Iran / Human Rights / January 2026

Iran’s Street Massacres of 2026

Why Iranians Are Risking Everything to Live Free from Islamic Republic Rule

Published April 25, 2026  |  Tehran / Global  |  By Marcus V. Thorne, Lead Editor

On the nights of January 8 and 9, 2026, something shifted permanently in Iran. Security forces positioned on the rooftops of police stations, mosques, and private houses opened fire on the crowds below. Automatic weapons discharged in continuous bursts. Protesters fell on the streets of Tehran’s Tehranpars neighbourhood, on the boulevards of Mashhad, in the squares of Kermanshah. In Fardis, Alborz province, a medical worker later told Amnesty International that a single hospital received 87 dead bodies in one night alone, with 423 injured filling the wards. Across the city of Karaj, hospitals suspended all non-urgent procedures to manage the influx of protesters shot in the head and chest.

The internet had been cut. Telephone lines were severed. Iran had gone dark. Behind that blackout, what unfolded was, in the assessment of Amnesty International, the deadliest period of repression by Iranian authorities in decades of its research. The figures that later emerged reflected the chaos of a state that had calculated that speed of killing mattered more than concealment. The official government death toll was placed at 3,117. The human rights organisation HRANA published a documented named list of 7,007 deaths by late February. Iran International cited its own confirmed list of 6,634, with fewer than 100 overlapping with the official count. By mid-January, reporting by Time magazine, The Guardian, and Iran International, drawing on hospital data and local health officials, put the potential total for just those 48 hours at between 30,000 and 36,500 killed. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, stated that at least 5,000 had been killed and that the figure could reach 20,000.

The enormous gap between these figures reflects the deliberate obstruction imposed by the Iranian state. What is beyond dispute, across every independent monitoring body, is that thousands of Iranians were killed by their own government in under two days, in the most concentrated episode of lethal repression in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Eyewitness — Narmak Neighbourhood, Tehran

The security forces shot and killed at least five or six people in front of us. They were using tear gas and stun grenades and shot directly at people. They even fired tear gas inside people’s homes.

The protests that culminated in the January massacres did not begin as a political movement. They began in a bazaar. On December 28, 2025, shopkeepers selling electronics and mobile phones in central Tehran closed their shutters in protest at the collapse of the Iranian rial and a sharp spike in gold prices. That day, the rial fell to a record 1.44 million to the US dollar on the open market. Official figures showed annual inflation running above 52 percent. Food prices had risen by an average of 72 percent compared to the previous year. By early January, as protests raged, the rial would fall further still, to 1.5 million to the dollar.

The currency’s collapse was not a sudden shock. It was the culmination of years of economic decay accelerated by several simultaneous shocks. In September 2025, the United Nations reimposed sanctions through the snapback mechanism, freezing Iranian assets abroad, suspending arms transactions, and targeting the ballistic missile programme. The 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, in which nuclear facilities were struck, had devastated business confidence. Iranian university students at Shahid Beheshti University captured the public mood when they released a statement on January 1 declaring that the system had taken their future hostage for 47 years.

An immediate trigger was the government’s decision to eliminate a preferential exchange rate of 285,000 rials applied to imports of essential goods including oilseeds, livestock feed, and fertilisers. Unable to source hard currency, the government replaced the subsidy with a monthly coupon worth 10 million rials per citizen. The consequences were immediate and cascading. Importers could no longer replenish stock. Merchants who had sold a television could not afford to buy another. The Grand Bazaar in Tehran shut. Truckers went on strike. University students walked out. Within days, what had begun as a traders’ dispute had expanded to more than 200 cities across all 31 of Iran’s provinces, drawing in workers, the middle class, ethnic minorities, and the young. By January 8, the Institute for the Study of War recorded over 340 distinct protests in a single week, the largest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

As the protests spread, their character evolved rapidly. Economic slogans gave way to political ones. Crowds chanted “Death to Khamenei.” In Hamadan, Tehran, Isfahan and Kermanshah, protesters were heard chanting “Reza Shah, bless your soul,” invoking the pre-revolutionary Pahlavi dynasty. The Iranian flag with the Lion and Sun, the pre-Islamic Republic symbol, flew openly in streets where doing so carried imprisonment. One of the most widely heard chants was unambiguous in its message: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran.” It rejected, with force, the regime’s 47-year claim that Iran’s identity was inseparable from revolutionary Islam and its regional ambitions.

