This archive uses Lion & Sun Revolution for the nationwide rising that began on 28 December 2025 (7 Dey 1404). The first days were a merchants' strike over the collapsed rial, opening at Tehran's mobile-shopping malls before the Grand Bazaar wave. The rising that followed was not that strike alone. After Shahzadeh Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince, called Iranians into the street at 8 p.m. on 18 and 19 Dey, the country filled.¹ Iran International carried the same call.²

The bazaar, then a limited street

The first documented closure was on 28 December, when shopkeepers at Alaeddin Passage (Pasaj-e Alaeddin, the central Tehran mobile-shopping mall) and at the nearby Charsou mall shut their stores, protested the dollar's rise, and marched toward Hafez Bridge. This archive holds that Alaeddin and Charsou protest on 7 Dey. Shopkeepers in Tehran's Grand Bazaar closed next. This archive holds aerial film of shut storefronts and a crowd in the bazaar on 29 December, and more of the same on Naser Khosrow and Lalehzar, Amirkabir Street, and Lalezar under tear gas. On Qeshm the next day, merchants joined the Tehran wave.

Even in those first days the chant was already political. On 30 December, shopkeepers on Bani Hashem Street closed and shouted Reza Shah, ruhat shad ("Reza Shah, may your soul be blessed"). In Hammam-Chal Alley a girl started, and the bazaar answered, Don't be afraid, we are all together. Through the first ten days the map stayed uneven: Mashhad under tear gas, a fruit-market strike at Meydan-e Tarehbar, funerals in Lorestan, a shopkeeper killed in Qom. Cities came out and went home. The Islamic Republic could still tell itself this was sporadic.

By 6 and 7 January the street was asking the bazaar to finish the job. In Kerman people marched through the old market shouting Honorable merchant, support, support. In Bandar Abbas the same week the crowd called merchants out and named the Pahlavi return. In Rasht, bazaar traders themselves chanted for Pahlavi. In Tehran's Yaftabad furniture market they shouted We don't want spectators, join us. The price crisis had opened the door. The demand on the other side was regime change.

The Crown Prince's 8 p.m. call

Shahzadeh Reza Pahlavi has long said his coordinated calls answer what Iranians were already shouting in risings across the country, not a crown seized from abroad. His own site records affection for the Pahlavi family and his name in the streets from the Dey 96, Aban 98, and Woman Life Freedom waves, and says that after 2022 compatriots pressed him to accept leadership of the national uprising, which he did in a video on 24 Aban 1403 (14 November 2024).³ BBC's 9 January profile traced the same pattern: Reza Shah, ruhat shad back in 2017, then the 2022 rising after Mahsa Amini's killing.⁴ In a November 2019 Iran International interview, asked about chants aimed at him and his family, he said the kindness overwhelmed him but the issue was the country's freedom, not personal rule.⁵ On 16 Dey, in The Washington Post the same evening as his first 8 p.m. call, he wrote that protesters were "chanting my name alongside calls for freedom and national unity," that he bore that as "a profound responsibility," not an invitation to claim power, and that he had stepped forward to steward a transition chosen at the ballot box.⁶ Iran International tied that op-ed to the video call published the same day.²

On 16 Dey (6 January), Shahzadeh Reza Pahlavi published his first call of the rising, on X as @PahlaviReza. Kayhan London¹ and Iran International² carried the Farsi text the same day. He said he was sharing the first call now, and asked everyone, on Thursday and Friday 18 and 19 Dey, at 8 p.m. together, to start chanting, in the streets or even from their houses. Later calls, he said, would follow from the feedback of that move.

On 17 Dey he spoke again. The day's presence across Iran, he said, was unprecedented, and was a declaration of readiness for the 8 p.m. program. He named Iran International and Manoto as the channels that would still reach people if the regime cut the net, and said a blackout should itself be read as another order to take the streets.⁷

This is the hinge. Before that call, the protests were the bazaar plus scattered cities. After it, the street was national. Witnesses inside Iran, and the Crown Prince speaking to Manoto on 19 Dey, treated 18 and 19 Dey as the nights the country answered him. Manoto later built a four-part documentary, This Is Our Story / In revayat-e mast, from citizen film of 7 Dey through the days after 18 and 19 Dey, including live street calls that had reached the channel in fragments. The series is the public cut of the same kind of footage this archive holds item by item.⁸ Manoto published it as This Is Our Story.⁹

18 and 19 Dey: the streets take the roads

At 8 p.m. on 18 Dey the cities moved together. Iran International's Tabriz file from that night is one city among many: Javid Shah ("long live the Shah"), This is the last battle, Pahlavi will return, and This year is the year, Seyyed Ali comes down. The same chants are on the Tehran and Mashhad tapes in this catalog. They are not bread slogans.¹⁰

This archive has listed more than 260 video footages from 18 and 19 Dey. See the tapes.

