Kiarash, who was visiting his native Iran, was one of thousands who took to the streets to demonstrate against the regime on January 10 in northern Tehran. Then a person wearing a full-face chador started shooting into the crowd. Blood flowed in the street, and by phone from Germany, where Kiarash lives, he recounts how close he came to being shot himself.
"I heard a 'pop pop' and saw with my own eyes three people collapse at the same time," he says.
He saw a man trying to help his partner, his hands covered in her blood.
"I have nightmares about it. He couldn't understand that she had been shot," says Kiarash.
Stacked body bags
According to several exiled human rights organizations in exile, several thousand protesters were killed by regime forces in the days around January 8.
Kiarash had heard earlier, on the same day as the demonstration, that one of his friends was among those killed. He went to the large morgue in Tehran. People searching for their relatives crowded into two warehouses filled with black body bags, sometimes two or three on top of each other, he says.
According to Kiarash, there were "up to 2,500 dead people in just one warehouse."
“Automatic volleys of shots”
Kiarash's testimony is one of many small pieces of the puzzle that are now beginning to trickle out about what has been going on - and is going on - in Iran, where the internet has been shut down and the people's testimonies are being silenced.
Kaveh, whose real name is different and who lives in the UK but was also in Tehran last week, says he heard gunshots in the streets without seeing any shooters.
"It wasn't shotguns, it was automatic weapons, automatic volleys of gunfire. Every ten minutes we heard a series of shots," he says.
But “the people did not disperse,” he adds.
They just stayed.
The demonstrations in Iran began in late December when shopkeepers took to the streets to show their dissatisfaction with skyrocketing costs and lowered living standards.
After that, the protests grew massively and encompassed the entire country.
The discontent is rooted in the abysmal economy with skyrocketing inflation and a currency, the rial, that has collapsed. But like the wave of protests following the death of the young Mahsa Zhina Amini, at the hands of the so-called morality police in 2022, the anger is directed at the regime at large.
