In Iran, a series of massacres may be taking place out of sight. More than 12,000 people are thought dead as anti-regime protests enter their third week, according to news reports from the country on Tuesday.
The protests, which began in late December, initially centered on economic issues but have grown in scope and scale. Their intensity has raised the prospect that Iran’s regime could be losing its grip on power after almost half a century — and has resulted in a horrifying response by Iranian security forces. President Donald Trump has also involved the US in the situation, writing in a post to social media on Tuesday that Iranians should “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS…HELP IS ON THE WAY.”
If accurate, the death toll would put the Iranian regime’s crackdown on a scale the region has not seen since Syria’s former president, Hafez al-Assad, killed thousands of dissidents in 1982; it would mean more Iranians have been killed in just over two weeks than even the highest casualty numbers estimated after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Here’s what we know:
What’s happening?
Facts from on the ground in Iran are incredibly scarce right now due to an ongoing, almost-total internet blackout across the country, but the veil lifted slightly on Tuesday when some Iranians were able to place calls outside of the country. The little we have learned paints an alarming picture of the regime response: According to CBS News, at least 12,000 — and potentially as many 20,000 — people have been killed so far.
Some verified counts from international human rights groups are lower, around 2,000 dead, but that is likely primarily a reflection of the uncertainty on the ground. Even Iranian officials have acknowledged between 2,000 and 3,000 deaths.
Reporting on Tuesday from the New York Times and other outlets has described indiscriminate violence by security forces, including snipers firing from rooftops into crowded plazas and machine-gunning of protesters.
“I managed to get connected for a few minutes just to say it’s a blood bath here,” one Tehran resident, Saeed, told the Times.
The internet blackout, which began five days ago, has crushed as much as 90 percent of the country’s internet traffic, according to some reports. Even satellite internet, which Elon Musk’s Starlink is currently offering for free inside Iran, has been blocked.
All of this means the exact status of the protests — and even to what extent they’re still ongoing — is unclear. It’s a degree of opacity that’s become increasingly rare in the 21st century: In conflicts like Russia’s war in Ukraine, and even in Gaza, despite a lack of access by international journalists, atrocities are often scrupulously documented on social media by witnesses. (In Iran, more video evidence is likely to emerge over the coming days and weeks, especially once the blackout has lifted.)
In comparison, while some limited video has emerged from Iran — including verified footage depicting body bags in a morgue near Tehran, Iran’s capital, and of gunfire and chanting protesters — the protests have largely taken place in the dark.
What’s the context?
In late December, protesters took to the streets as Iran’s currency, the rial, continued its collapse, falling to record lows relative to the dollar. The protest movement began with a workers’ strike in Tehran and spread quickly, morphing into something far larger. Protesters from across Iranian society, including university students, have joined demonstrations, with some chanting “Death to the dictator” (Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei). Iran’s former ruling family has even become involved: Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last ruler before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has exhorted protesters to continue.
What has Trump said?
Last week, Trump told reporters, “I’ve made the statement very strongly that if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved. We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.”
What that could look like, like so much else about the situation in Iran, is uncertain. But it’s not a stretch to imagine Trump, emboldened by successful strikes against Iranian nuclear sites in June and by a recent operation to arrest Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro this month, looking to military force as an option.
On Monday, he also announced a 25 percent tariff on “any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran” in a social media post, though it’s unclear when, or whether, it will be implemented. And his administration has reportedly met with Pahlavi, the crown prince in exile, to discuss the protests.
Could the Iranian regime actually fall?
It’s difficult to make predictions while protests are still ongoing, and even more so with how little we actually know on the ground. But many experts believe that, while the fall of the regime is no sure thing, the conditions for it to occur are in place. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking Tuesday, predicted that Iran’s government was in its “final days and weeks.”
What that collapse would look like is still unclear — or even if it is this protest and not the next one, or some other event, that causes it.
But as Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a leading expert on Iran’s domestic politics and foreign policy, explained to my colleague Joshua Keating last week, these protests are, more than anything, a signal that “this phase of the revolution of the Islamic Republic has reached its limits, and that the country needs a different direction.”
“Now we’re not yet seeing a Yeltsin getting on a tank, a major leader coming out and addressing the people and saying, ‘I’m calling for the end of the Islamic Republic,’ or a redirection of the Islamic Republic,” he said, “but I think Iran is very close to that sort of a scenario.”
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