In Tehran the avenues fill. A Tajrish night crowd on 18 Dey. A Narmak gathering with hands up. Sattarkhan marching the length of the street on 19 Dey. Pasdaran intersection. Punak on the pedestrian bridge, fire on the asphalt. Sa'adat Abad, posted to VahidOnline from a Starlink send. Kashani Expressway with people where the traffic should be. In Chitgar the chant is an order: Iran is ready, Prince, give the command. In Kaj Square a masked protester holds up a portrait of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. On the walk from Dolat toward Pasdaran they sing O good king, come back to Iran. In Sarsabz the night is monarchist from the first shout. At Vali-e Asr police station, later-released film has the crowd still chanting Javid Shah under fire. In Heravi a later ingest is captioned as the first night of Prince Reza Pahlavi's call.

Mashhad is not a side city. Emamat Boulevard walking as a crowd, Vakilabad packed with people and cars, a massive night street, green lasers over highway traffic that has become a gathering. Yazd at Imam Hossein Square and Beheshti. Kashan on fire in the street. Nazarabad in Alborz people and cars filling the road. Shiraz street fires. Tabriz bins over, fire, the street taken. Later Tabriz tapes name those nights as the first and second days of the Reza Shah II call.

No public census counted heads. Iranian witnesses, the Crown Prince, and the people who filmed from balconies and from the asphalt called it millions, in every province, with marching where there had been car traffic. This archive cannot audit that number. It can show the film. A single town does not stand in for that map.⁹ HRANA's later fifty-day file gives a named minimum by province.¹¹

The blackout and the killing

While the 8 p.m. crowds were still forming, the authorities cut more than websites. They cut the country off. Street lights went dark in some cities. The Crown Prince had already said that cut should be read as another call to stay out. Live fire rose while the national cut kept most film inside the country. A few citizens who still had Starlink moved video and photos out; independent Telegram channels, above all @VahidOnline, republished what they received. Iran International later described 18 and 19 Dey as an organized two-day massacre ordered by Ali Khamenei. State television kept talking. Families were pressed over bodies.⁷ Iran International later described the two nights as an organized massacre.¹²

The traffic numbers are not a metaphor. Kentik¹³ and Cloudflare¹⁴ both time the collapse on 18 Dey (8 January) from about 20:00 Iran time (16:30 UTC). By about 22:15 (18:45 UTC), traffic from MCCI, IranCell, and TCI had fallen to effectively zero. Iran International quoted Cloudflare's 22:15 local reading that same night.¹⁵ Cloudflare's later look at 19 Dey put residual traffic below 0.01 percent of the pre-shutdown peak. Saeed Suzangar, speaking to Zoomit, put the last nationwide drop between 21:30 and 22:30, after a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood cut that followed the protest map.¹⁶

That floor held for consecutive days. FilterWatch's later reconstruction¹⁷ treats 8 to 17 January as the near-complete nationwide blackout: ten days in which international connectivity had vanished and in-country device responsiveness sat around 3 percent. NetBlocks' hour counter matched that floor. On the morning of 17 January (27 Dey), after 200 hours, national connectivity was still about 2 percent of ordinary levels, with no sign of a real return.¹⁸ By 21 January the observatory said 300 hours had passed and the blackout was still being used to hide the killing.¹⁹ A brief, heavily filtered opening of Google and some messengers around hour 238 on 18 January fell again by hour 240.²⁰ Kentik, writing on 21 January, said a near-complete shutdown had then lasted almost fourteen days.¹³ This was not the 2019 pattern, where the National Information Network still served domestic sites. FilterWatch recorded that this time the NIN, privileged SIMs, mobile phones, and landlines were taken down with the global link.²¹ Zoomit's field notes on the morning of 19 Dey match that: SMS still dead on every operator, many shop card-readers dead until midday, Tapsi unable to run, mobile operators without a link to telecom sites overnight. The Ministry of Communications said at 13:50 that security bodies, not the ministry, had ordered the cuts.¹⁶

Phones were part of the same order. One viewer wrote to Iran International that from midnight, mobile lines and SMS were gone and "only landlines are working." Another reported a 100 percent cut of fixed and mobile internet, plus blocked line-to-line calls, SMS, and jamming of satellite and of Iran International itself. A third told the desk the situation was "much worse than the twelve-day war," with Snapp and banks down. On X the same night, people outside the country wrote that morning would not come, and that they were dying of no news of a mother and of friends. Kentik separately logged that international voice was blocked, with only brief windows of limited outbound calling. Calling Iran from a foreign number was, for more than two weeks, the hard direction.²² Kentik logged the same voice block.¹³

The return was staged, and it was not a return to 17 Dey. ICTNA, citing Digiato, dated the sixth day of the blackout, Wednesday 23 Dey (13 January): mobiles inside Iran could dial out; landlines still could not; inbound calls from abroad to Iranian mobiles or landlines still failed.²³ Zoomit, the next afternoon, 24 Dey (14 January), recorded ISNA saying outbound landline international had opened too.²⁴ Inbound from abroad remained closed. That one-way state lasted until Monday 6 Bahman (26 January). That evening Gadget News ran a field test: a caller in Sweden dialled an MCI mobile in Iran; at 19:30 the call still failed (busy tone or unreachable). User reports the same evening said some landlines inside Iran were again reachable from abroad.²⁵ Citna, timed 18:00 the same day, claimed inbound to both Hamrah operators and TCI landlines had just opened.²⁶ Treat the landline inbound date as 26 January / 6 Bahman. Treat mobile inbound that night as still disputed.

