A criminal cannot be a religious leader

“Every day we hear about someone who has been killed,” an acquaintance of mine from Isfahan, over 300 kilometres south of Tehran, tells me. One of his relatives has been arrested; a few others have been injured. Stories like this are no exception.

According to the latest statistics from the NGO Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), the number of confirmed deaths has reached 7,002, including 164 minors. The status of another 11,280 deaths is still under investigation. The total number of arrests now stands at 50,842. In addition, 11,090 people were seriously injured. The government has so far only confirmed the death of 3,100 protesters. The Guardian earlier reported 30,000 deaths. Payam Akhavan, the former International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor for the Srebrenica massacre, called the massacre an “Iranian Holocaust” and claimed that 33,000 had been killed.
The brutality with which protesters were massacred in Iran can be attributed to both the brutality of the Islamic regime and fear of its own fall if the protests were to continue.

The protests began on 28 December in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, the heart of Iran's economy and a traditional stronghold of the Islamic Republic. They then quickly spread to other cities - particularly in Kurdish areas, which were also the starting point of the Mahsa movement in 2022 and 2023. The regime's repression machine also took off in the west of the country, where several protesters were shot dead by militiamen in Ilam and Kermanshah provinces in late December.

‘We cursed Khameini’

On 4 January, I was in touch with an acquaintance in western Tehran. He told me that it was still quiet in his neighbourhood, but that in the city centre many people were on the march. Following an appeal by Reza Pahlavi, Iran's former crown prince, huge numbers of people poured into the streets in 31 provinces across Iran on 8 and 9 January - a turnout that neither the regime nor its opponents had expected.
I sent another message to my acquaintance to inquire how the situation was. He sent back a voice message: “Oh Reza. We went outside. You can't imagine what a disaster it was. We cursed Khamenei. The smoke from tear gas was so thick in our lungs that we couldn't understand our own voices. I miss you here.”

Then the internet was shut down nationwide and I had no contact with him for some time. A week later, he called me briefly - less than a minute. He only had time to say that he and his family members were safe, but that a huge tragedy had unfolded. The internet was still not available then. During a second brief phone conversation, he told me that some colleague’s had lost close relatives: a wife, a brother and a son. Another colleague, a man aged about 60, had been hit by bullets, but did not dare go to hospital for fear of the security forces.

Black body bags

During previous protests in November 2019 against rising petrol prices, the regime killed 1,500 protesters in two days. This time, many Iranians expected that, because of threats from Trump, the government would not dare to carry out large-scale repression. That expectation turned out to be false.
Along with the digital blackout, the regime's killing machine was set in motion. With shotguns, light weapons like Kalashnikovs, semi-heavy weapons like Dushka’s and even chemical weapons, thousands of protesters were killed in a few days. The news slowly seeped out.

If the video’s of piles of bodies in forensic centre trucks and sheds had not been leaked from Iran to foreign countries via the few Starlink satellites, reports of the huge number of victims would have been hard to believe. They are images Iranians have not seen with their own eyes before: piled bodies in black body bags; the moans and wails of a man walking and shouting among them: “Where are you, Sepher Baba?” The moment a man turns to his young son's body and groans: “Mani, go, I am also coming to you.” People dancing around a young man's grave - in pain and endless amazement. There is the story of a helpless woman who says: “I found my son. My son's body. In the morgue, I turned the bodies over one by one until I recognised my son and could look him in the eyes.

Iranian asylum seekers

I also spoke to Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey and in the Netherlands. They had heard similar stories from relatives and acquaintances in Iran. Farshad, who in a Dutch asylum seekers' centre already  waiting two years for an interview with the IND, lost three friends in Shiraz. An Iranian man living in a Turkish refugee camp lost several family members in South Khorasan province, in eastern Iran. He says he had been interrogated by Turkish intelligence. “They asked me what my connection to Iran was, whether I had received videos of the killings and violence through Starlink or other means.” He says he was also asked about his political affiliation: “They asked if I supported Reza Pahlavi.”

Sanctions

Many Iranians in the Netherlands are disappointed by the lack of mass expressions of support for the protesters in Iran, especially compared to the Red Line protests less than six months ago, when hundreds of thousands of Dutch people took to the streets to demonstrate against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Some right-wing opinion-makers accuse the left of hypocrisy: critical of Israel but silent on Iran.
Still, there are plenty of left-wing voices who believe that attention to victims should be universal and call attention to Iran's massive human rights violations. They do point out the difference with Gaza: Western responsibility for Israel made public criticism more logical, while the Iranian regime is already internationally condemned and sanctioned.

Swift action was taken from European politics this time. Besides imposing new sanctions against the regime, the Revolutionary Guards were also placed on the list of terrorist organisations. Hopefully, this constitutes a first step.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Putin and Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine and Gaza. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will also have to be prosecuted by the court. Not only for last month's heinous crimes, but also for previous crimes committed by him and his regime, such as suppressing street protests in 2009, 2019 and 2022, and downing a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020. Justice will prevail only when the world realises that a criminal cannot play the role of a religious leader.