Political activist and human rights advocate
The killings that swept Iran last month revived memories of 1988, when the Islamic Republic erased thousands of political prisoners in silence—my brother, Bijan, among them.
While the world may see in the staggering death toll of the January protests an unprecedented explosion of violence, those of us who have spent decades seeking justice see something else: the chilling continuity of a regime that has only ever known one way to survive.
For us, the massacre of thousands of unarmed protesters is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed.
The parallels with 1988 are as deliberate as they are haunting.
Back then, the Islamic Republic imposed a total information blackout. Prison doors were bolted. Phone lines were cut. Family visits were suspended without explanation. Families were left in torturous limbo, wandering from prison gates to government offices, met only with silence or lies.
Months later, the truth emerged in the most brutal form: a bag of personal belongings handed to a father, an order not to mourn, and the realization that a loved one was gone.
Today, the regime replicates that silence through digital darkness—a nationwide internet shutdown. But the scale has shifted. In 1988, authorities could intimidate families one by one. They ordered us not to hold funerals, not to cry, not to tell our neighbors. They believed that by hiding the bodies, they could hide the crime.
In 2026, the numbers are too large for secrecy to hold. When the reported death toll reaches 30,000 in a single week, grief becomes a tidal wave no blackout can contain. Familiar tactics of intimidation—extorting “bullet fees,” abducting the wounded from hospital beds, desecrating graves—no longer work as intended.
In 1988, the regime hid its atrocities beneath the soil of Khavaran. In 2026, in an unimaginable cruelty, it staged its terror in the open.
Videos that surfaced despite the shutdown shattered the nation: hundreds of lifeless bodies sealed in black plastic, lined along sidewalks and outside gray buildings like discarded refuse. Families were forced to walk these endless rows, performing a sadistic ritual of identification.
In one widely shared clip, a father’s voice trembles as he searches, calling out, “Sepehr, my son—my Sepehr, where are you?”
For decades, the Mothers of Khavaran—mothers, fathers, siblings, and children—refused to surrender to silence. They were the first to turn grief into political defiance. They wore white to funerals and memorials, rejecting the regime’s imposed black, the color of official sorrow.
White declared innocence. White rejected the legitimacy of the executioners.
They clawed at the dirt of Khavaran with bare hands, searching for truth even as Revolutionary Guards beat them and trampled their flowers.
That spirit has not vanished. It has evolved.
What we see today—mothers dancing at their children’s graves, distributing sweets instead of halva, clapping instead of wailing—is not denial. It is defiance. It is a refusal to allow a theocracy that has weaponized martyrdom for nearly half a century to dictate how death is understood. As one mother put it, our hearts are broken, but our spirits will not bend.
In 1988, impunity—enabled by an international community eager to close the Iran-Iraq war through UN Resolution 598—convinced Tehran that mass murder was an effective tool of statecraft.
Iran in 2026 is different. The world is watching in real time. The “Nuremberg moment” long urged by human-rights lawyers is no longer aspirational. It is necessary.
My brother Bijan and the thousands murdered in the dark summer of 1988 were denied even the pretense of justice: no trials, no headstones, no place in official history.
The Islamic Republic believed it was burying bodies. It was planting seeds.
Those seeds have now erupted. The legacy of the fallen is not buried in the mute soil of Khavaran; it lives in every young Iranian who stands firm before gunfire. We are no longer merely archivists of the dead. We have come to demand accountability.
History has never wavered on this truth: no tyranny is eternal. Their gallows will not save them from the dawn.
Ali Shakouri-Rad said the protests on January 8 and 9 were a predictable outcome of years of accumulated social discontent, even if the scale of the response surprised political factions and security institutions alike.
Shakouri-Rad rejected remarks promoted by official media that foreign intelligence services or opposition networks orchestrated the violence.
“I do not believe this, and I think many people do not believe it either,” he said, referring to claims that Israel’s Mossad or networks associated with exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi were responsible for the violence.
Protests and unexpected scale
Shakouri-Rad said the breadth of demonstrations across almost 400 cities exceeded expectations across Iran’s political spectrum. “Reformists, conservatives and the security institutions did not think this many people would respond to Reza Pahlavi’s call,” he said.
While protests were foreseeable given sustained grievances among workers, teachers and retirees, he said, the social response exposed a deeper rupture that institutions had failed to anticipate.
‘Injecting violence’ to justify force
The reformist politician argued that violence was introduced by those seeking to suppress protests and then use that violence as justification. “I can more easily believe that those who wanted to suppress what they called unrest carried out these acts,” he said.