People did not wait for TCI. With WhatsApp and the usual messengers dead, families and offices fell back on simpler VoIP that later sat on the allowlist, above all Google Meet, and on whatever FaceTime or similar path still flickered. FilterWatch noted that even when Google Search returned on some mobile operators on 17 January, Gmail and Google Meet stayed blocked or showed heavy packet loss. Shahr Sakhtafzar dated Meet reopening on some lines to 4 Bahman (24 January), seventeen days after 18 Dey, and printed a user note that the page would open while a call still would not complete. That is the field picture for VoIP, not a census of every provider: a few paths were later permitted, they were unstable, and a session that connected often did not hold. The street had a separate egress. While ordinary mobile data was dead, a small number of people with Starlink still uploaded clips and stills; citizens forwarded them to large Telegram desks, and @VahidOnline was among the channels that published that material on 18 and 19 Dey. This catalog ingested those posts. Sa'adat Abad on 19 Dey, captioned as received via Starlink, Hemmat over Ashrafi Esfahani Expressway, and Vakilabad Boulevard in Mashhad the same night are three examples from that pipe. FilterWatch noted the allowlist pattern.²¹ Shahr Sakhtafzar dated Meet reopening.²⁷

What came back was not the internet of 17 Dey. FilterWatch's later charting puts a more stable backbone reopening around 27 January, with traffic still about 40 percent below the pre-shutdown level and a blocked-by-default allowlist in place.²¹ Kentik's 21 January reading was still near-zero.¹³ NetBlocks, on 28 January, still counted 20 full days of blackout for ordinary users on a whitelist and intermittent service²⁸; two days later 22 full days, still heavily filtered.²⁹ Inbound landlines from abroad opened on 26 January; mobile inbound that night remained disputed.²⁵ NetBlocks timed 200 hours on 17 January with national connectivity still at about 2 percent, and 300 hours on 21 January with the cut still in place; the graphs are 200 hours, about 2 percent and 300 hours, cut ongoing. On 26 May 2026 the same observatory logged a partial restoration on day 88, after 2,093 hours of near-total isolation from international networks, which it called the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history.³⁰ The chart is on the Net blackout monitor.³¹

Some of the dead in this catalog have no name yet. A Fardis tape shows several protesters on the ground after the shooting of 18 Dey. Other nights in this rising are the same: the camera arrived before the family could.

Rooftop volleys, wards, and overflowing morgues

The suppression was not batons and tear gas alone. What reached Telegram and this catalog from 18 and 19 Dey is closer to battlefield fire: sustained automatic bursts (mosalsal, machine-gun fire), rooftop shooters, and visible targeting lasers in the night sky. Protesters still shout Javid Shah under machine-gun fire and smoke. Night street film from 8 January is captioned for massacre conditions with machine guns. Tehranpars police station shows a continuous barrage on 19 Dey; Police Station 126 in Tehranpars and Station 108 Navvab show automatic weapons fired from roofs. One clip paired with the regime's denial asks viewers to watch police shoot from a rooftop. An eyewitness audio account describes machine guns from a six-story building and the dead and possibly still-living wounded loaded into a pickup. Mashhad's highway crowds on 19 Dey carry green lasers over the traffic. Isfahan Municipality carried a sniper on the roof on 19 Dey. A Tehran voice track on 18 Dey counts people shot in the head, hands, and back. CBS, the same week it printed a five-figure death estimate, carried morgue film of lined bodies.³²

Hospitals were not sanctuaries. This archive holds a first-release video of security entering hospitals and killing on 18 Dey. Earlier in the rising, military forces raided Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ilam on the evening of 4 January to seize injured protesters. Najafabad Hospital on 8 January shows bodies on the floor in bags. Chaotic interior and exterior scenes at Al-Qadr Hospital on 18 and 19 Dey show staff moving the wounded and the dead while the corridors fill. Iran International obtained bodies on the floor of Al-Ghadir Hospital on the morning of 19 Dey; the catalog also holds exterior and interior Al-Ghadir film where medical staff said they had to walk through rows of corpses to reach the living. Iran International's later reconstruction, citing Health Ministry spokesman Hossein Kermanpour, put about 150 wounded and 36 dead delivered to Al-Ghadir on 18 Dey against a five-body morgue, with the overflow in the rear courtyard, storage rooms, and corridors until pickup trucks moved bodies toward Kahrizak. Kermanpour confirmed the circulated images were real.³³³⁴³⁵ Witness lines in that reporting describe security blocking treatment, finishing the wounded inside the building, and families identifying the dead in the hospital yard, including Setareh Rafiei, shot in the head in Narmak, found among bodies in Al-Ghadir's courtyard, and Hossein Heydari in the rear yard after head and side wounds in Haft Hoz. CCTV and stills from Al-Ghadir tie the same hospital to witness accounts of execution-style shots on the wounded. Sattari Hospital in Qarchak published a corridor image described as a coup de grâce after the wounded were brought in on 19 Dey.

