Iran’s sweeping crackdown on anti-government demonstrations left more than 6,800 people dead, the vast majority of them protesters killed last month, according to an advocacy organization tracking and confirming the fatalities. The level of violence against protesters has few recent parallels, human rights groups say.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based advocacy organization for rights in Iran, says the figure is expected to climb, with more than 11,000 cases under investigation Tuesday as researchers seek to gather and cross-check reports from family members of the dead, data from hospitals and other evidence. That task is made more difficult by the government-imposed internet blackout at the height of the crackdown, which slowed the travel of information within Iran and to the rest of the world.
Although The Washington Post has not independently verified the death toll, videos that have surfaced from the protests show evidence of widespread violence, as do accounts from the ground.
The scale and speed of the killing in Iran are very high, said Zachariah Mampilly, a political science professor at City University of New York.
Some analysts have drawn comparisons to China’s response to the student-led pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
As many as 1 million people were at Tiananmen when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army stormed the square on June 4 of that year, crushing protests. While China’s government said 200 people were killed, 36 of them students, according to the State Department, outside estimates range into the thousands. “Tanks pursued student victims with machine guns, ran over some and smashed others like insects against walls,” The Washington Post reported at the time.
But protests in Iran, and the crackdown against them, were spread across the country, not concentrated in part of the capital, said Daniel Brumberg, a professor of government at Georgetown University.
Another parallel, Brumberg said, is the killing by Syrian government forces of at least 10,000 people in Hama, Syria, during a three-week period in February 1982 on the orders of then-president Hafez al-Assad, father of deposed strongman Bashar al-Assad.
Artillery and tanks reduced whole neighborhoods to rubble, as Hafez al-Assad moved to destroy a stronghold of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a challenge to his government.
Other crackdowns on dissent have unfolded across the region in more recent years.
Egyptian security forces killed at least 817 people in a single day at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in Cairo on Aug. 14, 2013, Human Rights Watch, a leading U.S.-based watchdog, found. Although far fewer people were killed than this year in Iran, Brumberg said the military and internal security forces working together to crush the protest is a parallel.
Iranian state television has cited a report of 3,117 deaths during the country’s recent protests. Iran’s government blames the United States, Israel and some of the demonstrators themselves.
Researchers outside Iran, meanwhile, continue the work of verifying a more accurate count, which would typically take longer than a few weeks, said Leslie Roberts, a professor of population and health at Columbia University.
“The most accurate information for how many people were killed in Gaza came a month after the killing began,” Roberts said. “Similarly, when we look at Sudan, it took us months to get credible data and information about the killings.”
Even on the lower end of estimates, the number of dead and the geographical scope of the protests and the repression were extraordinary, said Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, who has worked on prevention of and responses to complex humanitarian emergencies.
“Typically, in these cases you see protesters in major cities, and even if they are widespread, government repression is localized to major cities,” Spiegel said. “But in this case, according to the reports we are seeing, they are simultaneously spread across the whole country.”
Much of the killing in Iran appears to have been carried out by security forces firing into crowds, which makes the high death toll all the more stark.
“Repression at protests usually starts with water cannons and pepper spray,” Spiegel said. “And then they move to shooting.”
Factors were in place for such repression to occur, Brumberg said. “When you have a conflict between those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose and have the power to defend their interests, it’s hardly surprising that they were this brutal,” he said. “The unity between the security forces and the police and the military was really decisive and helped make it this brutal.”
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