This is one of an Iranian journalist’s dispatches from protests, morgues, and funerals over two weeks in January 2026, offering a rare ground-level view of what Amnesty International calls a “massacre.” Shared via an encrypted channel, these dispatches provide a firsthand account of a crackdown. Dear sister, hello. Today is January 8. It is 12:15 AM. I’ve just gotten home, and the sound of gunfire still hasn’t stopped. The internet and SMS have been down for hours, and even the phones are down. We have no way to reach each other. I don’t know why I’m writing these lines to you. I only know one thing: I have to write. I feel as if my lungs have swollen like balloons, filled with tear gas. My voice won’t come out after all the screaming. But none of that matters next to what I saw tonight in the streets of Tehran. There were so many of us. Everyone was in the streets. And yet, sister, tonight the best of us were taken. They went drenched in blood, as bullets tore through their heads, necks, and chests. The only reason we are still here, the only reason we didn’t go too, is that it wasn’t our turn yet. Maybe we slipped into another side alley. Maybe a bullet went astray. Maybe someone was running behind us, and the bullet found them instead. I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow it will be my turn. I decided to write you a few lines so it stays here. If I survive and the internet comes back, I will send it myself. If I don’t, I have entrusted a few people to send this to you. We are trapped in the darkest knot in Iran’s history. I came back alive tonight, but the volleys still haven’t stopped. I feel like a survivor of a massacre. For the rest of my life, I will have no duty except to tell of this crime. But if I’m here, one day when we sit together in a café on Khordmand Street and drink tea, I’ll tell you how long these hours felt, and how hard they were. I love you as much as all the moments we had the right to be together but weren’t. Sattar Khan Street, western Tehran, Thursday, January 8 Tonight, I saw something in people that I had never seen at any protest before. A kind of clarity. People were determined to bring them down. Security forces opened fire. Instead of scattering, protesters lifted the wounded from the pavement and moved toward the gunmen. It was the strangest moment of my life. I was watching people who had accepted death. They came either to die or to be free. Eslamshahr, near Tehran, Friday, January 9 A man brought his eight-year-old daughter to the protests. I begged him to take her home. This is dangerous. They have no mercy. They could shoot a child. The man pointed to his daughter and said, “This child is hungry. I would rather we both die here by bullets than watch my daughter die of hunger in front of my eyes.” Tehran, Kahrizak morgue, Saturday, January 10 I went to Kahrizak, outside Tehran, to retrieve the body of my twenty-three-year-old cousin. I expected a morgue. Instead, we were taken to a warehouse. They opened a door, and bodies were heaped on top of one another, many shot in the head. An officer told us calmly, “Find him yourselves and bring him out.” His father fainted. We had to search through the corpses until we found Erfan and pulled him out. He had been shot in the heart. On the drive back, I saw refrigerated trucks heading toward Kahrizak. They carried the bodies of our young people. Tehran, Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Sunday, January 11 At funerals, religious rituals have become political flashpoints. Each body should, by Muslim tradition, be escorted with “La ilaha illallah” (“No god is worthy of worship except Allah”). But every time a coffin was lifted, the crowd shouted “Death to the dictator,” as if to insist this young person did not die naturally. This young person was killed by the regime in the streets. Tehran Subway, Tuesday, January 13 I was on the metro when her earbuds stopped working during a song. “Zombie” by the Cranberries had been playing. When the music cut out, I overheard two women nearby. They exchanged what they had heard and seen: a colleague’s niece killed in Rasht; a downstairs neighbor’s grandson shot on Sattar Khan Street. Then came a long silence. One woman asked: “Do you think it’ll happen this time?” The other replied: “I think it has to.” After another silence, twenty or thirty seconds maybe, the first woman asked: “If they’re gone, what will you do?” The answer was unexpectedly domestic. The other woman paused, then said, “I’ll do a deep clean. After Mahsa’s death,” a reference to the 2022 protests, “I haven’t done any house-cleaning. The place is a total mess.” In Iranian tradition, house-cleaning before the new year is a ritual of renewal: clearing away dust and sorrow to make space for something new. To me, the exchange suggested a quiet insistence that a future beyond fear is possible and worth preparing for. And the world owes our people a collective, national house-cleaning. 
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