To understand why Iranians have repeatedly, and at enormous cost, taken to the streets, it is necessary to understand the nature of the system they are protesting against. The Islamic Republic is a theocratic state governed by the principle of Velayat-e Faqih, rule by the supreme Islamic jurist. The Supreme Leader, currently 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, holds ultimate authority over the military, the judiciary, foreign policy, and state broadcasting. Elected officials including the president have limited real power. It is a system designed, constitutionally, to be immune to democratic pressure.

Opinion data consistently reflects Iranians’ rejection of this arrangement. GAMAAN, the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, conducts anonymous internet surveys of tens of thousands to over 100,000 respondents. Their research has consistently shown that roughly 70 to 80 percent of respondents, across provinces, age groups, rural and urban areas, would not vote for the Islamic Republic. The same surveys show that the most popular position, in every wave, is that regime change is a precondition for meaningful progress. Support for this position spiked during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and spiked again after the 12-day war in 2025.

Women have been at the forefront of every protest wave. The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 while in the custody of the morality police, for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. That uprising was the first major Iranian protest defined not by economics but by gender-based oppression, and it marked a cultural turning point. By 2026, GAMAAN surveys showed around 70 percent of respondents rejecting compulsory hijab. The regime had largely lost the ability to enforce it on the streets. Women continued to defy the law in large numbers, and the state’s response oscillated between sporadic crackdowns and tacit acknowledgement that enforcement was no longer viable at scale.

The economic grievances driving the January 2026 protests are inseparable from political ones. Iran’s government, by the time protests broke out, had increased its security budget by nearly 150 percent in a proposed annual budget while offering wage increases amounting to only about two-fifths of the inflation rate. A ministry of social welfare announcement in 2024 stated that 57 percent of Iranians had some level of malnourishment. Fifty percent of males aged 25 to 40 were reported as unemployed and not seeking employment. Meat had become a luxury item. Seven million people faced hunger. Power cuts lasting three to four hours daily were commonplace by early 2025. Meanwhile, Iran continued to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various proxy militias across Iraq and Syria. The protest chant “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran” expressed what polls confirmed: that 64 percent of survey respondents agreed with that sentiment.

Political repression has been systematic and intensifying. Iran’s execution rate in 2025 exceeded 1,500 people, the highest in decades, with over half for drug-related offences that international law classifies as non-capital crimes. Amnesty International documented that authorities have used the death penalty increasingly against ethnic and religious minorities, women, and anyone linked to protest activity. Eleven people were executed in connection with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement alone by June 2025. Torture and ill-treatment in custody are described by Human Rights Watch as systematic and widespread. Punishments including flogging and amputations continue to be applied. Lawyers, journalists, dual nationals, and human rights defenders remain arbitrarily detained.

At a cultural level, a profound alienation has developed between the Iranian people and the state that claims to represent them. GAMAAN’s surveys reveal that protesters view the regime as an alien force, an occupying entity rather than a legitimate government. The slogans recorded in January 2026 reflect ancient Iranian nationalism, pre-Islamic identity, and a desire for normal life. The popularity of the Lion and Sun flag, of chants honouring the Pahlavi era, and of Reza Pahlavi as an opposition figure are not necessarily endorsements of monarchy. They represent, in the words of the GAMAAN researchers, “an Iran-first mentality” that separates the idea of Iran from the idea of the Islamic Republic. Young Iranians, who have known no other system, are driving this cultural revolt with clarity and at personal cost. They are not asking for reform within the Islamic Republic. They are demanding its replacement.

