How Iran Crushed an Uprising

A visual investigation by The New York Times shows the breadth and ferocity of the regime’s crackdown across the country.

By Katrin Bennhold

Iran’s mass protests in early January were seen by many as the most threatening yet for the regime. The crackdown was brutal: Thousands were killed by security forces.

Iran’s state-imposed internet blackout made it fiendishly hard for my colleagues to gather information. But they did.

Today, as U.S. warships are in the region, my World colleague Parin Behrooz writes about the disturbing findings of a New York Times investigation.

How Iran crushed civilians with lethal force

by Parin Behrooz

Over the past three weeks, my colleagues and I have been working to figure out what really happened in Iran this month.

As protests spread throughout the country, Iran was plunged into a state-imposed communications blackout. By the time the government began its brutal crackdown, rumors quickly began to take the place of information.

A.I.-manipulated videos and images flooded social media. Debates began raging online over how many thousands of people had been killed by government security forces.

But some in Iran managed to evade the restrictions, which allowed me and my colleagues to begin collecting and verifying the witness accounts and videos trickling out of the country. What we found was disturbing.

We learned from Iranian officials familiar with security matters that on Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council to crush the protests by any means necessary.

Security forces opened fire on protesters in at least 19 cities, according to verified videos. Hospitals were overwhelmed by protesters coming in with gunshot and pellet wounds to the torso, head and eyes — an injury pattern consistent with lethal force, not crowd control.

One doctor told us that injuries had changed from limb fractures and tear gas inhalation to “skull fractures and gunshot wounds.”

We obtained photographs of more than 300 bodies taken to Tehran’s main morgue. A majority of the bodies showed severe head trauma and collapsed eye sockets. Other colleagues reported on corpses being dumped at Tehran’s largest cemetery.

Within four days, the protests had largely been crushed.

We may never fully know the extent of what happened. Most independent monitoring groups agree that the number of deaths is in the thousands.

But we can say that the government responded to these protests with more lethal force than we’ve seen in many decades. That tells us something about how it views the stakes of the protests, which called for the downfall of Khamenei and his regime.

“Everyone I speak to inside Iran knows a family member, a friend or a colleague who has been killed, wounded or imprisoned,” said Omid Memarian, a New York-based Iran analyst and journalist who has reported from inside the country. The repression has been “on a scale without precedent.”

A history of violence

Iran has seen multiple waves of protests in the last two decades, each with different triggers and government responses.The 2009 Green Movement, which followed a contested presidential election, was large and organized.

It demanded reforms, not the overthrow of the regime. Iran’s government deployed violence against the demonstrators, resulting in dozens of deaths, but the protests were largely stopped through mass detentions and pressure campaigns on reformist leaders.

During economic protests from 2017 through 2020, demonstrators called for a more radical overhaul of the political system, and the government was even more willing to use violence. During one crackdown, more than 300 people were killed. In 2022, large protests took place after the death of a woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law, which mandates that women and girls cover their hair and bodies. The state again responded to those protests by killing hundreds of people.

The latest demonstrations began with shopkeepers from the bazaars who were exasperated over economic problems, but quickly spread across the country, including to rural and impoverished areas far outside of Tehran.

The government at first tried to mollify the protesters, promising to distribute the equivalent of a few dollars a month to all Iranians.

But street demonstrations explicitly calling for an end to the regime, with chants like “This year will be the year of blood, Ali [Khamenei] will be overthrown,” grew larger, leading up to Khamenei’s order. The crackdown that followed was in a different category: Not dozens or hundreds of killings, but thousands.

Analysts saw the response as proof that Iran’s leaders feared for their very existence.

“If it hadn’t been as serious, they wouldn’t have cracked down the way they did,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. The protests “showcased that more people than ever are at a breaking point.”

Fragility and ferocity

There is only one moment in Iran’s post-revolutionary history that compares, analysts said.

In the 1980s, the newly founded Islamic Republic was consolidating power as it faced internal opposition on a number of issues, including protests over the hijab and the suppression of Iran’s Kurdish minority.

The dissent came to a head in 1988 when the supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered the mass execution of what is estimated to be thousands of political prisoners behind closed doors. The killings took place in the shadow of the deadly Iran-Iraq war.

Now, once again, the Islamic Republic is seeing external and internal threats converge. At home, it faces a profound legitimacy crisis. Abroad, it’s confronting the weakening of its regional proxies and the prospect of more attacks from the United States and Israel. The Islamic Republic is at its most fragile geopolitical moment in years, and perhaps ever.

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History and the January crackdown show us what the Iranian regime is willing to do when its survival is threatened. When it feels weak, it seems to grow more ferocious.

Farnaz Fassihi, Sanjana Varghese and Malachy Browne contributed reporting.