Arya News - It is nearly a month since Iran’s theocratic regime responded to the most serious challenge to its rule for decades by massacring protesters in the streets.
It is nearly a month since Iran’s theocratic regime responded to the most serious challenge to its rule for decades by massacring protesters in the streets.
But it has only been in the past few days, as authorities eased an internet blackout first imposed when they began their crackdown on January 8, that many Iranians outside of the country have begun to hear personal accounts of the bloodshed from affected friends and relatives.
A number of these harrowing stories – transmitted by voice notes sent from those still inside Iran – have been shared with The Telegraph . The picture that emerges from them is one of utter brutality – a clinical, state-sanctioned push to crush dissent in towns and cities across the country, propping up the regime in turn.
“The smell of blood was everywhere,” says Siavash*, a 23-year-old man who found himself caught up in a demonstration in Tehran after leaving his house to buy a birthday cake for his mother.
“I saw a father on his knees, trying to keep his son alive. I stepped forward to help,” he adds.
Then, Siavash says, he felt a blow. “I felt like someone kicked my leg… and saw it wasn’t there any more. It was hanging by a strip of skin below the knee. I collapsed on to the body of the boy.”
Shortly after he was wounded – most likely by a high-calibre firearm – Siavash looked up to see a member of the security forces looming over him. “You’re still alive?” they asked.
He was then thrown into the back of a van, where he was piled among a mound of corpses. “I was struggling to breathe under the weight of the bodies. Every now and then, I’d hear a moan from the pile. I still hear those moans today, in that half-awake state between dreams and reality.”
Protests were met with deadly response from the Iranian government – opposition figures have claimed 30,000 people were killed - MAHSA / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty
The van was driven to a hospital in the capital, where a nurse acted quickly to save Siavash’s life after noticing he was still breathing.
“Don’t say anything, let them think you’re dead,” he recalls her saying as she applied a tourniquet, zipped him into a body bag and sent him to the morgue.
“I don’t know how long I was in there, in the cold, among the dead. I would lose consciousness and wake up, until eventually I felt them moving me,” he says.
Having retrieved Siavash from the morgue, hospital staff hid him in the maternity ward, the only place they reasoned the regime wouldn’t be looking for men who had been on the streets.
“They amputated my leg there,” he says. “I had left the house to buy my mother a birthday cake, but I never made it back home.”
Although Siavash’s account could not be immediately verified by The Telegraph , it echoes other reports that have emerged in recent days from across the country. Taken together, they capture the surreal darkness of the January massacre .
While accounts differ from town to town and vary in detail, all of them, like Siavash’s, describe large numbers of wounded and killed, the use of heavy weaponry against demonstrators, and medical staff in overwhelmed hospitals making desperate attempts to protect the wounded and the relatives of the dead.
There are consistent themes: a deliberate, deadly targeting of protesters that marks a grim new nadir in the regime’s crowd control tactics, suspicions that arrested protesters were being murdered in custody, and difficulty retrieving bodies for burial.
What is not yet clear is exactly how many people were killed. Iranian opposition figures have put the number of dead at 30,000, but that claim is difficult to verify. Reformist politicians inside Iran have called for an independent investigation to establish the true death toll.
The Iranian government, meanwhile, has officially announced 3,117 deaths – a figure that is far too low to credibly reflect eyewitness reports. It also claimed 2,400 of those killed were “martyrs”, implying that most victims were members of the security forces, volunteers with the Islamic Republic’s Basij militia – and therefore supporters of the regime – or innocent bystanders who had been attacked by protesters.
Protesters marching during an anti-government demonstration in Tehran in January 2026 - UGC via AP
Unlike Siavash, Arash*, a 25-year-old man from Tehran, went to protest deliberately and was prepared – or thought he was prepared – for trouble.
“We had gone out in thick jackets and masks, expecting the usual – buckshot and gas,” he says.
“Not this. It was the apocalypse. People were falling like leaves from a tree, and everyone had someone slung over their back, trying to breathe, trying to run through the smoke.”
Arash says he realised the true extent of the danger when a young woman near him screamed: “Run! Can’t you hear the live fire?”
As she sprinted for a nearby row of low hedges lining the pavement, the woman rang every doorbell she passed in an attempt to open escape routes for the strangers fleeing behind her. Then, says Arash, “I saw her fall. The bullet hit her square in the forehead.”
