Bullets, Blackouts, and Burials: Inside Iran’s Systematic Terror Machine Before the Bombs Fell

As United States and Israeli forces launched joint military strikes on Iranian facilities Saturday, thousands of Iranians defied the regime from their windows, chanting “Death to Khamenei” in a display that captured the bitter reality facing Tehran: many of its citizens celebrated foreign bombs falling on their own soil. The calls for death for Iran’s supreme leader were answered on Saturday. His death came two months after the regime’s security forces massacred thousands of protesters in what has become the deadliest crackdown in modern Iranian history, leaving a nation demanding one question no one can answer: what serves as accountability?Human Rights Activists News Agency has documented tens of thousands of deaths and executions, potentially marking the deadliest massacre in modern Iranian history. A Premeditated Massacre What unfolded on January 8 and 9 was not crowd control but carnage. Security forces deployed heavy weapons against largely peaceful protesters. Eyewitnesses described rooftop snipers and trucks mounted with DShK machine guns opening fire. In Rasht, witnesses reported security forces trapping protesters inside the bazaar, setting it ablaze, then shooting those who tried to escape.Two senior Ministry of Health officials disclosed an internal government count exceeding 30,000 deaths on those two days alone. Security forces were overwhelmed by bodies, exhausting stocks of body bags and replacing ambulances with semi-trailers. Footage from the Kahrizak morgue showed hundreds of bodies in black bags as families searched desperately for loved ones.The crackdown was not spontaneous. According to former Iranian government officials and classified documents, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – who would die in Saturday’s bombing – ordered security forces “to crush the protests by any means necessary.” Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, coordinated the massacres through highly classified directives across the regime’s security apparatus. Erasing the Evidence Since January 8, Iran has maintained a near-total internet blackout, isolating 90 million people from the outside world. With truth obscured, the regime has systematically pressured families of the dead. Families told the Sun that authorities pressured them to falsify death circumstances, instructing many to register victims as Basij members or claim terrorists killed them.Families have also been forced to pay for bullets that killed their loved ones, with amounts ranging from $480 to $1,720 per bullet. Some report being unable to locate remains after authorities buried bodies in undisclosed locations. Only after families consented to official narratives portraying victims as regime supporters were bodies released.The Terror Continues More than 53,000 people have been arrested, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, with hundreds of children among the detained. Security forces conducted violent house-to-house raids, using pellet gun wounds as evidence to justify arrests. Many detainees have been subjected to torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.Human rights organizations documented detainees being injected with unknown chemical substances, linked to multiple deaths in custody. Reports emerged of imprisoned protesters being tortured and raped, with women’s bodies returned to families with missing wombs to hide evidence of sexual violence.State media have broadcast at least 167 forced confessions obtained through torture. At least 26 protesters have been sentenced to death, though human rights groups warn hundreds more were facing execution. The crackdown occurred amid Iran’s worst execution spree in nearly four decades: 2,228 executions in 2025, more than double the 1,006 recorded in 2024.“The Islamic Republic has repeatedly used decisive force when it feels threatened,” associate professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran, Saeid Golkar, tells the Sun. “What appears different now is the scale and tempo, together with the normalization of lethal responses as a default option.”On February 21, exactly 40 days after the massacres, students across Iran revived anti-regime protests as universities reopened. For five consecutive days, thousands of students boycotted classes, transforming campuses into hubs of resistance.At Tehran University, Sharif, Amirkabir, and Shahid Beheshti universities, protesters chanted “Death to the dictator” and “The blood that has been spilled cannot be washed away.” Some students tore down and burned Iran’s current flag, replacing it with the pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag.Students from Tabriz University issued a manifesto declaring their institutions a “bastion of freedom” and proclaiming: “Neither Shah nor mullahs, long live the democratic republic.” The regime responded with Basij violence, student suspensions, drone surveillance, and machine gun-mounted vehicles near campuses. Yet protests persisted.The Accountability QuestionThe international community has condemned the violence. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the crackdown. The EU and Ukraine designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization. Australia, New Zealand, and the UK announced sanctions.Yet for families burying loved ones, these measures ring hollow. UN experts demanded transparency, disclosure of disappeared persons’ whereabouts, halting executions, restoring internet access, and allowing independent investigations. Tehran’s response has been continued repression.Up until Saturday, President Trump’s approach had oscillated between military threats and diplomatic overtures. By early February, the United States had deployed two carrier strike groups and more than 150 aircraft to the region. Yet no military intervention materialized as the death toll mounted. After Iranian assurances that planned executions of 800 protesters were canceled, Trump pulled back from strikes that appeared imminent.While mass street killings subsided under overwhelming force, the machinery of repression accelerated. But in talks in Geneva this week involving American and Iranian negotiators,, the focus remained on nuclear concerns, not human rights., For decades, the Iranian state denied responsibility for gross human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity. A UN Fact-Finding Mission last year found that while some sporadic measures have been taken, they remain inadequate. “The judicial system lacks basic independence,” the Mission found. “Victims and families seeking accountability are not only denied justice, but are continuously intimidated, threatened, arrested, and subjected to criminal prosecution.”The Center for Human Rights in Iran repeatedly called for referring Islamic Republic officials to the International Criminal Court, recalling ambassadors, severing diplomatic relations, cutting off oil revenues, providing internet access to Iranians, demanding disclosure of all detainees’ whereabouts, and offering emergency protections for those at risk.Yet, as bodies were buried in mass graves and families coerced into praising the regime that murdered their children, students faced machine guns for demanding justice, and protesters languished in torture chambers awaiting execution, one question persisted: what serves as accountability?The Islamic Republic survived for decades by ensuring the answer is ‘nothing’. Through systematic impunity, terror, and international indifference masked as diplomatic pragmatism, it has evaded consequences for massacres in 1988, violent crackdowns in 2009, 2019, and 2022, and now the deadliest repression in its history.Whether the Iranian regime – which has proven remarkably durable over the last 47 years – will remain as strong without Khamenei will be determined in the coming days and weeks.“Finally,” one Iranian musician, who asked only to be identified as Mehdi, tells me in the early hours of Saturday. “Something, we hope, will change. For good.”

Bullets, Blackouts, and Burials: Inside Iran’s Systematic Terror Machine Before the Bombs Fell

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