Over 36,500 killed in Iran’s deadliest massacre, documents reveal

For more than two weeks, the country has lived in manufactured silence. The public Internet, the basic infrastructure of modern life, has been reduced to rumors and fragments. What remains functional are regime-sanctioned channels, whitelisted networks that keep the state connected to itself while cutting the country off from civic circulation.

Outside of Iran, this situation is often described as a new episode of unrest. From the inside, we feel closer to a new revolution which has already cost thousands of lives in the country.

Iran has experienced a massacre and has entered a post-massacre period, a phase in which the state no longer shows restraint. He kills, buries, rewrites the narrative and disconnects.

The power outage is not a consequence of the disorder. It’s part of the machinery. Violence is easier to commit when it is harder to document, and easier to deny when evidence is delayed, partial or erased.

From the workshop of The program with Kambiz HosseiniAs Iranians call for a live broadcast to be broadcast in Iran, the issue no longer seems abstract. It looks like a chase.

What exactly does the world think they are looking at?

Calls do not come in the form of speeches. They come as effort, as voices pushing through dead air and broken connections.

“No more fear”

Ali, calling from Mazandaran in northern Iran, speaks directly to security forces. “You don’t need to put down your weapon. No one is afraid of you.” He repeats it, not as bravado, but as fact. Fear, he suggests, is no longer the organizing principle.

Pouria, calling from Shiraz in southern Iran, offers a different register. “We did not abandon any casualties and we did not allow anyone to be left behind or written off. » The language is practical, almost logistical. It describes a moral line that was maintained even when institutions collapsed. Don’t leave anyone behind.

Bahram, from a working-class neighborhood in southern Tehran, explains why he took to the streets. “For my country and for my children.” This is not an ideological statement. This is an intergenerational issue.

Mahsa, from Najafabad, asks for something simpler. “I want to tell the story of my city.” The request itself constitutes an indictment. In Iran today, telling the story of a place can be an act of defiance.

From the southern port city of Bandar Abbas, Alia’s anger is controlled and unsentimental. “You thought we were afraid. We are not afraid. We are angry and we are waiting.” She repeats it, clarifying the point. “They think we’re scared. We’re not. We’re angry and we’re waiting.” She doesn’t ask to be comforted. She asks to be heard.

These voices share a quality that has become rare in authoritarian systems. They are no frills. They are not looking for spectacle. They insist on being recorded.

The power of names

This emphasis recalls the life of Raha Bohlouli-Pour, a university student who was shot and killed by Iranian security forces near Fatemi Square in Tehran on January 8, 2026. Raha, whose name in Farsi means free, was interested in art and music, according to her online profiles.

She was neither an organizer nor a public figure. It carried no slogan and did not belong to any faction. In a political culture trained to seek out enemies, there was nothing exceptional about it.

Raha did not die because she exercised power or made demands. She died because she embodied a way of being that the State had learned to fear. His generation does not aspire to heroic gestures or sacrificial myths. He seeks something calmer and more difficult to suppress, the right to live an ordinary life with dignity, continuity and care. Breathing without permission. Imagine tomorrow without explanation.

She left no manifesto. All that remains are fragments, short reflections, carefully chosen lines. His language returns again and again to elementary concerns, breathing, continuing, tomorrow. Even when fear appears, it is not dramatized. His writing is sober and lucid. If it is political, it is in the most fundamental sense of the word. He insists that being alive is non-negotiable.

A detail counts. Raha wrote down names. She named the detainees and the missing. She recorded people as people and not as abstractions. She understood how repression begins, not with bullets, but with erasure. Violence becomes easier once names disappear and individuals dissolve into numbers.

This is why callers are important. They produce the most destabilizing thing such a state could face: a record. Names. Places. Timelines. Descriptions of fear moving through neighborhoods and solidarity growing more quickly. Strangers pulling each other out of danger. Businesses close their doors. Families taking risks that would be unthinkable in a normal society.

Navid, a Tehran doctor, describes overwhelmed hospitals, security forces stationed inside wards, families pleading for information and staff pushed beyond exhaustion into something closer to moral injury. It doesn’t seem ideological. He seems like someone trying, with diminishing success, to remain human within a system designed to punish humanity.

“Uncertainty as camouflage”

The figures, always and only the figures, come as estimates.

One widely cited figure suggests the death toll could exceed twenty thousand. Whether the final tally is higher or lower will be important to historians and prosecutors. The deeper point is simpler. The state has made counting dangerous and then uses uncertainty as camouflage.

This is what post-massacre means.

Not only were people killed, but proving that they were killed becomes a second battleground.

People no longer seem shocked. They seem exhausted by the reliability of cruelty.

Today’s Iran is no longer just in internal crisis. When a government treats its own population as an enemy force, the consequences do not remain contained. They impact refugee flows, regional instability and a precedent that other regimes are quietly studying.

The calls continue to come into the show. Not because a phone line can defeat a security device, but because history is written by those who insist on being considered human.

The state can disrupt the signal. It cannot completely erase the insistence.

This insistence, name by name and breath by breath, is perhaps the most dangerous thing in Iran today.

What we are witnessing today in Iran can be described as a crime against humanity.