(LONDON) — As the internet blackout in Iran appears to be easing after weeks of protests across the country, the scale of the Islamic Republic regime’s bloodiest crackdown in decades is now being made public, according to activist groups.
More than 5,700 protesters have been killed since Jan. 8, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, an Iran-focused activist group based in the U.S.
More than 17,000 other related death cases are still under review, the group said. That U.S.-based group relies on a network of activists in Iran for its reporting and has been known to be accurate during previous unrest. While ABC News cannot confirm the number independently, the true toll might be even higher, according to other sources.
What began in Tehran late December in response to the collapse in currency and economic conditions quickly took on a political character — with crowds on the streets openly calling for regime change.
In response, the Iranian authorities launched a brutal crackdown on protests, according to observers.
Those protests intensified on Jan. 8 after a public call for protests from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-based son of the former shah of Iran.
Internet and telephone access across Iran was cut on Jan. 8, and the country went through its longest digital blackout in its history, isolating protesters from the rest of the world. NetBlocks, an independent tracking company, said on Sunday that the general outages had stretched past 400 hours. The company said service had been intermittently restored for some users in recent days.
With the partial restoration of internet access, people inside the country and others who have left in recent days shared videos and stories with ABC News that shows the horrific nature of the regime’s suppression of the protests.
Eyewitnesses from other cities also described what they had seen as a “war situation,” with some using terms such as “massacre,” “bloodbath” and “apocalypse,” in accounts shared with ABC News.
Saman, who asked ABC News not to use his full name for fear of his safety, was in Rasht — the largest city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast — when the major protests formed.
As tens of thousands of protesters were taking over streets of the city on Jan. 8, the regime’s forces set the iconic bazaar of the city on fire after shop owners refused to end their strikes and had joined protesters, Saman told ABC News in a telephone interview.
While many protesters and non-protesters were still inside the bazaar area, the flames spread, he said. As people fled, government forces closed off the main exits of the market toward the street and directly shot at people trying to flee the flames, Saman said.
“There was smoke everywhere, a huge fire was there,” Saman said. “As people were going to leave, they shot them all. Maybe some of them were not even protesters. And some were normal people who had raised their hands up.”
Satellite images reviewed by ABC News show visible fire damage at the site of Rasht’s bazaar after Jan 8.
Saman said some of the wounded who were hospitalized, including one of his friends who was shot in his calf, were then taken into custody by the regime’s forces. It’s unclear where they’re being held or whether they’re still alive, he said.
While the deadly crackdown appeared to have quelled the protests and the streets now appear to have been emptied of people, families of the dead and missing, as well as families of the injured protesters, have been left in a state of confusion — scouring morgues, hospitals and prisons in a desperate attempt to find their loved ones, according to people who’ve spoken with ABC News.
Some of the people who were protesting on Jan. 8 have not returned, Saman said.
The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.”
Saman said the regime’s forces gunned down two of his friend’s sons. He said his friend described an unimaginable scene when he went to collect the bodies from a street corner of the city’s cemetery.
The regime’s forces “had loaded bodies in freight trucks,” Saman said. “Corpses all stripped, corpses of all the girls and boys had been dumped at one corner of Rasht’s Bagh-e Rezvan [the city’s cemetery] where bodies were handed over to the families.”
Martial law remains in force across Iran, according to people ABC News spoke with. Families of victims have told ABC News they have been warned by the regime’s authorities not to hold funerals for their loved ones because those events have proved to be lightning rods for further protests in the past.
“Everyone has either lost someone in their circle, or knows someone who has,” Hadi, who also did not want to use his full name for security concerns, told ABC News. He said he left the country on Wednesday.
“There is fear and pain in the air,” he said. “Anti-riot vehicles at the junctions and anti-riot police in all streets.”
With journalists and international observers denied access to Iran during the wave of protests, the reported estimates of the death toll have varied. But the numbers have been steadily climbing as a network of international nongovernmental organizations has worked to verify the scale of the crackdown. The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.” Some families have reportedly been asked to pay for their loved ones’ bodies when they’ve attempted to retrieve them from the morgue.
Though Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, described on Friday the protests as a “terrorist operation,” saying the death toll amounted to 3,117 civilians, 2,427 members of the security forces and 690 “terrorists.”
The Iranian regime has been accusing American and Israeli agents of killing protestors and warned the U.S. of any intervention.
However, President Donald Trump said the United States has an aircraft carrier “armada” heading toward Iran, adding that he hopes he would not need to use it. His remarks come after he had warned the Iranian regime not to kill protestors.
“Iran’s message to President Trump is clear: The U.S. has tried every conceivable hostile act, from sanctions and cyber assaults to outright military attack — and, most recently, it clearly fanned a major terrorist operation — all of which failed,” Araghchi said on social media. “It is time to think differently. Try respect.”
Amid the rising tensions between the political authorities of the two countries, many Iranians express on their social media that they feel there is no option left for them to get free from the brutality of the autocratic regime except for foreign intervention. They openly say the only way out of the deadlock is a U.S. military intervention to take the regime down.
However, still some others doubt the idea, saying foreign intervention might push the country towards more chaos in long term.
“For the Iranian government, confronting an external enemy is far easier than confronting its own people,” Omid Memarian, a journalist and analyst, wrote in The Atlantic. “Domestic protests threaten internal cohesion; war produces unity.”
Memarian added that, if Trump “follows through” with his threats “but still fails to fracture Iran’s machinery of repression, then he should expect to perversely strengthen the regime’s base, which will believe it is justified in even greater violence against the country’s civilians.”
Regardless of one’s stance on foreign intervention, most Iranians are still reeling from the terror and despair they have experienced since late December.
“It was a war,” Saman said. “The regime’s war against its own people. People were unarmed, but they came with their machine guns.”
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