The same pattern runs through morgues and transfer points, not only through the street. A body photographed with medical lines still attached is captioned as proof the patient was moved to the morgue while still under treatment. The family of Mehdi Ranjbari said his body was delivered with electrodes and an angiocath still in place. Staff at Gharazi Hospital reported hearing cries from inside body bags. Arash Aghaaali was described in memorial copy as found half-alive among bags. Film shows covered bodies laid out when morgues had no room left, Kahrizak bags on the pavement after 8 and 9 January, and bagged bodies with blood visible while people search. That is the machinery behind the Kahrizak monitors and serial numbers in the next section.

HRANA's Farsi Zemestan-e Sorkh mapped 682 protest sites in 203 cities in the first fifty days (7 Dey to 26 Bahman 1404), all 31 provinces. Tehran province accounts for 1,588 of the named dead in that verified list. The next heaviest provinces in that file are Isfahan, Razavi Khorasan, Gilan, Kermanshah, Alborz, Fars, Ilam, Lorestan, and Khuzestan.¹¹

20 and 21 Dey: they came out knowing

The two-day massacre did not empty the street. Saturday 20 Dey and Sunday 21 Dey, people went out again. They had seen the live fire and the blackout. They knew what the night cost. They went anyway.

A Punak tape in this archive is captioned for that reason. The date matters: twentieth of Dey, Punak, Tehran. After two days of killing, the crowd had taken the streets again. The date on the tape matters. They knew what was coming, and that is why the night is large. Phone lights in the same neighborhood. Victory signs held up to a reconnaissance drone. Another camera of the same Saturday, the street taken after the massacre.³⁶

It was not only Punak. Jannatabad on 35-metri Golestan. Ekbatan marching. A Tehran night crowd still chanting for the monarchy over a fire. Mashhad sent as a war night. Ahvaz still a night march. Isfahan still with fire in the street. In Tehranpars, Police Station 126 was still firing from the roof.

On 21 Dey the dead were already being collected, and the slogans had moved with the families. At Behesht Zahra mourners held photographs and shouted against Khamenei. Another cemetery tape chants marg bar Khamenei and I will kill the one who killed my brother. Justice minister Amin-Hossein Rahimi told reporters that anyone on the street from 8 to 11 January was a criminal. That sentence only makes sense if Saturday and Sunday were still occupied.

How many people were killed

No complete public list exists. Regime statements sit at the bottom. Named Iranian tallies sit higher. Leaked security figures sit higher still.

The Pezeshkian government published a list of 2,986 names without cause or place of death. Iran International compared that list with family submissions and found fewer than 100 matches. Treating the official list as the toll is how the massacre is made small.³⁷

Families did not meet that list first. They met a hall. At Kahrizak, Tehran's forensic centre, Vahid's tapes of the 18 Dey dead, carried out after the blackout, show a monitor paging identification photographs. Under each face the screen reads photo number n of 250, dated 9 January. That is not a printed album of twenty pictures a sheet. It is a catalog of two hundred and fifty faces on one screen, in one building, that relatives had to sit through until they recognized their own. The same kind of monitor appears later in this archive at Behesht-e Sakineh in Karaj. Women and infants are on those screens, including the Hosseinpour twins. Staff told people to find the body themselves among bags brought in by pickup.

A field report in Etemad from the gate on 22 Dey described the same procedure. First-degree relatives stood in front of a giant monitor while the faces of the killed passed one by one. A mother spent three hours on those images before she found her thirty-year-old son. Until the monitors were running, families opened cover after cover on the floor. After a match, staff wrote a five-digit body code on the palm or the wrist, to be shown at Behesht Zahra. That paper's politics are its own. The identification method is on the record.³⁸

Witnesses on X said that by Friday evening at Kahrizak they had seen numbers up to 55,000 written on the bodies. That is street testimony from one facility, not a census. What this archive can show on the bags themselves are forensic codes in the eleven-thousands: Amir Mohammad Shahkarami, fourteen, called in two months later as "bag number 11754"; Yaser Eskandarzadeh filed as code 11821. Factnameh, reading IRIB's own explanation of the annual serial and the highest codes visible on 20 Dey film (12554 minus a pre-crackdown baseline of 11607), put about 950 new files through Kahrizak by that night. Even that conservative reading is Tehran forensic, not the country. County transfers were said to run on a different series. Mashhad, Kermanshah, and the Ashayer hospital morgue in Khorramabad had their own halls, already full. If 55,000 was a misread serial, the serial still describes one morgue. If it was not, it is still one morgue. Witnesses on X reported high serials at Kahrizak.³⁹ Factnameh read the forensic codes on film.⁴⁰

A father on the Kahrizak pavement, in film Iran International later named as Sepehr Shokri's father, walked the bags calling his son's name. Families at the gate on 19 Dey kicked away the state's bottled water. From above, a refrigerated truck is heard bringing more bodies in.⁴¹

HRANA's verified fifty-day file names 7,007 dead: 6,488 protesters, 236 children counted separately, 76 other civilians, and 207 members of military or government forces. It had 53,777 arrests. Another 11,744 death files were still under review. Those 7,007 are a named minimum, not a ceiling.¹¹

Iran International, after a public call, received files on 6,634 javidnaman from families and citizen reporters.³⁷ In a 5 Bahman editorial it cited two IRGC Intelligence reports to the Supreme National Security Council that put the dead above 33,000, then above 36,500.¹² That is a leaked internal figure, not a finished census. It is also the order of magnitude BBC Persian's 22 named dead⁴², Yle's first-week six⁴³, and Yle's later state-TV 3,117⁴⁴ do not reach.