Arya*, 23, witnessed eerily similar scenes in the central city of Isfahan, where his best friend died in his arms after being shot in the head.
“His fiancé was right there. She fainted from the shock. Someone opened the door to their home and we threw her inside to save her, then went back out to pull others to safety. My own body was riddled with pellets, but we were just running and crying, doing what we could,” he says.
Security forces shooting to kill featured in many of the testimonies shared with The Telegraph . Several witnesses, including veterans of previous cycles of anti-regime protest and crackdown, suggested this signalled a shift to wartime tactics by the regime.
“It was a co-ordinated, guerrilla-style assault on defenceless civilians. It was an operation designed not to disperse a crowd, but to liquidate it,” says Roya*, a 40-year-old journalist from Rasht, a town 140 miles north-west of Tehran. She was gathered with other demonstrators at the town’s bazaar last month when security forces opened fire.
“They encircled the market and set it on fire, and then, as people scrambled to escape the flames through the narrow exits, they mowed them down with machine guns.”
Her account matches those of others: the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA), which reports on repression in Iran, has documented 392 deaths in Rasht on or after January 8.
Vehicles pass a burnt-out building destroyed by protests that have swept across Iran in January - ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images
Others also cite the use of heavy-duty weaponry by security forces.
Mahya*, a 32-year-old ex-soldier who joined protests in a city in central Iran, says he recognised weapons from his time in the military including “DShK ‘Dushka’ heavy machine guns, sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs, and shotguns” being used against those demonstrating. The Telegraph was asked not to identify the city by name, for fear of reprisal by authorities.
“For the first time [at a protest], I even saw the G3, the army’s standard rifle,” says Mahya.
His account matches with an investigation by BBC Verify which examined hundreds of videos and photos and identified a wide range of lethal weapons used by the authorities, including heavy machine guns, sniper rifles and shotguns. The use of high-calibre weapons would be consistent with the leg-severing wound Siavash describes, although he says he does not know exactly what hit him.
The scale of the violence resulted in an immediate influx of gunshot and trauma casualties at hospitals across the country.
Saba*, a 50-year-old woman who was accompanying her mother to a routine check-up at a hospital in Tehran, describes how the “doors burst open and the wounded just poured in”.
“The floor was covered in blood. People were walking through it like it was water. You could hear the moaning from the piles of bodies.”
Like the medics who hid Siavash in a morgue, Saba said she saw staff at the hospital taking risks to protect the victims and their loved ones.
Many doctors, she said, tried to manipulate paperwork by writing “heart failure” as the cause of death to protect the relatives of those killed on the streets from interrogation.
Those efforts had to stop when security forces arrived and began to round up wounded patients.
But what of those arrested?
According to at least two of the accounts shared with The Telegraph , some of those swept off the streets and out of hospital wards amid the unrest were subsequently murdered in custody.
One man, who asked not to be named in any capacity, says he spent a week searching for his brother before eventually tracking him to a prison in Isfahan.
When he asked for permission to visit, the prison’s guards responded by handing over his sibling’s corpse. His brother had been shot through the heart, according to the man’s account. The blood was still fresh.
Mina*, a 25-year-old woman from the north of the country, says residents in her town experienced the same. The Telegraph was asked not to identify the place by name, for fear of reprisal by authorities.
“Our town is so small, everyone knows everyone,” says Mina. “They are still handing over bodies from the streets, but now even the people who were arrested and walked into detention on their own two feet are being returned as corpses.”
Relatives search for their loved ones among killed protesters - UGC / AFP via Getty Images
Deepening the sense of despair, to retrieve a body, relatives are often forced to pay a “bullet fee”, refunding the state for the ammunition used to kill their loved one.
In other instances, authorities are said to have refused to release corpses for burial unless their families – or closest friends – stated they belonged to the Basij militia and were loyal to the regime.
Forcing people to identify the deceased as such is a tried-and-trusted tactic of the Islamic Republic that is intended to shift the blame for bloodshed to protestors and justify retribution, including executions , in the future.
The family of Arya’s best friend, who died in Isfahan, were pressured into saying as much. “But we know the truth,” says Arya. “He was a protester.”
*Names have been changed
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