A newly announced grassroots network of Iranian doctors, nurses, paramedics and volunteers says it will provide safe medical relief and neighborhood support amid what it describes as a deepening humanitarian emergency after the crackdown that followed nationwide protests.
The group, calling itself the “People’s Red Lion and Sun Groups of Iran,” issued its founding statement on Tuesday, nearly a month after demonstrations erupted across the country and the subsequent violence that has left more than 36,500 people dead, with tens of thousands more suffering physical injuries and profound psychological trauma.
“We speak in days when Iran is wounded,” the statement said. “The people of Iran are mourning and angry because of losing at least thirty thousand of their best sons and daughters.”
The initiative says many of the wounded have been pushed into hiding, unable to seek treatment openly for fear of arrest or retaliation.
“Reports show that many of the wounded are forced to be treated at home and in hiding,” it said, warning that others have been deprived of medical care altogether because they cannot safely access trusted doctors or secure facilities. The statement adds that some remain in critical condition.
The group also raised alarm over reports of security forces entering hospitals and detaining injured people. “Reports indicate that Revolutionary Guard suppression forces have gone to hospitals, taken the wounded with them, or arrested citizens at home by reviewing patient lists,” it said.
According to the organizers, attacks on medical centers, intimidation of healthcare workers, and the removal of patients from hospitals have created what they describe as “a national humanitarian and emergency crisis.”
Many, they warned, are now at risk behind closed doors. “If urgent help does not arrive, some will die, and others will face irreversible physical and psychological consequences,” the statement said.
The founders present the network as a strictly humanitarian effort rather than a political organization, emphasizing that its purpose is to protect lives and reduce suffering.
“Our identity is human and relief-based, not political,” the statement declared. “We have been formed to save human lives and reduce the suffering of families.”
“We are not a political organization, not an instrument of power competition,” it added. “We are a grassroots network of relief and resilience.”
The group’s name and symbol deliberately revive the Red Lion and Sun, a historic emblem associated with humanitarian aid in Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
By restoring it, the organizers say they seek to highlight “heritage, humanity, and collective responsibility,” while committing themselves to what they call non-negotiable principles centered on saving lives.
“Saving human lives is our absolute priority,” the statement said, adding that citizen safety and privacy would be treated as red lines.
“The safety of citizens and their privacy are our red lines. We will have no mechanism for registration, list-making, or traceable recruitment.”
Instead, the initiative describes itself as an educational and resilience-based network built around decentralized neighborhood cells rather than centralized leadership.
“Our work is education, not organization,” it said. “All local cells will be independent and self-governed.”
The structure, according to the statement, is designed to allow rapid and secure assistance under conditions of surveillance and insecurity. Each unit would consist of only three to five people, formed exclusively among long-time friends, family members or trusted neighbors.
“There is no headquarters and no internal hierarchy,” the group explained. “Each cell is an island of resilience.”
The organizers say the model draws on international crisis-preparedness approaches focused on empowering communities when trust in official institutions collapses or when access to formal emergency services becomes impossible.
The mission of the Red Lion and Sun Groups, they said, is practical and urgent: ensuring safe medical treatment for wounded citizens, connecting patients with volunteer doctors and nurses, and preventing injuries from going untreated because of fear or blocked access.
“No wounded person should remain untreated because of fear or lack of access,” the statement said, outlining a vision of neighborhood-based first response so that vital hours are not lost in moments of crisis.
Beyond medical care, the group said it aims to provide emergency support to families facing severe shortages, supply disruptions, or siege-like conditions, including food, medicine, and essential goods.
It also plans to publish short educational materials that can be stored and used even during communication blackouts, covering first aid, trauma care, psychological support, and basic crisis survival.
The statement places particular emphasis on psychological first aid, including reducing panic, supporting children and the elderly, and strengthening social resilience alongside physical rescue and safety measures.
The announcement comes as the group describes a volatile national environment, warning that the scale of violence and the Iranian authorities’ confrontational posture internationally have heightened fears of further escalation and instability.
In closing, the organizers framed their initiative as a covenant of solidarity with ordinary people, urging citizens to form small trusted neighborhood circles to help one another when institutions fail.
“We make a covenant with the people that, within our capacity, knowledge, and means, we will stand beside them,” the statement said.
“If an incident happens in your area, if an injured person seeks help, if treatment arrives too late… this time, the people will not be alone.”