No global body ranks every protest massacre in modern history. The answer depends on which number one uses and what one counts as the same kind of event. Inside Iran since 1979, Iran International's comparison file already places January above every prior Islamic Republic crackdown it lists: Green Movement totals in the 70–112 range; Aban 1398 (Bloody Aban) with at least 324 victims identified by name and outside estimates up to 1,500 over about a week; Woman Life Freedom at 540–600 over months.⁴⁵ IHRNGO's January report, with 4,219 verified dead and about 91 percent of dated killings on 8 and 9 January alone, calls the rising one of the most extensive massacres of protesters in Iran's contemporary history.⁴⁶ HRANA's 7,007 named minimum in fifty days is already far above those earlier waves.¹¹ Even accepting only the state's 3,117 across the peak nights implies about 1,559 deaths per day in Iran International's arithmetic, a daily rate it compares above its cited deadliest-day figure for the Gaza war window and above the civilian daily toll in the Iran–Iraq missile campaign.⁴⁵

For street protest suppression specifically, the usual English-language yardstick is Cairo's Rab'a dispersal on 14 August 2013: Human Rights Watch documented at least 817 protesters killed in about twelve hours at one sit-in (likely more than 1,000 at Rab'a alone, 904 including al-Nahda the same day). HRW's executive director called that one of the world's largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.⁴⁷ January in Iran was not one square. It was hundreds of cities over two nights under a national communications cut. On verified named dead alone, IHRNGO's more than 3,300 killed on 8 and 9 January already exceeds Rab'a's documented single-day protest toll.⁴⁶⁴⁷

Iran International's editorial board, reading leaked IRGC Intelligence reports rather than a verified census, called January the largest massacre of civilians during street protests over a two-day period in history.¹² Its later context piece stacks 36,500 in 48 hours against multi-week state-violence episodes such as Hama 1982 (10,000–40,000 over 27 days of siege and air power) or the 1991 Iraqi Sha'baniyah suppression (30,000–100,000 over roughly three weeks with armor and helicopters), which are not the same category as a nationwide unarmed protest wave.⁴⁵ TIME reported two senior Health Ministry officials saying as many as 30,000 could have been killed on 8 and 9 January alone, with body-bag stocks exhausted and semi-trailers moving the dead.⁴⁸ Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of IHRNGO told AFP the killing was an unprecedented mass killing at a scale that we haven't seen before, while stressing that published NGO totals lag what witnesses report.⁴⁹ Until more names are verified, the safe public sentence is: January is already the largest protest massacre in the Islamic Republic's record and, on IHRNGO's two-day verified count alone, larger than the best-documented single-day protest killing in Egypt in 2013; the 30,000–36,500 band, if confirmed, would stand in a different class entirely.

President Trump's public counts moved, and they sat far above that BBC and Yle copy. On 13 January, at a Michigan plant, he would not name a total. "Nobody has been able to give me an accurate number," he said.⁵⁰ He had heard figures "much lower" and "much higher." He did not, on that day, say 9,000 or 11,000 or 20,000. That same week CBS, from two sources including one inside Iran, put the dead at least at 12,000 and possibly 20,000.³² Those are CBS's sources, not his words. They are what a US network was already printing while BBC Persian still sat on 22 named dead⁴² and Yle on six.⁴³

On 20 February (1 Esfand), at the White House, he did name a number: 32,000 killed "in a short time." Iran International recorded that as the first time a head of state had spoken of more than 30,000 dead from 18 and 19 Dey.⁵¹ Radio Farda printed the same briefing.⁵² That figure sits in the same band as the leaked IRGC Intelligence reports of 33,000 then 36,500.¹² On 14 April he posted on Truth Social that Iran had killed "at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters."⁵³ Iran International recorded the 42,000 claim again on 16 June.⁵⁴ On 21 July, after an execution, he wrote "the latest one of 52,000, plus."⁵⁵ Two days later in Georgia he said the Islamic Republic had killed more than 52,000 protesters in the streets four months earlier.⁵⁶ In a TIME interview published 1 October he said they had killed 75,000, "anywhere from 72 to 75,000," "documented," and that they had gone on Fox and said 3,000.⁵⁷ That 3,000 is the state-television 3,117 Yle later led with.⁴⁴ Attribute each of his figures as his claim. They are not a census. Each figure stands alone.