The decision to escalate to mass killing on January 8 was not spontaneous. It was ordered. According to former Iranian government officials cited in reporting compiled by Wikipedia’s sourced entries on the 2026 massacres, Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has been described as the operational mastermind of the response. Supreme Leader Khamenei himself reportedly ordered that protests be “crushed by any means necessary.” On January 9, in a public speech, Khamenei accused demonstrators of “vandalising their own country just to please the president of the United States.” The state had labelled its own people enemies of the nation.

The forces deployed included the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij paramilitary battalions, and multiple divisions of the FARAJA national police. Plainclothes security agents operated among crowds. Verified videos obtained by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch showed security personnel firing from rooftops at protesters and bystanders below. In one six-minute verified video from Rashid 115 Street in Tehranpars, security forces are visible firing continuously from a police station rooftop. A protester warning another nearby is heard saying the security forces included snipers. Multiple videos from Mashhad’s Vakilabad Boulevard showed personnel firing from elevated footbridges into crowds. Eyewitnesses in Kermanshah province described streets where anyone visible was a target. An eyewitness told Human Rights Watch: “Anyone you speak to these days has a relative, a friend, or an acquaintance who has been killed or injured.”

Wound patterns documented by Human Rights Watch were consistent with deliberate lethal intent. Gunshot wounds to the head and torso were disproportionately common among the dead and injured, indicating that security forces were targeting protesters with the intention to kill rather than incapacitate. Hospitals were overwhelmed to the point of crisis. In some facilities, doctors told Amnesty International they were instructed not to treat wounded protesters, effectively turning a medical visit into a legal risk for patients. In one extraordinary moment of evidence, Human Rights Watch verified videos from Kahrizak forensic centre south of Tehran, in which at least 400 bodies could be counted in a single site.

What distinguished January 2026 from previous protest crackdowns was not just scale but speed. Iran International’s analysis at the 100-day mark noted that in earlier episodes such as November 2019 and the 2022 uprising, violence was spread across days or weeks. In January 2026, a significant proportion of the deaths occurred within approximately 48 hours. This compression of violence, in their assessment, reflected a deliberate shift in repression strategy: break the protest wave before it could consolidate. The internet blackout, the longest ever imposed in Iran, was not reactive but synchronised with the killing, designed to conceal atrocities as they were being committed.

The aftermath brought a further wave of repression. A nighttime curfew was imposed in major cities. Heavily armed security forces patrolled streets. Reports from state-affiliated media confirmed that thousands had been arrested. Independent reports and testimony gathered by Amnesty International indicated that tens of thousands of people, including children, were arbitrarily detained. Iran’s judiciary chief ordered prosecutors to show no leniency and to expedite trials. Charges carrying the death penalty were applied to those arrested. Families attempting to retrieve the bodies of the dead were monitored, restricted, and in some cases coerced into silence as a condition of receiving their relatives’ remains. By January 19, the government had reasserted control. Large-scale organised protest had been suppressed. But the grief, the anger, and the demands had not disappeared.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian — February 11, 2026

In an extraordinary public acknowledgement, President Pezeshkian apologized to the Iranian nation for the massacres, while noting that he lacked control over the security forces that carried them out. He promised to meet with protest representatives and recognised the constitutional right of peaceful protest, though the promise offered little comfort against the documented scale of what had occurred.

