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Guest Essay

Feb. 4, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Ben Hickey

Scott Anderson

Mr. Anderson is the author of "King of Kings,” an account of the Iranian revolution.

It’s been a trying time for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Over the past two years, its regional proxy allies have been severely weakened by the Israeli military. Add to that a 12-day bombing campaign against Iran conducted by the United States and Israel in June. The regime suffered a body blow last month when large-scale street protests over the nation’s economic collapse quickly transformed into calls for the government’s overthrow. For a moment, it appeared the protesters might be gaining the upper hand. Then came the state’s brutal crackdown.

Just how close did the regime feel it was to falling? With the nation still essentially cut off from the outside world, that would appear difficult to ascertain. But often, one reliable indication in such circumstances is to gauge the ferocity with which a regime responds to unrest. It may be a bit on the morbid side, but one way to measure that response is to ascertain how many people died.

Trying to determine the death toll is more than a measure of threat to a regime: It is also a vital step in providing a sense of justice for the victims and in holding the perpetrators accountable for their crimes.

The calculation is easier said than done, because exaggerated and underestimated body counts have been a feature of armed conflict since time immemorial. In conventional wars, combatants often minimize their own casualty figures while exaggerating those of their enemy to bolster morale and suggest victory is close. In internal insurrections like what we have witnessed in Iran, this formula tends to be reversed, with the state lowballing casualty numbers — no government wants to be seen as indiscriminately slaughtering its citizens — and dissidents raising them to provoke outrage. The current Iranian regime has the dubious distinction of having traveled both sides of the street.

In the 1978-79 revolution that toppled the shah and ushered in Iran’s Islamic government, the first great jolt of violence occurred in the northwestern city of Tabriz in February 1978. After security forces quelled the unrest, the shah’s government initially reported six people had been killed, while the opposition claimed hundreds.

Such vast divergences in body counts quickly became a feature of the Iranian revolution, with the opposition often claiming death tolls in protests that were five- or ten- — at times, even twentyfold — that of the state’s numbers. One common approach when people are confronted by such disparities is what is known as “the false dilemma,” in which they decide the true figure must lie somewhere in the vast middle.

In the Iranian revolution, this tendency worked in the opposition’s favor, leading many observers to believe the conflict was far bloodier, and the shah’s soldiers far more brutal, than was the case. In the revolution’s aftermath, a commission appointed by the Islamic government to determine the number of dead came up with the remarkably specific figure of 2,781. No matter. By then, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, was routinely proclaiming that there were as many as 60,000 “shahids,” or martyrs.

Now, of course, the Iranian regime finds itself on the other side of this body-count battle.

The recent unrest began in response to the collapse of the Iranian rial and hyperinflation when shopkeepers in Tehran took to the streets on Dec. 28. In subsequent days, thousands — and then millions — of other Iranians joined the protests. Their complaints swiftly went beyond the economic to the political, with many demanding that the government dissolve. Initially, violence was minimal, with the number of those killed reported as in the dozens.

Then, on Jan. 8, everything changed. This was also the day the regime shut down the internet and essentially cut off Iran from the outside world. Over the next few days, strife spread on a scale that even the state ultimately had to acknowledge. By Jan. 21, and with order somewhat restored, the state said 3,117 had died, a toll that it claimed included several hundred members of the security forces.

That number stands in stark contrast to what is now being reported by most international media outlets and outside human rights groups. Often working from snatches of video and furtive telephone calls from sources inside Iran, their estimates of people killed during the protests now range from more than 6,800 by the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency to as many as 30,000 reported in Time magazine, which cited two unidentified senior officials of Iran’s Health Ministry.

So, who’s right?

The regime’s history of turning to violence when threatened provides a hint. In the so-called Twitter revolution of 2009, when demonstrators took to the streets over what they insisted was a stolen presidential election, security forces killed several dozen. In the quashing of the Women, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, many place the body count in the neighborhood of 550. Even by the regime’s own figures, then, what took place this January is on a totally different order of magnitude.

Except the regime’s figures are also probably a fiction. In the city of Rasht, for example, the normally reliable Human Rights Activists News Agency has documented at least 392 deaths. If that many were killed in Rasht, with a population of some 766,000, what might it reveal about the numbers in Tehran, population 10 million and the epicenter of the protests? Civilians across the country have reported mass graves, morgues overflowing with body bags, relatives or neighbors disappearing without a trace.

On top of the dead, estimates of the wounded range as high as 300,000. That is far out of keeping with the usual one to three ratio of killed to wounded in combat situations, but it makes sense amid reports of security forces firing birdshot at protesters, taking aim at their eyes and heads. Doctors in Tehran have described demonstrators with severe eye injuries, many who were blinded, as well as security forces storming into hospitals to haul away those with telltale wounds from shotgun pellets.

But even this probably doesn’t help paint the full picture. A hallmark of most every past civil disturbance in Iran is that security forces operate with even greater impunity in the countryside. This is especially true in corners where ethnic minorities like Kurds and Baluchis predominate and where the regime’s Revolutionary Guards have periodically conducted bloody crackdowns. With just these two ethnic groups joined to the rural population, it means we have heard little about the fates of people in a broad swath of the country.

All of which suggests a terrible answer to the question of just how much the regime feared for its survival. Whatever the final number proves to be, it may have carried out one of the worst state-sanctioned massacres of unarmed civilians anywhere in nearly a half century in order to survive.

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