The group ended with a call for readiness and mutual support. “Be ready,” it said. “To save Iranian lives. To save Iran.”
In late September 2022, when a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini was killed for showing her hair, Iran erupted. Millions of brave Iranians, women and men, young and old, took to the streets.
What followed was not just a protest against compulsory hijab laws, but one of the clearest rejections of the Islamic Republic since 1979: Woman. Life. Freedom.
At the time, I was head of digital operations at the Israel ministry of foreign affairs, leading Israel’s public diplomacy online in six languages, including Persian.
From the start, we distinguished between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. That distinction guided everything we did. We launched one of the only official digital campaigns anywhere in direct solidarity with Mahsa Amini and the protesters, including a filter viewed more than a million times.
Our Israel in Persian accounts exploded. Posts expressing support reached millions. Every day, we received thousands of messages from inside Iran: “Thank you for seeing us,” they said, “be our voice.”
In January 2026, they did the same.
For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has insisted that hatred of Israel is central to Iranian identity. But millions of Iranians have told us otherwise.
A GAMAAN survey published in 2025 found that roughly two thirds of Iranians said the government should stop its “destroy Israel” rhetoric, and a similar majority viewed the recent 12 day conflict as between the Iranian regime and Israel, not between Israel and ordinary Iranians.
Loyal supporters of Iran's theocratic rule, the same voices that celebrated October 7, want you to believe Iranians hate Israel and that the protests are foreign engineered fantasies.
They flood social media with trolls, lies, and fake AI videos. But the people have already spoken. Across ideology and geography, they are saying the same thing: Not death to Israel. Not death to America. Death to the Islamic Republic.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian Jews live around the world today, many still speaking Persian, cooking Iranian food, and aching for the country they were forced to leave.
Israel is home to about 200,000 Iranian Jews. Long before modern politics, Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem, an event recorded in both Jewish and Persian history.
That shared past still lives between our peoples. And it lives in everyday encounters.
Every Iranian I have ever met has responded to me as a Jewish Israeli with warmth, curiosity, and respect. Never hatred.
Israelis are taught that Iran wants them wiped off the map. Iranians are taught that Israel is satanic and responsible for their suffering. But we both know the truth. It is the Islamic Republic that threatens both of us.
The rulers in Tehran have destroyed Iran’s economy, murdered teenagers for defying religious rule, and crushed dissent. They send money to their armed allies in the region while ordinary Iranians struggle to afford food and medicine.
Inside Iran, protesters chant, “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran.”
For Israelis, the danger is existential. The same regime that brutalizes its citizens openly calls for Israel’s destruction and races toward nuclear capability.
Israelis and Iranians do not need permission to recognize each other. Beneath decades of forced slogans lies something older and stronger than propaganda.
When Iranians rose up, Israelis didn’t see enemies in the streets of Tehran. We saw courage. And just as Iranians amplified Israeli voices after October 7, we understand that now it is our turn to speak for them.
This is not a Zionist conspiracy. It is human beings standing up for human beings.
The Islamic Republic fears that if Israelis and Iranians ever meet as people rather than caricatures, its mythology would collapse. So we stand with our Iranian brothers and sisters as allies, determined to answer their call for help.
For Jews, “Next year in Jerusalem” is a prayer for freedom. Today, that prayer has an echo: Next year in Tehran.
The sources said Alijanvand was shot by security forces with two live rounds, one striking his lower back and another his abdomen. His family spent five days searching hospitals, police stations and prisons across Isfahan province before identifying his body in the cold storage at Bagh-e Rezvan cemetery on January 13, the sources said.
According to the sources, Alijanvand's body was transferred later that night, on January 13, to Shahin Shahr's morgue.
Authorities initially refused to hand over the body and sought to have Alijanvand declared a “martyr,” a condition the family rejected, which would have required them to accept the state’s official account of the death rather than acknowledge that he was killed by state security forces.
Alijanvand was eventually buried under heavy security at around 4 a.m. on January 15, in a tightly controlled ceremony at Behesht-e Zahra Chaharbisheh cemetery in his hometown of Masjed Soleyman in southwestern Iran, with only five family members present and several plainclothes agents in attendance, the sources said.
Alijanvand was married and worked as a forklift driver at a brick factory, according to the people familiar with the matter.
