Iran has entered one of the most violent chapters of its recent history. What began as protests has escalated into a nationwide crackdown marked by mass shootings, sweeping arrests, executions, and an almost total information blackout. For nearly a week, the internet has been largely shut down, cutting Iranians off from the outside world as security forces target even the smallest forms of public gathering.
Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian senior fellow with an investigative project on terrorism based in London, told The Media Line the crackdowns described to him have blurred the line between protest and ordinary life. “When there’s a gathering on the street, they will shoot at anyone who is on the street. It doesn’t matter if you’re chanting or not. If you’re going out to get some medicine from the pharmacy or whatever, you just come to the street—you could be a target.”
Very little footage out of Iran. This is believed to be earlier tonight. Chants of “Javid Shah” “Long Live the Shah”
pic.twitter.com/2bJ3Gyspcs [1]— Ellie Cohanim (@EllieCohanim) January 15, 2026 [2]
He described tactics that, in his view, are designed to compound confusion and fear. “They’re even switching off the electricity so the district goes completely dark. They don’t even see who they’re shooting. They’re just murdering people to create this atmosphere of fear, to put everyone off from protesting.”
They’re just murdering people to create this atmosphere of fear, to put everyone off from protesting
Eyewitness accounts and images that briefly surfaced online before the blackout show bodies bearing severe wounds—suggesting not only lethal force, but also a deliberate effort to blind and permanently disable protesters. “It’s just complete indiscriminate shooting at the people. The evidence is so overwhelming that the regime can’t hide it.”
Exact casualty figures remain impossible to verify independently. Estimates range from several thousand to more than 20,000 killed, and those closely following developments suspect the real number may already be higher.
“This is the longest I ever remember for Internet to have been shut down,” Azarmehr said. “Under the current business climate, there’s only one reason they’re doing this. It’s because of the horrific numbers.”
One account he said he received from Tehran illustrates what he believes may be the scale of the bloodshed. “He told me that at the cemetery, they were counting the bodies; they’d counted up to 1,700 and still hadn’t finished,” Azarmehr said. “There were two truck containers and there were bodies in containers that hadn’t even been taken off the trucks yet. That is just in one cemetery in Tehran. Extrapolate that throughout Iran and I think you’ll get a better idea of the numbers.”
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Jeiran, a former Iranian university professor, and her husband Babak, an Iranian pediatrician, activist, and journalist living in Germany, said the violence is also reflected in hospital accounts relayed from inside the country. “One person who managed to leave Iran during these days told us that, in a single day, around 600 people with eye injuries were brought to Farabi Hospital,” Jeiran and Babak told The Media Line. “People whose eyes had been deliberately targeted by security forces. From this alone, one can begin to grasp the scale of what is happening.”
Azarmehr argued that the absence of foreign journalists inside Iran is itself an indicator of what authorities may be trying to conceal. “If the numbers were really not this high and the regime had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t they have foreign press on the ground in Iran?” he said.
While Tehran and other large cities remain focal points, Jeiran and Babak stressed that the protests are nationwide, extending into smaller towns and rural areas where authorities were unprepared for sustained resistance. “In many small towns—even in places whose names are rarely heard—people have acted with remarkable courage,” Jeiran and Babak said. “In numerous cases, they achieved significant results precisely because the authorities did not anticipate such resistance there.”
Jeiran cited Abdanan, a small town in western Iran, as one emblematic example. “The authorities assumed the protests were about poverty and distributed rice to the residents,” she said. “The people poured the rice into the streets and declared that their protest was not about poverty, but about the absence of freedom.”
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For Jeiran and Babak, the crackdown is not an abstract political crisis but a collective personal trauma shared across Iranian society. “We did not personally know the victims whose names have appeared in international media,” Jeiran and Babak said. “However, through my personal networks, I am in contact with people whose friends, relatives, or neighbors were killed or detained during the protests. In Iran today, almost everyone is connected—directly or indirectly—to someone who has been affected.”
Since January 8, the couple said, they have been almost completely cut off from Iran. “Since midnight on January 8, we have been completely cut off from friends, family, and my students,” Jeiran said. “I know that many of them are in the streets, and I am deeply worried about them. I do not know, when the internet is restored, how many of them will still be alive—how many I will have lost, how many will have been injured, or how many will have lost their eyesight.”
This is not a protest; it is a revolution
They described the moment in sweeping terms. “This is not a protest; it is a revolution,” they said. “And unfortunately, a revolution against a regime that is this violent, this dictatorial, and this ruthless comes at a very high cost.”
Beyond arrests and killings, the silence itself has become a form of punishment. “Every day, I exchange messages with my own mother and with my mother-in-law,” Jeiran said. “Every morning, the first thing I do is check for my mother’s ‘good morning’ message. Now, for a week, every morning feels as if I have lost something.”
“Since January 8, we have been constantly trying to reach one another by phone and internet, but it is as if our voices disappear into a void,” Jeiran and Babak said. “It feels as though our country, our families, have suddenly been erased from geography itself.”
Executions have become a central tool of intimidation, according to Jeiran. “Executions are being carried out in prisons arbitrarily and without due process,” she said. “Because news from inside rarely reaches the outside world, we do not know the full extent of what is happening.”
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Azarmehr pointed to the case of Erfan Soltani, whose reported execution became a focal point on social media before being reportedly postponed, with his fate still unclear. “I don’t have any direct verified information about him other than what I’ve seen in various posts online,” Azarmehr said.
