The account of the 48 hours that resulted in the Iranian state’s deadliest attack on its own people since the founding of the Islamic Republic
Maryam finished her morning chores in Tehran on Thursday, January 8, before heading home to change and go for coffee with friends. At the end of the afternoon, he found himself among the crowds protesting against the country’s terrible economic conditions. What happened over the next two days could prove decisive for the history of Iran.
Those heading to the protests were expecting violence, but what happened that night went much further than they had imagined. It was the twelfth day of nationwide unrest, but the mood at the demonstrations remained upbeat and determined – at least initially.
“Thursday night was beautiful,” recalls Maryam, as friends and family filled the streets on what is a weekend day in Iran, protesting for better living conditions and the end of a repressive regime.
“It was a dystopian and strangely strange feeling,” confesses the 30-year-old artist. “Life was normal in the morning, but at night everyone went out to protests.” CNN is using a pseudonym for this woman and other protesters mentioned in this article for security reasons.
On Shariati Street, one of the main north-south arteries of the Iranian capital, Hasan, 33, headed towards a roundabout where friends had gathered to take part in the protests. “There was a feeling that we were going to make a difference, that maybe a revolution was really going to happen”, he recalls. The bloodshed that followed quickly dashed that hope.
It was the night that Reza Pahlavi, the American son of Iran’s deposed monarch, urged Iranians to take to the streets from 8pm.
Video verified by CNN shows hundreds of protesters walking along Ayatollah Kashani Avenue, in northwest Tehran, on January 8 (Negaarsh/X)
As protesters gathered in more than 100 cities across the country after nightfall, Iran was left in the dark.
At 8 p.m., authorities closed Internet access and blocked international telephone calls, imposing an unprecedented communications cutoff on the country’s 92 million inhabitants. In that darkness, security forces repressed the actions.
What happened over the next 48 hours was revealed as the deadliest attack by the Iranian state on its own people since the founding of the Islamic Republic, almost 47 years ago.
As the blackout was lifted, CNN recreated the weekend’s events through first-hand accounts from protesters who have since left the country and videos of the carnage shared by activist groups.
Witnesses, human rights activists and health professionals told CNN that security forces unleashed widespread violence over the Iranian weekend of January 8 and 9, turning streets across Iran into a war zone and pointing to a coordinated armed attack.
By the end of those days, thousands of people had died, a shocking number that the regime later acknowledged. In the aftermath, hospitals had difficulty treating the injured, women were heard wailing in cemeteries flooded with the dead, and morgues were filled with bags of unidentified bodies.
Streets covered in blood
Other videos show streets covered in blood, motionless protesters with apparent gunshot wounds, green laser projections intended to disorient the crowd, the sound of semi-automatic weapons fire and screams.
A protester from another city near Tehran, Kiarish, tells CNN that he had left his family home to join thousands of people in a large but peaceful protest that turned deadly when security forces opened fire.
“I heard the shots… It was totally different,” Kiarish recalls, recalling the protests he had participated in in the past.
In Tehran, Hasan returned to the streets on Friday, despite the bloodshed he had seen the day before.
“It was not possible to escape violence,” he says.
The Basij, an ideologically motivated volunteer paramilitary force often deployed to police protests and impose social controls, used firearms, shotguns and so-called pellet bombs, which spread pellets on impact, says Nazanin, a 38-year-old woman who joined the protests on Tehran’s Ashrafi Esfahani Avenue the following night.
Shotgun-mounted laser sights aimed at protesters while drones with green, red and blue lights hovered overhead. Some protesters were shot in the face, he told CNN.
Protesters, in turn, set fire to the streets to try to block the spread of tear gas and create barriers against security forces, he adds.
On Friday night, horrific images captured in Tehran appeared on the Internet. In one of the videos, a protester turns his belt into an improvised tourniquet to stop the bleeding from a wound on his leg, while he sits on the sidewalk and others leave the area, amid clashes illuminated by lasers that pass through the crowd.
