06.09.2026
Eight months have passed, and what happened in January 2026 in Iran is either largely ignored by the ever-so-caring Westerners or largely unprocessed by the people who lived through the killings, the digital blackout, or whatever else the slaughterhouse of the IRGC was offering.
Yet this is only the worst of what they have committed. I still haven’t processed January, so let me bring up a ledger instead.
Also referred to as the “Persian Babi Yar”, which tells you something about either your own political standing or the grimness of the event.
Protests started on December 28 after the rial collapsed. On January 8 the state cut the internet, and on January 8 and 9 the IRGC, the Basij, and imported foreign militias opened fire on crowds in every major city with live rounds.
The numbers, big one first. Two senior officials of Iran’s own Health Ministry told TIME that as many as 30,000 people were killed on those two days alone; a hospital-registered list ran to 30,304 names. A doctors’ network inside the country also put it above 30,000. HRANA, which only counts what it can verify by name, had 6,221 confirmed and another 17,091 under investigation by the end of January.
Then the state number: 3,117. Which the regime itself couldn’t hold; within a week an official was telling Reuters 5,000, and an internal security estimate leaked at “at least 12,000.” Even 3,000 people in two days at face value is systematic mass murder.
How it looked on the ground: the state ran out of body bags, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances. Corpses were wrapped in blankets and left in the streets because the morgues couldn’t take them.
Because that was not enough, the regime has been executing almost every day since. As of the start of September, Iran Human Rights has verified at least 532 executions in 2026, with reports of 500 more it could not confirm; the Boroumand Center counts at least 916. Only about one in seven is officially announced. In the last week of August, 23 people were hanged, one every four hours. Among them, protesters from January, convicted on torture-tainted confessions, executed for having been in the street.
On January 8, 2021, the so-called “leadership” banned American and British vaccines on live television, calling them untrustworthy and meant for contamination. That same day the Red Crescent cancelled 150,000 doses of Pfizer that Iranian philanthropists had already paid for. Then six months of nothing, while hundreds of millions of dollars went to state-linked no-name companies with no vaccine experience.
The numbers: official COVID deaths were 136,000 through February 2022; excess-mortality studies put the real figure between 240,000 and 293,000. A peer-reviewed counterfactual study (Ghafari et al., BMC Medicine, 2023) puts the deaths a normal vaccination timeline would have averted in the tens of thousands, up to 75,000 in its highest scenario. A lawsuit filed inside Iran charged the leadership with the manslaughter of over 100,000 people. The lawyers were arrested. Big surprise.
Again, 1,500 people in a matter of days, with a total internet blackout. That figure came from three interior ministry officials speaking to Reuters; Amnesty verified 321 by name, including 23 children, and called it a minimum. The regime said nothing for months, then said 230.
Seven weeks later, on January 8, 2020, the IRGC shot down flight PS752 out of Tehran, killed all 176 people on board, and denied it for three days. “If they don’t shoot us down” is the grim bit I use every time I need to fly in and out of the country. There’s no guarantee it won’t materialize.
The Health Ministry’s own estimates attribute 40,000 to 60,000 deaths per year to air pollution. Over the life of the regime that is the largest number on this page, and it’s a policy outcome; Iran didn’t simply get bad weather after 1979.
Lake Urmia is the famous one, down roughly 90 percent to dams and unregulated wells. What nobody talks about are the aquifers under Tehran, Isfahan, Fars, and Khorasan, pumped empty, with the land above them falling into the void: the Tehran plain sinks up to 25 centimeters a year, measured from satellite, and it does not come back. Khuzestan protested for water in 2021 and was shot at for it.
Then the earthquakes. Rudbar-Manjil, 1990: 35,000 to 50,000 dead. Bam, 2003: 26,000 dead in unreinforced buildings on a known fault. Sarpol-e Zahab, 2017: about 620 dead, and the buildings that collapsed were the state’s own new affordable housing while older private construction stood. Earthquakes are not a crime. Twenty-six thousand people in mud brick is.
In May 1982, a ceasefire with reparations was on the table. The leadership refused it and kept the war going for six more years. Iranian dead for the whole war: the regime’s own Martyrs Foundation says 190,000 to 213,000; independent estimates run to 300,000 and beyond, and the majority fall after that 1982 decision, in the human-wave offensives at Majnoon and Fao where kids walked across minefields. For the kicker, add 50,000 to 100,000 exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons, many still dying of it, abandoned by the state that sent them.
Amnesty counted 2,946 executions in the twelve months after June 1981 alone; Abrahamian’s tally for 1981 to 1985 is about 7,900. Then the summer of 1988: political prisoners already serving sentences, marched before “death commissions” and hanged on a fatwa. Amnesty has at least 5,000 named; opposition figures go to 30,000. The bodies went into unmarked mass graves at Khavaran. The man who sat on the Tehran death commission became president of the country.
Enough Iranians have lost their lives to this slaughter machine. How many more?