“But there is no doubt that executions will be restored,” he added. “This regime is very capable of killing. They will do anything to survive—any crime.”
Jeiran and Babak said the atmosphere after executions is one of constant fear—but also mounting resolve. “The feeling described to me is a deep and constant sense of fear following the executions and the widespread crackdowns,” Jeiran said. “Yet, despite this fear, many people say: we no longer have anything left to lose.”
During a brief moment when connectivity was restored, Jeiran said she received a message from inside Iran that captures both the brutality and the solidarity on the streets. She shared it verbatim:
“Hello Ms. Jeiran. I managed to get connected. I just wanted to tell you that we did not surrender; it’s just that because there was no internet, we couldn’t send any videos. They fired a lot of tear gas and we could hear explosions, but people didn’t stop. Everyone was helping one another. I didn’t have a mask; a young man came forward and tied a cloth over my face. Somewhere else, when the tear gas was burning my eyes, a woman took me to a trash-can fire and told me to hold my head over it. Others blew cigarette smoke into my face to ease the effects.
I recorded your image from the TV screen for after victory, because before that, this footage cannot be shared. I’m saying this so you know: This is how we see you. With heavy noise. People are completely unarmed and only shouting for their rights, while the government suppresses them in the harshest possible way. They have no intention of changing their methods. They respond only with force. Their logic is this: We will destroy your lives, and if your protest goes beyond simple criticism, we will label it as ‘riot’ and crush it.”
As real footage becomes harder to obtain, artificial intelligence has emerged as both a tool and a weapon, adding confusion to what audiences abroad can verify.
Azarmehr cited, as one example, videos circulating online in which opposition accounts claimed some police officers supported protesters, though he said the footage was taken years earlier and showed excitement in the streets after a football match.
He said the regime has also fabricated AI images and videos to inflate the size of pro-regime gatherings and to demonize voices on the streets by labeling them as “ISIS elements” brought from abroad to destabilize the country.
Azarmehr said, “I understand there were some fake videos. … There were some videos from past protests labeled as new ones. … There were some AI-manipulated videos on both sides. … It was hard to detect the real authenticity of all the videos coming out of Iran, but it is undeniable the slaughtering of the people, and the overall mass media’s silence is astonishing.”
He also criticized what he described as silence among some human rights activists abroad. “The left and the liberal Westerners, what I call the activist elite, they don’t really like what’s happening in Iran,” he said. “It’s not matching their theories.”
Hope that satellite internet could break the blackout has also faded, Azarmehr said. “This time we were a little bit more hopeful because of Elon Musk’s Starlink connections. [But] I don’t think Starlink was that widespread.”
He added, “About 80% of the Starlink connections, they’ve managed to jam using Chinese technology, I’m told. The people have got so scared that for now they’re not using them or they’re hiding them or they got rid of them or something.”
For those still inside Iran, connectivity has become existential. “A dear contact of mine told me to spread abroad that restoring the internet is more important than daily bread,” Azarmehr said.
Despite official narratives suggesting that life in Iran has returned to normal, Azarmehr rejected that claim. “If nothing was going on, why don’t they just restore the internet? I saw through a Chinese channel that some protests were still ongoing yesterday,” he said.
Jeiran and Babak said resistance continues—often quietly, sometimes in pairs, and always at great risk—arguing that the absence of footage reflects censorship, not calm.
As repression intensifies, expectations toward the United States have become more visible inside Iran. Protesters have been filmed chanting appeals for American intervention and, in some cases, explicitly invoking President Donald Trump, following public statements from Washington suggesting that “all options” remain on the table. Yet weeks into the crackdown, no concrete action has materialized.
For Jeiran and Babak, those expressions should not be misread as ideological alignment or political endorsement. “When people in Iran speak about naming a street after Donald Trump, it is not an expression of ideological alignment,” they said. “It is a symbolic gesture—an attempt to be seen and heard by global power structures after years of being ignored.”
Jeiran said many Iranians fear a familiar pattern: public statements of concern followed by renewed negotiations that leave the population exposed. “What people say they want is not reform, not another round of negotiations, but the complete dismantling of the Islamic Republic,” she said. “And many believe that, without external help, they cannot achieve this on their own.”
Azarmehr rejected claims that such sentiments are the product of foreign manipulation. “Does everyone really think that America and Israel can manipulate that many people across that many towns and cities?” he asked. “Do you really not think that the people in Iran have genuine reasons to oppose the ayatollahs?”
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At the same time, both voices acknowledged the risks of escalation. Iranian society, they stressed, is not monolithic. Alongside desperation born of decades of repression, there is also awareness of the destructive legacy of foreign military intervention in the region. The tension between urgency and fear now defines much of the public debate inside Iran.
Let’s focus everything on stopping the killing in Iran at the moment. Any other discussion can wait.
Azarmehr said the most urgent message now emerging from inside Iran is not strategic or ideological, but profoundly human. “Let’s focus everything on stopping the killing in Iran at the moment. Any other discussion can wait.”
For Jeiran and Babak, the priority is visibility—before silence becomes permanent. With the internet still largely blocked, executions that may resume soon, and families unable even to confirm whether their loved ones are alive, time itself has become a weapon.
As Iran’s streets fall quiet under force rather than consent, the absence of images must not be mistaken for calm, nor silence for acceptance. The voices that continue to surface—fragmented, endangered, and often reaching the outside world only through chance—are not asking for sympathy. They are asking to be seen, to be believed, and to be helped before the cost becomes irreversible.