The international response to the January massacres ranged from condemnation to calls for criminal accountability, though concrete action remained limited by geopolitical complexity. Amnesty International called for urgent diplomatic action and appealed to UN member states and regional bodies to condemn the killings and pursue legal accountability under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Human Rights Watch called the mass killings unprecedented in Iran and stated that “rulers who massacre their own people will keep committing atrocities until they are held to account.” Both organisations urged referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, was among the first international officials to put a public number to the scale of the killings, stating on January 16 that at least 5,000 had been killed and that the toll could reach 20,000. The UK government condemned the violence and announced new sanctions, including a commitment to legislate against the IRGC. The United States, under President Trump, took a publicly aggressive rhetorical stance: Trump threatened military intervention if the killing continued, and during the 2026 State of the Union address claimed that 32,000 protesters had been killed. In later remarks during the Iran war period, Trump called for those who perpetrated the massacres to be “tried and executed.”

The Iranian diaspora mobilised with historic force. On February 14, over 250,000 people attended a rally in Munich, the largest Iran-focused demonstration in European history. In Toronto and Los Angeles, each rally drew approximately 350,000 attendees. Iranian Canadians submitted a petition to parliament calling for the designation of the Islamic Republic as a foreign occupying entity. Iranian Australians submitted a parallel petition to the Australian Parliament. In London, protesters urged the UK government to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. The global Iranian community was operating from a shared conviction: that what had occurred inside Iran was not a crackdown but a massacre, and that the regime responsible for it had lost any claim to international legitimacy.

Documentation of the full scale of the January events remained compromised by the internet blackout and the regime’s systematic concealment of victims. HRANA’s full report, published on February 23, included a detailed named list of 7,007 deaths but acknowledged that more than 11,000 additional cases remained under review. Iran International’s confirmed list of 6,634 had fewer than 100 names overlapping with the government’s own published list of 2,986, suggesting the official record was functionally independent of reality. The true number of those killed may never be definitively known.

By April 2026, large-scale organised street protests had been suppressed. The regime had, as it had before, deployed sufficient lethal force to break visible dissent. But the underlying conditions that drove millions into the streets have not changed, and in several respects have worsened. The rial remains at historic lows. Sanctions have been tightened. Iran is simultaneously engaged in a broader regional war with the United States and Israel, the same conflict that has occupied its military resources and deepened its isolation. The economic conditions that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described in Senate testimony as directly shaped by US sanctions policy remain in place, with no resolution in sight.

Amnesty International reported that amid the ongoing militarised clampdown, large-scale protests had ceased but that “the grievances and demands expressed by protesters, including calling for the end to the Islamic Republic system, remain.” Iran’s judiciary continued to process arrested protesters with the threat of the death penalty applied to those charged with serious offences. Human rights groups warned of the danger of swift executions used as instruments of deterrence, as occurred with those convicted in connection with the 2022 uprising.

What January 2026 confirmed, at devastating cost, is that the Islamic Republic will use unlimited violence to survive. That calculus is unchanged. But what has also changed is that the world now has a clearer picture of what that survival looks like. The 100-day analysis by Iran International described the January events as marking a potential new stage in the Islamic Republic’s repression, one that operates simultaneously across physical, informational, and legal layers. It is repression designed not just to stop protests but to prevent the formation of any public memory or grief that could sustain future resistance.

Strategy Battles Assessment

The Islamic Republic Has Won the Battle — But Not the War Within

The January 2026 massacres represent a tactical success for the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus and a strategic failure of a different kind. The regime demonstrated it retains the capacity and the will to kill at a scale sufficient to break organised street protest. That capability is real and should not be underestimated. But the conditions that produced the uprising remain structurally embedded. A currency that has lost 90 percent of its value since 2018, an inflation rate exceeding 50 percent, a generation with no meaningful economic future, and a security budget being increased by 150 percent while wages fall in real terms do not describe a system capable of generating the legitimacy required to govern indefinitely by force alone.

The most significant shift revealed by January 2026 is not tactical but cultural. When 70 to 80 percent of Iranians polled say they would not vote for the Islamic Republic, when the protest chants of a street uprising quote the same sentiments tested in anonymous surveys conducted years earlier, the alienation has passed through a threshold that repression alone cannot manage. The regime can suppress expression. It cannot, over time, suppress the underlying reality.