Media coverage

The slogans in this archive are marg bar Khamenei, Javid Shah ("long live the Shah"), and King Reza Pahlavi, with older lines such as Reza Shah, ruhat shad ("Reza Shah, may your soul be blessed") and Ta akhund kafan nashavad, in vatan vatan nashavad ("until the mullah is shrouded, this homeland will not be a homeland"). People came out because the Crown Prince asked them to. That is the political fact of 18 and 19 Dey. Western public broadcasters, prestige newspapers, and the legacy wires did not report it as the fact. They kept the bazaar in the lede, kept the dead in the dozens or at the regime's round thousands, and filed a patriotic Pahlavi restoration under "unclear," "desperation," or "the past." In that copy the Islamic Republic remained the only serious government and reformist prisoners the only serious opposition. The hypocrisy is the bind: these desks sell themselves as tribunes of democratic choice and human rights, then treat millions chanting for regime change and a return to Iran's pre-1979 state flag as a side story, an economic riot, or a forbidden outcome. The practical effect is to normalize the post-1979 order and to treat what the street asked for as the one demand respectable copy cannot name.

On 1 January, five days into the bazaar strike, the Guardian ran "Two people confirmed dead" against an "economic crisis." Reuters, after the massacre, still wrote that the protests had "erupted on December 28 over economic hardship" and then "swelled." BBC English, on the night of the 8 p.m. call, still wrote that the unrest had been "sparked by anger over the collapse of the Iranian currency." In the same piece it put HRANA's then-count of 34 protester deaths and said BBC Persian had confirmed 22 named dead. BBC Persian's Farsi file around 16 Dey had HRANA at about 35. Those were early named lists, before the blackout. They were later left standing as if the killing had stayed that small. The Guardian ran two dead on 1 January.⁵⁸ Reuters kept the economic spark after the massacre.⁵⁹ BBC English and BBC Persian kept the early named lists.⁴²⁶⁰

France 24 opened the year on "cost-of-living" clashes and shopkeepers striking over prices, with the Grand Bazaar as origin.⁶¹ On 16 January its AFP desk wrote that protests had started with a bazaar shutdown on 28 December, then turned into a mass movement against the clerical system, and that people had poured into big cities from 8 January under an internet blackout. It did not name the Crown Prince's 8 p.m. call as the reason those nights filled.⁶² Le Monde, in English opinion on 11 January, still counted about 50 dead and traced the spark to economic collapse and the bazaar, then repeated the stock line about a lack of organization and recognizable leaders.⁶³ Its 16 January news file kept the 28 December merchants' strike as the opening and HRANA at 2,677 killed, measured against Woman, Life, Freedom.⁶⁴

Germany's ARD Tagesschau, on the morning after the first 8 p.m. night, said the protests had been "entzündet" by anger over living costs for twelve days since 28 December, with no Crown Prince call in the lede.⁶⁵ On 16 January it interviewed Islamwissenschaftlerin Katajun Amirpur, who treated the rising as subsided and the death toll as swinging between 3,000 and 12,000, while insisting the problems that brought people out were "not only" an economic crisis but the whole system.⁶⁶ Deutsche Welle, on 24 January, still opened a casualties piece with economic crisis and 3,117.⁶⁷ Der Spiegel did record protest calls from Reza Pahlavi on 8 January and IHR's 45 dead, but the same week's profile of the Shah's son still opened on 1979: the Shah "so verhasst" that millions had forced abdication.⁶⁸⁶⁹ Deutschlandfunk quoted experts that media attention was pushing Pahlavi into a lead role while Iranians might want "not the regime" without necessarily wanting him.⁷⁰

Spain's El País, on 23 January, reported HRANA at 5,002 dead and the regime's 3,117, but framed the rising as the latest in a recurring two- or three-year cycle of economic anger since 2017.⁷¹ On 29 January it again opened on regime survival, sanctions, and protests that had "started on 28 December," with HRANA at 6,221 beside the official 3,117, not on Javid Shah as the demand.⁷² The same habits showed on public television from Stockholm to London: SVT, through 8 and 9 January, kept the bazaar and the rial as the story, cited HRANA's 29 dead, and had its correspondent call the crowds "regime-critical, as usual for protests in Iran," with Mahsa Amini still the reference point.⁷³⁷⁴ Yle, in the first week, treated the protests as economic collapse, cited BBC for six dead, and measured the week against 2022; after the killing, a brief led with state television's 3,117.⁴³⁴⁴

Iran International's leaked SNSC figures sat above 36,500.¹² From 20 February, President Trump named 32,000, then 42,000, then more than 52,000, and later 72,000 to 75,000. He also said the regime had told Fox 3,000. The gap is what legacy copy would not carry: BBC English's 22 named dead⁴², the Guardian's two dead on New Year's Day⁵⁸, Le Monde's early 50⁶³, SVT's 29⁷³, state-TV 3,117 ledes⁴⁴⁶⁷, and the bazaar-first habit, set next to Iran International's leaked 36,500¹² and Trump's later 32,000⁵¹, 42,000⁵³, 52,000⁵⁶, and 75,000⁵⁷ counts.