A “different energy”
In dozens of cities across Iran, chaos was rampant. Protesters set fire to vehicles and buildings and threw stones as they fought security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. The government alleged that the protests had been infiltrated by “rioters” working on behalf of Israel and the United States, which had launched an unprecedented military attack on Iran just seven months earlier.
In the days leading up to the January 8 violence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly warned that Washington would “strike with full force” if Iranian authorities violently suppressed the demonstrations, asserting that the US was “ready and loaded”. Even after that weekend, he called on Iranians to “continue protesting”, promising that “help is on the way”.
For Hasan, too, this round of riots was different, reflecting both the brutality of an increasingly paranoid regime and a new level of public anger and appetite for confrontation. “It had a totally different energy”, he highlights. “People are very angry and just want to be in the streets.”
As casualty figures began to emerge in the following days, it became clear that the death toll was significantly higher than in any previous protest. By one estimate, more than 5,000 people were killed during the unrest, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) – the highest death toll of any major wave of protests Iran has seen.
Even the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, acknowledged the high death toll, stating that thousands of people had been killed and blaming “those linked to Israel and the US” for the carnage. The Iranian National Security Council said on Wednesday that 3,117 people were killed in the protests, of which 2,427 were found to be “innocent” and killed by “terrorists” who sought to sow unrest.
Authorities also accused protesters of attacking banks, mosques, medical centers and gas stations, showing images of burned buildings on state television. Without presenting evidence, they also accused the protesters of committing “atrocities similar to those of ISIS”, such as “burning people alive, beheadings, stabbings”.
Anti-government protests in Iran
December 29, 2025 to January 13, 2026
Data as of January 13, 2026. Note: The Institute for the Study of War assigns confidence levels (high, medium or low) to each protest based on the reliability of the sources and the quality of the evidence. Sources are evaluated for bias and historical accuracy, with a higher level of trust requiring multiple reliable sources and clear video documentation. Not all registered protests are mapped – only those that reach the threshold for assigning a confidence level are included. Source: Institute for the Study of War with the AEI Critical Threats Project Graphic: Lou Robinson and Renée Rigdon, CNN
Worse than we could imagine
Activists said authorities were trying to send a message to protesters by using such violent force.
“It’s as if it had been planned and coordinated, the way the authorities began the repression,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights, tells CNN, adding that witnesses from different locations described seeing the authorities use live ammunition and military-grade weapons “with the aim of killing as many as possible.”
A doctor who treated some of the injured tells CNN that the type of injuries changed starting the weekend of January 8 and 9, when authorities began to intensify the use of lethal force.
“It was as if an order had been given: ‘Use live ammunition now’”, reveals the doctor.
An image has emerged showing an Iranian military vehicle equipped with a machine gun mounted on the streets of the capital on Thursday night. CNN verified its location in Sadeghieh Square, just over four kilometers south of where the largest crowds would gather on Ashrafi Esfahani Avenue.
Other videos circulating showed armed men shouting support for Khamenei, riding in trucks with machine guns.
Despite the blackout and the scarcity of information coming from Iran, Amiry-Moghaddam said that what emerged showed a “massacre” even “worse than we could have imagined”.
On Saturday, January 10, Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, the largest in the country, was packed with families trying to bury their loved ones, according to Kiarish and Maryam. Kiarish, who was there looking for Nasim – a family friend who, according to him, had been shot in the neck on Thursday night – says that two warehouses in the cemetery had hundreds of bodies. It depicts layers of corpses stacked in black zip-lock bags.
The scene was also repeated in other places. In Kahrizak, south of Tehran, videos showed large crowds gathered around dozens of body bags on the sidewalk near a morgue.
In the 1980s, during its first decade in power, the Islamic Republic executed thousands of people in a widespread repression against the opposition – a wave of violence that, according to Amiry-Moghaddam, traumatized an entire generation.
“It took years for them to get back on their feet,” he laments.
The regime’s goal now, Amiry-Moghaddam adds, appears to be once again “traumatizing a generation.”
Credits:
OSINT Reporters: Oliver Sherwood, Avery Schmitz, Farida Elsebai
Editor supervisor, OSINT: Gianluca Mezzofiore
Reporter: Kareem El Damanhoury
