Concerns are mounting that Iranian security forces have now killed thousands of protesters. Even with an , smartphone videos have surfaced showing truck-mounted machine guns firing on residential streets, hospitals inundated with shooting victims, and a morgue overflowing with hundreds of bodies after just the first night of attacks.
To explain what it described as a “significant” death count, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Sunday invoked ISIS, stating in a release that the deceased protesters were terrorists paid by Israel and the U.S. Two days prior, a Guard official on state TV had cautioned that anyone going into the streets should be ready to “take a bullet.”
An exact death toll can’t be determined. Figures from have risen into the hundreds, but those groups only count identified bodies—a meticulous task hindered by a communications blackout affecting cell phones and even landlines.
But starting with reports from a few Tehran hospitals, an informal group of expatriate academics and professionals estimated that protester deaths could have hit 6,000 by Saturday. This estimate doesn’t include bodies authorities took directly to morgues instead of hospitals—like the hundreds laid on the floors and parking lot of the Kahrizak Forensic Center outside Tehran. A social media indicates the scene shows only those killed on Thursday night.
The scope of the killings seemed to surpass anything previously witnessed in Iran. In Nafjabad, a city in Isfahan province, 35 people died just on Thursday night. The protests have spread to all 31 of Iran’s provinces—a country of 90 million with 100 cities of over 100,000 residents.
“I’m in Shiraz,” a protester told TIME early Sunday from the 1.7 million-person city in Iran’s southwest. Using “Lewis” as a pseudonym for safety, he communicated via Google Meet on Starlink—a satellite internet service illegal in Iran because it can bypass shutdowns. Ahmad Ahmadian, a U.S.-based activist involved in in Iran, said there are at least 50,000 Starlink uplinks, though many might not work due to subscription costs. (Unlike in Ukraine and , owner Elon Musk hasn’t offered free Starlink access in Iran.)
Protests started in Tehran’s central bazaar on Dec. 28, after the national currency’s collapse pushed the economy into a free fall. But in Shiraz, people took to the streets a week later, Lewis said, spurred Reza Pahlavi—the U.S.-based son of Iran’s former shah (king). These protests were different from past ones.
“It’s completely different,” Lewis said. “Not only are the crowds much bigger, but the protesters are far more organized and persistent this time.” He added: “The police assaults are way more violent.”
Large crowds gathered Thursday night at the time set by Pahlavi and other opposition groups, chanting “Death to the dictator.” But on Friday, Lewis said, Shiraz’s turnout was reduced by aggressive security forces, and by Saturday only 15- to 25-year-old men dared to face them—sometimes violently. A Shiraz hospital told Iran Wire journalist Solmaz Eikdar it was too swamped with gunshot victims to accept other patients and was triaging to save those most likely to survive. In Rasht, on the Caspian Sea coast, residents were ordered indoors under de facto martial law, Eikdar told TIME. She said her reporting from hospitals in Rasht, Tehran, and Shiraz confirmed at least 1,000 deaths.
The academics’ estimate started with an informal survey by a Tehran doctor who called six hospitals Friday to ask how many protester deaths each had. The numbers—Milad (70), Imam Hossein (70), Ibn Sina (23), Labbafi Nejad (7), Fayaz Bakhsh (15), Shahriar (32)—added up to 217 deaths in one night. Using a BBC report of an east Tehran hospital with 40 dead, the group chose 30 as an average.
Tehran has 118 hospitals total, but only 63 are public or military. To be cautious, the researchers told TIME, they assumed only half of those received bodies—putting Tehran’s protester deaths at 900 for Jan. 8 (Thursday night), when the internet first went down. They added another 900 for Friday (when security was more violent) and 400 for Saturday’s smaller protests. Then they added 1,000 deaths for neighboring Alborz province, citing street intensity and its history from the .
That put the two provinces at 3,200 deaths over three nights. They applied the same method to other cities—big and small—adjusting for ethnic and historical factors. Then they cut their total in half, ending at 6,178 deaths over three days (which witnesses say got increasingly violent).
A Tehran resident said security forces fired freely in the Nazemabad neighborhood Friday night. “Blood’s everywhere—on walls, streets,” he said. “It’s a catastrophe. They killed as many as they could.”
Some stayed defiant. “People definitely want to overthrow the current system and replace it with something better,” Lewis said from Shiraz. “That’s why they’re getting shot and killed.”
But the Iranian regime has a long, ruthless history—killing and maiming, especially with pellet fire aimed at eyes. “It’s quieter tonight,” a resident of Tehran’s northeast Niavaran neighborhood reported Sunday. “With all these killings, everyone says they’ve lost a cousin, friend, or know someone killed—and then there are so many blinded. Farabi Hospital had to remove so many eye sockets.”
“They’ll keep killing,” he said. “How much longer can people fight with nothing?”