The second move was to put the Crown Prince on trial for being heard. BBC, having filmed crowds calling for the monarchy, added that "other Iranians" saw that support as "a sign of desperation" and "a lack of alternatives." Deutsche Welle asked why Iran had "no political alternative" to Khamenei, named Narges Mohammadi as the imprisoned opposition, and wrote that the extent of Pahlavi's support "remains unclear."⁷⁵ Deutsche Welle named Mohammadi as opposition.⁷⁶

The New Yorker, on 22 March, titled him a "would-be king" with a "distant promise." Azadeh Moaveni's piece kept the rial as the trigger, granted that crowds in more than a hundred and fifty cities had called for his return, then moved the camera to a strike on a girls' school in Minab and wrote that he had "so far not commented" on those deaths. He was not silenced. Four days after 18 and 19 Dey he told CBS that the way to have fewer people killed was to "intervene sooner." On 17 January, at a press conference, he asked governments to degrade the IRGC's command and infrastructure, and said that did not mean foreign boots on Iranian ground. The Iranian people's boots, he said, were already on the ground. On 27 February he told the ABC that such a strike could be "a humanitarian intervention to protect more lives in Iran that otherwise might be lost." When the US-Israeli campaign opened on 28 February he posted, on X as @PahlaviReza and on his own site, that the promised aid had arrived: a humanitarian intervention aimed at the Islamic Republic, its repressive apparatus, and its machinery of slaughter, not at the country and nation of Iran. The Farsi text is the same: مداخله‌ای بشردوستانه. He asked President Trump to use the utmost caution to preserve civilian lives. On 22 March, the day the New Yorker appeared, he asked Trump and Netanyahu to keep targeting the regime's machinery of repression and to spare civilian and critical infrastructure. The magazine quoted him calling the war a "humanitarian rescue mission" in the same paragraph in which it accused him of silence. His printed words are "humanitarian intervention." The New Yorker profile is dated 22 March.⁷⁷ CBS recorded "intervene sooner" on 23 January.⁷⁸ His 17 January press conference is on his site.⁷⁹ ABC aired the 27 February interview.⁸⁰ His 28 February humanitarian message is in English⁸¹ and Farsi.⁸² His 22 March infrastructure statement is on record.⁸³

The paradox is the assignment of crime. The New Yorker wanted a Minab caption that would make the war the atrocity. His record after January is the opposite. For years he had said Iranians did not need foreign intervention. After the two-day massacre he said unarmed chanting could not be asked of people facing that regime again. Iran International later carried his Reuters interview: the campaign that followed the massacre was "perhaps a necessary step to avoid further bloodshed." A missing Minab label is not muteness. It is a refusal to let one wartime incident overwrite 18 Dey, or to treat help against the killers as a crime against Iran. Minab is not the nationwide march. Using it that way is how the killing is made a side scene. Iran International carried his Reuters line on necessity.⁸⁴ The New Yorker Minab frame is cited above.⁷⁷

Yle's expert on 14 January was Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group in Washington. In that interview he said Reza Pahlavi was still a contested figure, that it was unclear how popular he was inside Iran, and that he was "not yet" a leader who united the opposition. He also said a change of leadership would more likely stay inside the present elite, possibly with the Revolutionary Guard replacing Ali Khamenei, which would mean a continuation of the same repressive machine. He told Yle that Iranians seemed united on what they did not want, and not on what they wanted instead. The 18 Dey tapes in this archive are the answer to that sentence. They name what the street wanted. Yle's guest was the man who called that demand unclear.⁸⁵

Iran International, with Semafor, had already published the Washington record that January interview blocks did not put on air. Crisis Group analysts, including Vaez, sat in Tehran's Iran Experts Initiative. Javad Zarif, in his 2021 memoir, treated Crisis Group as a channel through which the Islamic Republic could publicize and lobby its nuclear draft in Western capitals. In an email to Zarif on 2 October 2014, Vaez wrote that he had helped the Iranian government's "public campaign against the notion of the breakout," as a "national and patriotic duty." Crisis Group denies that it lobbies for any foreign government, and Vaez has called the grouping informal. The dispute is on the record. So is the choice of guest: a public broadcaster covering a rising for Pahlavi interviewed a Washington specialist whose published work had been to keep the Islamic Republic at the table.⁸⁶

The bind for these newsrooms is older than January. They present themselves as tribunes of democracy. They cannot, without rewriting their own file, affirm a majority chanting Javid Shah and King Reza Pahlavi. In that file, from the Cold War through 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is still the oppressor: the allied autocrat Europe marched against, not the patriotic modernizer whose state expanded industry, schooling, and rights. To report 18 Dey as a national political choice would mean reversing that inheritance. The workaround is procedural. Keep the chants in quotation marks. Call support unclear. Interview the expert who says the crowd has not agreed on a replacement. Offer Mohammadi and Tajzadeh as the opposition that fits the file.