“Reza worked from morning until night. He was deeply patriotic and hopeful for Iran’s freedom,” the source said, adding that Alijanvand believed Iran’s exiled prince Reza Pahlavi would return to the country.
Last month, Iran International reported that more than 36,500 Iranians were killed by security forces during the January 8-9 crackdown on nationwide protests, making it the deadliest two-day protest massacre in history.
Variations of this message have surfaced across pro-government platforms, from seminarians presenting bloodshed as “righteous” to well-connected insiders arguing that killing protesters in the street is cheaper than arresting and executing them one by one.
A week after Iran killed more than 36,500 people, a state-affiliated analyst, Hesamoddin Haerizadeh, framed the protests not as civic dissent but as a divinely charged war, wrapping state violence in religious and moral language.
Opening his remarks, Haerizadeh cast the uprising as an externally orchestrated assault, describing the unrest as foreign backed riots and part of a broader confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the "non-believers front."
From there, he moved beyond political framing into a religious logic that treats street protests as a battlefield where killing is not a crime but an inevitable feature of a sacred struggle.
Haerizadeh branded the protests as “armed rebellion,” insisting that what had taken place was not peaceful protest but organized violence.
Haerizadeh then introduced an explicitly theological lens, portraying the crackdown as part of what he described as a divine process of purification.
“These events are meant to separate the impure from the pure,” he said, adding that turmoil is necessary so that “the impure are distinguished from the pure.”
In one of the starkest passages, he cited a Quranic verse often used to legitimize violence against perceived enemies: “And fight them until there is no more fitna,” he said, quoting scripture, “until religion is entirely for God.”
Critics say the effect of this framing is to turn the killing of protesters into something sacred: not a state decision, but a divine sorting mechanism—a form of moral cleansing.
Haerizadeh’s rhetoric relied heavily on dehumanization, dividing society into moral categories rather than citizens with rights.
“Kill, but with a ‘pure heart,’” activist Ahmad Batebi wrote, arguing that the lecture was designed to allow perpetrators to believe: “I didn’t kill; God sifted.”
The civic technology group TavaanaTech described the session as “workshops for killing and murder,” warning that such religious framing lowers the moral barrier to atrocity.
“This language is the language of genocide,” the group wrote, “a language that first makes the victim worthless so killing becomes easier.”
Killing as bureaucratic efficiency
A separate set of remarks, contained in an audio file attributed to Ahmad Ghadiri Abyaneh – the son of a former senior Iranian diplomat – moves beyond ideology into blunt cost-benefit logic.
In an online session on Thursday, January 29, he argued that killing protesters in the street could spare the Islamic Republic the international pressure that follows formal executions.
He minimized the scale of the deaths, reducing reported killings from tens of thousands to just over 3,000, and said the cost of killing protesters on the streets was far lower than arresting and executing them one by one.
“Why didn’t you kill them on the streets?” he asked, addressing the authorities. “You know that if they had been eliminated on the spot, the cost to the system would have been far, far lower than if you tried to execute them one by one.”
“Each one becomes a case file and a source of pressure on the Islamic Republic,” he continued. “By any logic—by any religious reasoning—it would have been right to show an iron fist with a decisive strike and wipe them out on the scene.”
Mockery on state television
The narrative hardened further when a host on Ofogh TV, an IRIB channel affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, mocked reports that thousands of bodies had been transported in refrigerated trailers.
“What type of refrigerator do you think the Islamic Republic keeps the bodies in?” he asked sarcastically, offering joking options including an “ice cream machine” and a “supermarket freezer.”
The remarks sparked outrage across Iran’s political spectrum. IRIB later removed Ofogh TV’s director, Sadegh Yazdani, and pulled the program, though many critics said deeper accountability was unlikely.
'Enemies of God'
The same logic resurfaced on Sunday, when Tehran City Council head Mehdi Chamran denied protest deaths while labeling victims with one of the Islamic Republic’s harshest religious-legal categories.
“In these protests we had no deaths, and only moharebs were present with guns and knives,” Chamran said.
The term mohareb –used for those accused of waging war against God – has long been associated with the harshest punishments, including execution. Critics say it functions as a rhetorical weapon, transforming civilians into divine enemies.
Taken together, these remarks point to a single through-line: Tehran's effort to frame violence as either sacred duty or bureaucratic convenience.