This approach, he noted, was not new, arguing that security agencies have historically escalated confrontations to rationalize harsher measures. “From the beginning it has been like this, and it has grown worse over time,” he added.
Shakouri-Rad cited an academic article by a doctoral student at Guards-run Imam Hossein University that described “manufacturing deaths among one’s own forces” as a method for controlling unrest. He said the model included the killing of Basij or police personnel or attacks on symbolic sites, later attributed to protesters to justify coercive action.
Shakouri-Rad described an incident in which protesters who fled into a dead-end alley were shot and killed by a Basij member. The shooter, he said, was not inherently violent but shaped by an environment of polarization that placed weapons in the hands of poorly trained forces.
Criticism of the presidency
Shakouri-Rad criticized President Pezeshkian for publicly relying on security briefings to explain the killings, saying it stripped the president of his standing as a centrist figure. Repeating those assessments on state television, he said, alienated the public, which had witnessed events firsthand.
“People were present and knew what had happened,” he noted, adding that the president should have questioned the security bodies over how such events unfolded.
He also questioned how alleged armed networks could operate across hundreds of cities without the knowledge of Iran’s security agencies, saying the lack of accountability, resignations or formal inquiries underscored the credibility gap.
A leader-backed presidency
Shakouri-Rad said Pezeshkian’s rise to the presidency was a project backed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, rather than the result of open political competition. Reformists, he said, assisted the process without understanding its nature.
Pezeshkian, he said, could have acted as a bridge to defuse crises only if real authority had been delegated.
Shakouri-Rad described the January killings as among the “darkest moments in Iran’s modern history,” saying the wounds left by injustice and the killing of young people – most of them under 30 – would not heal without truth, accountability and a fundamental change in governance.
Referring specifically to the bloodshed on January 8 and 9, Shakouri-Rad said: “It is not something we can erase easily in the coming years, or even in decades to come.”
The effort to compile a database of detained healthcare workers is led by the AIDA Health Alliance (AHA), named after Aida Rostami, a 36-year-old Tehran physician who treated protesters in secret during the 2022 protests, went missing after a hospital shift, and was later found dead bearing signs of torture.
Doctors involved with AHA say they have so far identified at least 40 detained healthcare workers across multiple provinces, including doctors, nurses, medical students, technicians and volunteer first responders. They say the figure is likely incomplete.
“Hospitals are no longer safe places,” said Homa Fathi, one of the doctors involved in documenting the cases. “If a doctor treats a protester, questions security forces or refuses to discharge a patient prematurely, that doctor becomes a target.”
Doctors working on the documentation say the crackdown has pushed medical care underground, forcing physicians to choose between their professional oath and their personal safety.
Some have established makeshift home clinics to treat gunshot and pellet wounds. Others report being followed, threatened or warned to stop providing care altogether.
The Norway-based rights group Hengaw reported this week that an Iranian surgeon, Alireza Golchini, had been charged with moharebeh, or waging war against God—a charge that carries the death penalty.
Golchini was later released on bail following international pressure, including a statement by the U.S. State Departmentcalling for his release alongside what it described as “all the brave doctors who have helped their fellow countrymen.”
Doctors following his case say it has not been closed and is not an outlier, but part of a broader effort to dismantle medical networks that support protesters.
Fathi described a hospital in southwest Iran where an elderly woman suffering from hundreds of pellet wounds to her face, back and legs was forced out of care to free beds for members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In other cases, she said, security forces fired tear gas inside emergency departments to clear wards, while doctors who confronted plainclothes agents photographing injured patients were later arrested.
She also cited an incident in which a medical intern was shot inside a hospital after protesting the presence of security forces. In one of the most disturbing accounts, she described unconscious patients being placed among the dead.
Another physician, Panteha Rezaeian, described cases in which doctors were followed to prevent home treatment, homes were raided, and physicians were warned to stop speaking publicly or face detention.
“We are seeing people attempt to remove bullets themselves or treat serious injuries at home,” Rezaeian said. “Some of them die days later, not because their injuries were unsurvivable, but because they were too afraid to seek help.”
Rezaeian warned that the denial of medical care had become “a secondary killing mechanism,” as injured demonstrators avoid hospitals out of fear of arrest or execution, risking death from untreated wounds, infections and internal injuries.
Doctors involved in the documentation effort say the pattern has intensified since January, with arrests accelerating after the latest wave of nationwide protests.
They warn that the systematic targeting of healthcare workers is intended not only to punish doctors, but to deter the injured from seeking care at all.
“This is not just about arresting doctors,” Rezaeian said. “It is about making people afraid to survive.”
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