their lives to bring change to the country, some more than once?
Soran Mansournia’s brother, Borhan, was shot and killed during a demonstration in the city of Kermanshah in 2019, during a previous wave of protests in Iran.
Mansournia describes the mood in Iran today as a complicated mixture of hope and fear.
“Even if the Islamic Republic suppress these movements again, I think in the near future — and I expect in less than three years — we [will] have another wave of protests in this scale and even much bigger than this one,” he said.
People look at books displayed for sale on a street in Tehran on Monday. Without the lifting of U.S.-led sanctions that have helped cripple Iran’s economy, along with corruption and mismanagement, there is no clear off-ramp for the regime. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Reuters)
Unless there is more action from the international community, he said, the regime will continue to stand.
Mansournia wants more countries to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. Canada is one of a small number to have proscribed the Revolutionary Guard in 2024. He also wants Iranian embassies abroad shut down.
“We don’t know what will happen,” he said. “But the thing that we can say is that the Islamic Republic, in people’s minds, is over for sure.”