As American and Iranian officials continue their waltz around the negotiating table, thousands of families across Iran will this week be mourning six months since their loved ones were massacred in cold blood by the very regime now seeking legitimacy abroad.
Estimates state 35-40,000 were killed by the regime’s security forces.
Protests initially erupted on December 28 last year, when Tehran’s shopkeepers shut up shop and took to the streets after months of deteriorating economic conditions. Protests quickly spread throughout the country in the first week of January.
The regime initially struggled to disperse the crowds before resorting to violent methods, reportedly on the orders of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei himself.
As demonstrations intensified, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called for Iranians to take to the streets, which they did in their millions. It was then that the Islamic Republic turned its guns on its own people on January 8-9.
Despite admitting to around 3,000 deaths, evidence from Iran and human rights organizations estimates the true number of those killed over just those 48 hours to be closer to 35-40,000, including children, the elderly, and many who were not even taking part but merely walking past the protests.
Thousands killed in mere days
For comparison, the Mahsa Amini protests saw 551 deaths according to human rights organizations.
Regime authorities imposed an internet blackout that isolated protesters from the outside world and made it harder for families to locate missing relatives.
Human rights groups and media reports have since described the crackdown as a coordinated campaign involving live fire, snipers, mass arrests, pressure on medical staff, and the targeting of wounded protesters in hospitals.
According to reports cited by rights organizations and international media, Iranian security forces were ordered to use lethal force against protesters, while families of the dead later faced intimidation, restrictions on funerals and burials, and pressure to accept official narratives portraying their loved ones as “rioters.”
Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that more than 24,000 people had been detained by January 18, while Hengaw and other rights groups argued that the killings should be investigated as possible crimes against humanity.
Wednesday and Thursday mark six months since those days. Many who took to the streets demanding basic freedoms and economic prosperity never came home.
In the months since, families of those killed have begun to share the stories of their family members with The Jerusalem Post.
Their accounts describe ordinary Iranians: soccer supporters, animal lovers, music lovers, poets, singers, workers, students, fathers, daughters, and young people with private dreams that had nothing to do with politics until politics came for them.
One dreamed of opening his own café. Others loved football, music, animals, poetry, and singing. Some had gone into the streets because they believed the burden of freedom should not be left to another generation.
“If we do not go into the streets for Iran’s freedom today, one day our children will have to do it instead,” one victim had said, according to testimony shared with the Post. “Today it is our lives so that they may have a better future.”
For many families, the killing was only the beginning of their ordeal.
Several families said they were never given a clear account of what had happened to their loved ones. They were not given proper answers, only bodies.
In some cases, families said they were told by regime officials that Israel had killed their relatives.
Others said they were forced to search through body bags to find them.
Some said bullets remained lodged in the victims’ heads when they were recovered.
For the regime, the dead were not to be recognized as martyrs but branded as “rioters.” That word has become another wound for the families. To them, their loved ones were not rioters.
They were Iranians who had taken to the streets to demand basic freedoms.
Receiving their bodies, families hid the truth of why they were killed
One family told the Post that the most painful part was receiving the body of their loved one while being forced to hide the truth of why he had been killed.
“For us, the most painful part was to receive his body,” the family said. “We had to hide the truth that he had partaken in protests.”
Another family described an eight-year-old daughter who still waits every night for her father to come home.
In another case, a son whose father had died nine months earlier had visited his father’s grave before the protests and told relatives that if anything happened to him, he wanted to be buried beside him.
After he was killed, the regime did not allow it – his body now lies in a grave almost 300 km. away.
Six months on, the families say their grief has been compounded by silence, intimidation, and the refusal of the authorities to tell the truth.
Many have not been able to mourn freely, while some have faced pressure over funerals, public recognition, and even the words used to describe the dead.
The families who spoke to the Post were all insistent on one point: the international community must not look away.
“We want the international community to see the oppression and genocide that has been happening for 47 years,” one family said.
“They can help the people free Iran from the occupation of this non-Iranian regime, a regime whose own inscriptions on the flag are not even in the Persian language.”
For the families, justice does not begin with diplomacy. It begins with truth and accountability, they explained.
It means knowing who gave the orders, who fired the bullets, who hid the bodies, who threatened the families, and who tried to rewrite the dead as criminals.
Over the coming days, the Post will publish further profiles of some of those killed in the January massacres, based on information, photographs, and testimony provided by their families and contacts.
Six months after January 8 and 9, Iran’s dead are still being mourned in private homes, at gravesides, and in the memories of those who loved them.