On Monday, a letter from a doctor inside Iran was posted online by Tavaana, a U.S.-based educational nonprofit. “I’m writing this so you can urgently share it wherever you can,” it read. “What we hear from BBC, Iran International, and other satellite networks shows that the reality in Iran is still not understood. They keep saying security forces are hesitant or weaker than before, and that mass killing hasn’t happened. The truth is exactly the opposite.”
Three days ago, the Iranian regime sent security forces to brutally crush the thousands of demonstrators who have taken to the streets to protest the Islamic Republic. Reported estimates of casualties vary wildly: HRANA, an Iranian human rights group, says it is several hundred. The regime’s own officials say 3,000. London-based organization Iran International says 12,000.
If the evidence from a clip posted Monday on X is any guide, that last estimate may very well be accurate. The clip, which is only six minutes long, appears to show “at least 262 instances of gunfire and sustained automatic shooting” fired on protesters in Tehran. And if 12,000 is indeed the true death toll, it means that in the span of just a few days, the regime has murdered at least four times as many people as were killed during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Given the internet and phone blackout imposed across the country, it is impossible to know the full extent of the toll the protesters have incurred thus far. Yet the news trickling out—primarily from medical professionals whose clinics and hospitals have been overrun by wounded protesters—paints a terrifying picture. One doctor, who treated the injured for days before fleeing Iran, gave an interview describing his experience. His quotations are harrowing: “The trauma cases I saw were brutal, shoot-to-kill”; “This was treated as a wartime situation—go and suppress by any means”; “You did not need to be a protester to be shot. You could just be passing by.”