The international community’s response to the massacres has been meaningful in rhetoric and marginal in effect. Accountability mechanisms under international law remain slow, contested, and vulnerable to geopolitical veto. The diaspora mobilisation is historically significant but has not yet translated into structural change within Iran. What January 2026 may ultimately represent is not an end but a calibration point: the moment when the Islamic Republic’s trajectory became undeniable, and when the question shifted from whether change would come to when, and at what further cost.

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Sources

• Amnesty International — What Happened at the Protests in Iran? (January 26, 2026)
• Amnesty International — Iran: Massacre of Protesters Demands Global Diplomatic Action (January 22, 2026)
• Amnesty International — Iran: Deaths and Injuries Rise Amid Authorities’ Renewed Cycle of Protest Bloodshed (January 12, 2026)
• Human Rights Watch — Iran: Growing Evidence of Countrywide Massacres (January 16, 2026)
• Human Rights Watch — Iran: Human Rights Situation Spirals Deeper into Crisis (February 4, 2026)
• Iran International — 100 Days On: The Anatomy of Iran’s January Crackdown (April 2026)
• Wikipedia — 2025–2026 Iranian Protests (continuously updated)
• Wikipedia — 2026 Iran Massacres (continuously updated)
• NPR / AP — At Least 6,126 People Killed in Iran’s Crackdown on Nationwide Protests, Activists Say (January 27, 2026)
• GIS Reports Online — Iran’s Protests Look Like the First Tremors of Regime Collapse (January 13, 2026)
• The Conversation / GAMAAN — Iran Protests 2026: Our Surveys Show Iranians Agree More on Regime Change Than What Might Come Next (January 13, 2026)
• Foreign Policy — Will Iran’s Protests, Economic Crisis Finally Topple the Government? (January 9, 2026)
• Al Jazeera — Why Is Iran’s Economy Failing, Prompting Deadly Protests? (January 16, 2026)
• The New Humanitarian — How Economic Collapse Set the Stage for Iran’s Deadly Protests (January 29, 2026)
• Euronews — From War to Wallets: How Iran’s Economic Crisis Is Fuelling Protests (December 31, 2025)
• CNN — Why Are There Mass Protests in Iran, and Could the US Get Involved? (January 13, 2026)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — 2026 Iranian Protests (March 2, 2026)
• UK House of Commons Library — Iran Protests 2026: UK and International Response (CBP-10462, April 2026)
• Wikipedia — 2026 Iranian Diaspora Protests (continuously updated)

Editorial Verification

All death toll figures are presented as ranges drawn from named, independently verified sources including HRANA, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Iran International, the UN Special Rapporteur, NPR/AP, and government-published figures. The high-end figure of 36,500 is drawn from Iran International reporting citing local health officials and is explicitly identified as a single-source high estimate. The figure of 30,000 is corroborated by multiple sources including Time, The Guardian, and Iran International citing medical data. The official government figure of 3,117 is included as the state’s position. No figures are presented as definitively confirmed. All eyewitness quotes are drawn from verified accounts as documented by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Economic statistics are sourced to official Iranian government data, Al Jazeera, and academic economists cited in named publications. Survey data is attributed to GAMAAN with full methodological context provided. The claim that Khamenei ordered the killings is sourced to Wikipedia citing former Iranian government officials; this is a serious unverified attribution and is labelled accordingly. Single-source high-end casualty figures are noted. Regime claims are presented and attributed.

Approved for Publication / Marcus V. Thorne — Lead Editor, Strategy Battles  |  April 25, 2026

©StrategyBattles.net 2026. All rights reserved. This article is produced for informational and analytical purposes. All casualty figures are sourced to named independent monitoring organisations and are presented as estimates. Nothing in this article constitutes legal, military, or policy advice. StrategyBattles.net maintains editorial independence and is not affiliated with any government, military, or intelligence body.