Iranian protesters describe personal harm from crackdown

“All my friends are like me. We all know someone who died in the protests.”

For Parisa, a 29-year-old from Tehran, the crackdown by Iranian security forces earlier this month was unlike anything she had witnessed before.

“In the previous, most widespread protests, I personally did not know of a single person who was killed,” she said.

Parisa said he was aware that at least 13 people had been killed since protests over deteriorating economic conditions erupted in the capital on December 28 and developed into one of the deadliest anti-government unrest in the Islamic Republic’s history.

A human rights group has reported the confirmed death toll at more than 6,000, and several young Iranians who were able to be interviewed by the BBC in recent days despite a near internet blackout have described the personal toll.

Parisa said that as protests intensified across the country on Thursday, January 8 and Friday, January 9, a 26-year-old woman she knew “died from a hail of bullets in the streets, and the authorities responded with lethal force to suppress them.”

She herself took part in protests north of Tehran on Thursday, which she insisted were peaceful.

“No one committed violence, no one clashed with security forces, but on Friday night they were still shooting into the crowd,” she said.

“The neighborhood where the conflict was taking place was filled with the smell of gunpowder and bullets.”

Mehdi, 24, also from Tehran, gave his assessment of the scale of the protests and violence.

“I have never seen this level of voter turnout and killings and violence by security forces,” he said.

He added: “Despite the killings on Thursday 8 January and the threat of further killings on Friday, many people came out to protest because they could no longer take it and had nothing left to lose.”

Mehdi described seeing security forces killing protesters at close range several times.

“I saw a young man die before my eyes from two live bullets,” he said.

“Motorcyclists shot a young man in the face with a shotgun. He fell down and never got up again.”

The US-based human rights activist news agency (Hrana) said it had confirmed at least 6,159 people had been killed since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 government officials. Additionally, 17,000 more reported deaths are being investigated.

Skylar Thompson, from Hrana, told the BBC it was very likely the number of confirmed deaths would rise.

“We do our best to ensure that any verified information we report is placed next to the name and location,” she added.

Another Norway-based group, Iran Human Rights (IHR), warned that the final death toll could exceed 25,000.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people had been killed, but the majority were security guards or bystanders attacked by “riots.”

Most international news organizations, including the BBC, are banned from reporting from inside Iran. However, footage was confirmed by the BBC showing security forces firing live ammunition into crowds.

Sahar, 27, from the capital, said he knew seven of the people killed.

She described how the security forces’ response to the January 8 unrest rapidly escalated.

During protests that evening, Sahar and her friends took refuge in a nearby house as tear gas was fired.

“My friend stuck his head out the window to see what was going on and they shot him in the neck,” she said.

Another friend was injured by a bullet and bled to death because he did not want to go to the hospital for fear of being detained later, according to Sahar.

Sahar said a third friend died while in Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) custody.

“They (officers) told his family to come to the IRGC intelligence office. A few days later they called and said, ‘Come and collect the body’.”

Sahar said that on January 9, uniformed security personnel fired live ammunition in public “mercilessly.”

“They were pointing lasers at people and local residents were opening car park doors so we could hide,” she said.

The disruption in communications further compounded the trauma.

“There is no news at all now,” Sahar said. “With no internet or phone lines, we had no idea who was going and what was happening. It was almost impossible to pick up the phone just to get news.”

Parham, 27, described Tehran security forces’ extensive use of shotguns, particularly targeting the faces and eyes of protesters.

One of his friends, Sina, 23, was shot in the forehead and eye on January 9.

“We took him to the hospital, but the doctor just gave him a prescription and told him to leave as soon as possible,” Parham said.

He added that injured protesters were constantly arriving at the eye hospital.

“It felt like every 10 minutes they brought in someone who had been hit by a bullet.”

According to Parham, an employee at the hospital café said: “During one shift, I saw 70 people come in with eye injuries.”

Sheena, who still has pills stuck behind one eye and on her forehead, said she went to a private eye hospital because she was afraid she would be arrested at the first hospital because she would have to show identification.

He said he was “lucky” compared to others at the eye hospital who “had grains all over their face and in both eyes.”

The BBC has seen medical documents showing that Cena had a “5mm metallic foreign body” behind his eye.

The BBC also received and verified the medical records of other protesters who suffered shotgun injuries.

Protesters and activists also described a pattern of authorities refusing to hand over the bodies of the dead to their families.

Mehdi said his friend’s cousin had been murdered and the family had been told by officials to pay a large sum of money to retrieve his body or agree to have him recorded as a member of the security forces.

“They said, ‘Either we should pay 1 billion tomans (more than $7,000; more than 5,000 pounds) to hand over the body to the family, or they should say he was a member of the Basij and was martyred in the face of public security and rioting.’”

Navid, 38, from Isfahan, also said two close friends whose relatives were killed had received such an ultimatum.

“They told me I would have to pay a fee worth thousands of dollars or be issued a Basij card to be included among the security force dead,” he quoted his friends as saying.

Human rights groups have warned that the practice has helped punish families of protesters and obscure the true death toll.