How Iran crushed a citizen uprising with lethal force

Protests in Iran erupted amid a communications blackout. But as video and witness accounts trickle out, the brutality of the regime’s crackdown is becoming clear.

By FARNAZ FASSIHI, SANJANA VARGHESE, MALACHY BROWNE and PARIN BEHROOZ

In Tehran, the capital of Iran, security forces opened fire at protesters from the roof of a police station. In Karaj, they fired live rounds into a march, shooting one person in the head. In Isfahan, young men barricaded themselves in an alley as gunfire and explosions rang out.

Scattered protests had percolated since late December, starting with a strike in Tehran’s bazaar and fueled by a plunging economy. But by early January, Iranians had revolted en masse, and security forces began to crack down with deadly force.

It was not just the protests unnerving the regime. President Donald Trump encouraged the demonstrators and threatened military intervention. In many places, riots flared in parallel with peaceful protests; government buildings, commercial properties, mosques and police stations were set on fire.

On Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and to show no mercy, the officials said. The death toll surged.

Despite Iran’s shutting down the internet and disrupting phone service, some Iranians managed to evade restrictions to share witness accounts and hundreds of videos, many of which The New York Times was able to collect and authenticate.

The Times has verified videos of security forces’ opening fire on protesters in at least 19 cities and in at least six different neighborhoods in Tehran in early January.

The videos show the breadth and ferocity of the regime’s crackdown. So do the testimonies of doctors and a nurse working in hospitals in Iran, and photographs shared by a witness and authenticated by the Times of hundreds of victims taken to a Tehran morgue.

The Times also interviewed two dozen Iranians in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Rasht and Ahvaz who had attended protests, as well as relatives of people killed. Protesters, residents and medical staff interviewed for this article all asked that their names or full names not be published for fear of retribution.

By Jan. 12, the protests had largely been crushed.

As more information emerges from Iran, the death toll has hit at least 5,200 people, including 56 children, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group that also monitors the situation in Iran, has confirmed at least 3,400 killed. Both organizations say that the numbers could prove two or three times as large as verification continues.

Iran’s National Security Council said in a statement that 3,117 people had been killed, among them 427 of its security forces. Officials, including Khamenei, have blamed terrorist cells tied to Israel and the United States for the uprising and killings.

“This is not merely a violent protest crackdown,” said Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International. “It is a state-orchestrated massacre.”

Crackdown

On Jan. 8, Nasim Pouraghayee, 45, a mother of two, and her husband, Ali, marched with large crowds in the Sadeghiyeh neighborhood in Tehran. She called her mother to say the atmosphere was boisterous and the turnout huge.

Abruptly, things turned deadly.

Her husband was walking behind her, hands wrapped around her shoulders to protect her, according to a cousin of Pouraghayee’s who, in an interview, recounted the events of the night as described by Ali. A bullet hit Nasim Pouraghayee in the neck; she fell to the ground and began vomiting blood, the cousin said.

“Nasim, Nasim, Nasim!” her husband screamed, holding her face. But she was unresponsive. “Help, help,” he pleaded to other protesters fleeing the chaos, but nobody came forward. He felt his wife’s body getting cold as he picked her up, the cousin said, and walked for an hour and a half to reach their car. When they reached the hospital, she was pronounced dead.

A video verified by the Times captured the sound of live fire being directed at protesters in Sadeghiyeh. The protesters turn, flee and scream as gunshots are heard.

About 40 verified videos show gunmen and security forces cracking down on demonstrations. Across the footage, they are seen riding in pairs on motorbikes and using a variety of weapons, including firearms, batons and tear gas. In a video filmed in Haft Howz Square in Tehran, men and women flee amid the sound of gunfire.

Mohammad, 40, a shop owner, said he and his younger brother were among demonstrators in Tehran Pars, a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Tehran, on Jan. 9, when they heard the rat-tat-tat of gunfire. “I saw two young men who were running away collapse; they were shot from the back,” Mohammad said.

Security forces fired on protesters from the rooftop of a police station in Tehran Pars for more than six minutes, one video shows. Protesters run away along an adjacent street. Minutes later, a person is dragged inside the courtyard of the police station.

Another video filmed farther along the same street — and in the direction the security forces were firing — shows protesters sheltering from incoming gunfire.

The sound of bullets striking nearby can be heard amid chants of “Death to Khamenei.”

A video that the Times confirmed was filmed at the nearby Tehran Pars Hospital and showed several body bags lined up on the ground outside an emergency room entrance as people could be heard wailing.

Hospitals

Across the country, hospitals swamped by thousands of injured protesters were unprepared for the scale of the gunshot wounds they were seeing, according to interviews and text messages with eight doctors and one nurse in Iran.

Gun violence is rare in Iran, and private citizens are not allowed to own weapons. The doctors and the nurse sharing their experiences in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Zanjan described scenes of chaos: medical staff frantically trying to save lives, white uniforms drenched in blood. They said patients lay on benches and chairs, and even on bare floors, in the overcrowded emergency rooms.

They said hospitals were short of blood and searching for trauma and vascular surgeons. The internet shutdown prevented medical staff from checking patients’ names and medical histories, they said.

A nurse at Nikan Hospital in Tehran said in an interview that the hospital resembled a war zone. A doctor at Shohada Tajrish Hospital in north Tehran, a sprawling government medical facility, said that, on average, medical staff saw about 70 protesters with gunshot wounds per hour on the two days of peak violence, Jan. 9 and 10. Many patients were dead on arrival or shortly afterward, he said.

Farabi Eye Hospital in Tehran, a national hub for ophthalmology, registered about 500 cases of eye injury from pellet bullets on Jan. 8 and several hundred eye injuries with live bullets on the following two nights, a surgeon said in a text message. He was in the operating room for three nights straight and said he wished for death when he had to empty both eye sockets of a 13-year-old.

Photos, videos and text conversations shared with the Times by Dr. Kayvan Mirhadi, an Iranian American doctor in Rochester, New York, who has been in regular contact with medical teams and hospitals in Iran, showed dozens of apparent gunshot and pellet wounds to the torso, limbs, head and eyes.

“They are essentially executing people on the streets,” Mirhadi said. “Starting Thursday, the reports of injuries I was receiving changed significantly. It went from brute force, fractures and tear gas to skull fractures and gunshot wounds.”

Some images shared by Mirhadi were sent by people asking how to treat their own wounds or those of relatives. One person asked about a bullet wound in his brother’s leg. Another sent a photo of an eye, with blood pouring out of a gash just above it.

The Times sent a representative sample of 17 images to experts from the Independent Forensic Expert Group coordinated by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, who determined that the injuries appeared to have been caused by buckshot or birdshot fired at close range.