Footage from the Kahrizak Forensic Institute in Tehran shows numerous bodies. The photos can be seen in separate videos that were secretly taken out of the country or uploaded to the Internet via still functioning connections to the Starlink satellite system.
"I assume that in any case, thousands of people were killed", a witness to the events, who recently returned from Iran, told DW. Before leaving the country, the eyewitness was with a friend in Kahrizak, who was supposed to identify his wife's body.
"The previous evening, in the neighborhood I was visiting, all I could hear was machine gun fire. "My friend and his wife were at a demonstration. The woman was shot," the source told DW.
It is still unclear what the exact number of people killed during the current wave of protests in Iran, which began two weeks ago. The internet has been blocked for a week now, communication with the outside world is severely limited.
An Iranian official told Reuters on Tuesday, January 13, that around 2,000 people had been killed during the protests. The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) reported on Wednesday, January 14, that at least 3,379 deaths of demonstrators had been recorded. However, human rights activists suggest that the actual number of demonstrators killed across the country is much higher.
More than 10,000 people have been arrested during the protests. Human rights groups are concerned that the judiciary could sentence many of them to death in show trials.
Not citizens with legitimate demands, but "criminals"
Anyone arrested on the street between January 8 and 11, 2026, is definitely considered a "criminal", said Amin Hossein Rahimi, Iran's justice minister, on January 14. In state media, protesters are systematically discredited as "terrorists" or "foreign agents" and are not perceived as citizens with legitimate demands.
To suppress the protests, the authorities rely on the police and the "Basij" paramilitary militias - volunteer units subordinate to the Revolutionary Guard, used specifically to suppress street protests. The Revolutionary Guard is an independent military apparatus and reports directly to the revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei. Its main task is to defend the Islamic Republic.
The "Basij" militias are ideologically indoctrinated through religious programs and educated according to the moral concepts of the Islamic Republic. They traditionally participate in state-organized rallies, which are currently held daily in many cities, footage of which is distributed through all state media channels. They are considered particularly loyal to the political system and at the same time form a stable electoral base for hardliners.
In the 2024 presidential elections, about 13 million voters (out of a total of about 62 million in the country) voted for 58-year-old Saeed Jalili. He takes a hard line against the West and was, among other things, Iran's chief negotiator in the nuclear talks.
This political camp has a loyal power base, holds key positions in the state apparatus and controls significant political and economic resources.
"All attempts at change have failed"
"We have tried everything to change this system", says journalist and religious expert Mohammad Javad Akbarin in an interview with DW. Akbarin, who currently lives in France, has worked with 15 reformist newspapers in Iran and has been arrested several times.
According to him, the Islamic Republic's system is irreformable. He, Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and four other opposition figures have called for American intervention in Iran. Akbarin says repression and killings have reached their peak.
The fact that despite the brutal actions against the protesters, people are taking to the streets and squares shows the deep dissatisfaction of a large part of the population. However, the institutional structures of power still show no signs of collapse. A rapid change of the system seems unlikely.
"The protesters are totally digitally isolated - with no real possibility of getting out of this situation", Akbarin says, adding that as soon as the internet becomes available again, "we will be faced with cruel pictures".
US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday, January 14, that the violence against the demonstrators in Iran has ended. He has received assurances from "very important sources on the other side" that "the killings have stopped".
He had previously threatened Tehran with a strong response if the announced executions of protesters were carried out. On Tuesday, he wrote on his social network Truth Social that aid for protesters in Iran was "on the way".
Whether and to what extent Trump will actually help the protesters is difficult to assess.
Appeals to the UN Security Council
Meanwhile, the human rights organization "Amnesty International" is urgently calling on UN member states to take coordinated action to prevent further bloodshed. Among them is a request for the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
At the request of the United States, the UN Security Council has called an emergency meeting for Thursday, January 15, to discuss the authorities' deadly crackdown on protesters in Iran. However, any specific decision against Tehran could be blocked by a Russian or Chinese veto.
"We have seen this in other similar cases - for example, in Syria under Bashar al-Assad, despite hundreds of thousands of victims," says lawyer Payam Akhavan. He was a legal advisor to the prosecutor's office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and a special advisor to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
"In these circumstances, the emphasis should be on systematically collecting evidence and documents for the need for future trials," Akhavan emphasizes. "A real legal examination of the case can only take place in a future, democratic Iran," he added.
Because even if the current wave of protests is suppressed, like all the previous ones, there will be another one.
Author: Shabnam von Hein