The Wall Street Journal – Efforts to establish the death toll in the Iranian protests are confounded by the regime’s internet blockade, but even the most conservative estimates take the tally way beyond some of the most brutal political crackdowns in modern history.
A week after Iran’s authoritarian leaders moved to crush the antigovernment protests, human-rights groups say they are piecing together evidence of what looks set to be the deadliest episode of political repression in the country since the 1980s, when the Iranian government executed thousands of political prisoners as it consolidated power in the wake of the 1979 revolution.
Death counts vary widely, but consensus is building that thousands of people have been killed. Even the lowest estimates—between 2,000 and 3,000—have surged past the death tolls in unrest during protests in 2019 and 2022.
If the figures emerging from the current violence are roughly accurate, they exceed crackdowns including Egypt’s mass killing of demonstrators in Cairo following a military coup in 2013, and China’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Upper estimates of death tolls in those cases reached just over 1,000, though those figures are also contested.
President Trump said Wednesday that the killings had stopped, appearing to step back, for now, from the threat of imminent U.S. military intervention. As of Thursday morning, some residents of Tehran reported that an eerie calm had taken hold on city streets after several days of chaos, confusion and terror that appear to have battered the protest movement into submission.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot described events of the past week as “the most violent repression in contemporary Iranian history.”
Rights groups say the killings accelerated on the evening of Jan. 8, when the regime shut down the internet nationwide. That left the country’s more than 90 million people in a near-total communications blackout. Since then, researchers have received only sporadic shards of information from sources still in shock, at times crying while relaying their accounts.
Iranians living in exile said they have had little success calling people inside Iran, but those in the country can occasionally reach out on costly and unstable phone lines. Some, mainly in the capital, have been able to send messages and media over Starlink satellite internet connections. Others left Iran with testimonies, or made their way to border areas where they could get online.
“The internet shutdown has severely constrained our access to information,” said Ahmed Benchemsi, a spokesperson for the Middle East and North Africa office of Human Rights Watch. “The information is fragmented, but we’re working hard on putting the pieces together.”
Several Iranian human-rights groups based abroad have been collecting documentary evidence and counting the dead, through eyewitness reports, hospital records and video evidence. The most frequently cited figures are from a group called Human Rights Activists in Iran, also known by the acronym for its news agency, HRANA. The U.S.-based nonprofit said Thursday that it had confirmed more than 2,600 deaths and the detention of over 19,000 people. The death-toll estimate includes about 160 members of security forces and supporters of the government.
Other groups including Iran Human Rights NGO and Iran Human Rights Monitor say the toll has surpassed 3,000. An analysis by Iran International, a London-based Iran-focused news agency that is viewed as critical of the regime, concluded that at least 12,000 people were killed, citing anonymous senior government and security sources in Iran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday that the figures are exaggerated and that “only hundreds” had been killed. Araghchi blamed protesters for inciting violence and said an official death toll would be announced by authorities soon.
The wide disparity in estimates from rights groups mostly comes down to methodology. Iran International said its figure reflects an initial estimate by Iran’s security establishment. Counts by human-rights groups are lower because they include only individual cases that meet each group’s specific verification criteria. Some of these groups have said they expect the true number to be much higher than those they have accounted for.
Skylar Thompson, deputy director of Human Rights Activists in Iran, said each death or arrest included in the group’s count goes through multiple internal verification steps. “Any update to our totals reflects information that has been independently verified through primary sources,” Thompson said.
The biggest obstacle for researchers is the internet shutdown, representatives of human-rights groups said. They say they are receiving a lower volume of reports than they would if witnesses were online, as well as less corroborating evidence such as multiple angles of the same incident captured on video, or photographs of victims and places that they can use to support identifications and geolocation.
When researchers have follow-up questions for sources, they are often unreachable, leaving incidents unconfirmed pending further validation.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of Iran Human Rights NGO, said the geographic scope of the protests has also complicated assessments. Demonstrations have been reported in almost 200 cities spanning all 31 of Iran’s provinces, but researchers don’t have reliable access to witnesses in all of those locations.
In some cases, he said, information is obtained from officials in medical facilities. Even that data provides only a partial picture, however, since they have only been able to contact a fraction of the more than 700 hospitals throughout Iran, mostly in major cities. Further, not everyone who was killed is taken to a hospital, he said. Groups may get information from one source about what happened on one day in one place, but not enough to complete the picture.
“If you look at what we’re reporting, these are just the cases we have documentation for, and that covers only a small portion only in certain places,” Amiry-Moghaddam said. “So I would say that several thousand dead is not unrealistic.”
Despite the limitations, current estimates of 2,600 to 3,000 deaths already exceed earlier crackdowns over longer periods. In 2019, human-rights groups say as many as 1,500 people may have been killed when the regime moved to stamp out demonstrations over rising fuel prices. At least 551 people were killed in 2022, when monthslong nationwide protests erupted over the death of a young woman in Tehran, according to a United Nations fact-finding mission.
The last time political unrest in Iran resulted in so many casualties was in the 1980s, when the regime carried out waves of brutal violence to suffocate dissent in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution that overthrew the monarchy and installed its Shiite clerics into power.