Western libraries still carry that vocabulary alongside January copy. Yle's 1970 archive of a Shah state visit records European protesters treating him as a dictator serving Western interests and as "Persia's oppressor." In March 2026, after the January killing, Yle Areena listed a history program that called the deposed Shah a man "regarded as a cruel dictator," allied with the United States, against whom Europeans had demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s. Svenska Yle, in March, quoted Rouzbeh Parsi that Pahlavi nationalism had "directly fascistic traits" even while it "resonated with the man in the street." That is not a finding from 18 Dey. It is the Cold War stock character, still in the rundown, making a street majority unreportable as a democratic fact. Yle's 1970 archive⁸⁷, its 2026 Areena listing⁸⁸, and Svenska Yle's Parsi quote⁸⁹ carry that vocabulary.

The Guardian, on 17 January, after the two-day killing, asked "What now for Iran's opposition?" It lingered on Pezeshkian's broken promise to listen, then opened an inquest on Pahlavi. It quoted Mehrdad Khamenei that the opposition, "unable to produce liberation," had "taken refuge in the reproduction of the past." It quoted Rouzbeh Parsi of Lund University that monarchist chants were "a sign of desperation" because people under the Islamic Republic had not coalesced around a figure inside the country. The figure they had coalesced around, in this archive's street film, is the one that piece then put in the dock. Arash Azizi, a supporter of an Iranian republic, told the Guardian he hoped that after Pahlavi's "failures" the "moral authority" of Narges Mohammadi and Mostafa Tajzadeh in prison would grow. BBC English had already used a 12 Dey statement signed for Mohammadi (Bonyad Narges), Tajzadeh, and fifteen others, calling for a "peaceful transition," as the opposition voice on the night of the Crown Prince's call. Nasrin Sotoudeh, on BBC Persian on 10 Dey, asked why wounded opposition currents should stand against each other. Those lines are on the record. They are not Javid Shah. The Guardian opposition piece⁹⁰, the 17 activists' statement⁹¹, Sotoudeh on BBC Persian⁹², and BBC English on the night of the call⁴² name a different opposition file.

BBC and the Guardian publish in a country that keeps its own monarchy as heritage. They treated Iranian crowds calling for a Pahlavi restoration as nostalgia, a paradox, or a lack of imagination. The same pages that lecture on a people's right to choose treated this people's choice as the one outcome that must not stand: a legitimate, patriotic monarchy in place of the Islamic Republic. The copy that followed 18 Dey did not have to invent a new line. It only had to keep the bazaar, keep the low death count, keep Minab, keep Mohammadi in the chair, and keep Pahlavi in the dictator file.

Post-protest aftermath and national shock

Inside Iran the killing did not stop when the chants went quiet. HRANA's fifty-day file already put the street dead at a 7,007 named minimum, with 11,744 files still under review.¹¹ Iran International's editorial on leaked IRGC Intelligence reports to the Supreme National Security Council called the January days the largest street massacre in the country's history.¹² Whether the final census lands near the regime's 3,117, HRANA's verified thousands, or the tens of thousands in family files and leaked council papers, the scale is a state shooting its unarmed citizens in the open street. That fact does not rise or fall on whether the crowd shouted Javid Shah or something else.

The diaspora went into shock for a second reason: the cold gap between that reality and the Western public story. Iranians abroad had marched in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities while the blackout hid the bodies. They watched legacy desks keep the bazaar lede, keep reformist names in the opposition chair, and treat the Islamic Republic as the only governable Iran. Many felt an ethical selectivity: human-rights language when it fit domestic politics, silence or hostility when Iranians asked for the end of the clerical order. When the White House threatened the killers, a large slice of European and left-leaning copy foregrounded Donald Trump, the regime's "foreign incitement" talking points, or peace slogans against US intervention, instead of the corpses and the families. Reuters recorded Masoud Pezeshkian blaming Trump, Netanyahu, and Europe for having "provoked" the rising.⁹³

Diaspora protesters said the same about the broadcasters, and about which exile marches legacy desks chose to see. The Jerusalem Post's 3 January London report⁹⁴ sat in the same week as a Downing Street rally on 7 January that Iran Freedom, the NCRI's English site, billed as PMOI/MEK supporters chanting "death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader," the stock line NCRI uses to reject both Khamenei and a Pahlavi restoration.⁹⁵⁹⁶ The People's Mojahedin (Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK) is the Islamist-Marxist group that helped bring Khomeini to power in 1979, waged war on the young republic, and later ran a militarized, cult-like exile; Iranians widely despise it, and Reza Pahlavi has said the MEK does not meet his democratic principles and is not in his coalition.⁹⁷ Reuters still framed January exile politics as a schism between monarchists and the "more organised" MEK.⁹⁸ Wires and NGO copy often treat MEK rallies as the default "Iranian opposition" photo, while Lion-and-Sun marches that matched the street in Tehran were left to local papers and diaspora video. On 3 January hundreds also rallied at Downing Street and the embassy with Javid Shah, the imperial standard, and calls for BBC accountability; Roger Macmillan wrote that protesters made their anger at the BBC explicit.⁹⁴ All Israel News recorded MEK-linked activists harassing those same Lion-and-Sun and Israeli-flag marchers, spitting, throwing bottles, and demanding the flags come down.⁹⁹ Expat BBC Persian staff later told the Jewish Chronicle that a funeral-access deal with Tehran advanced regime propaganda while Iranians inside the country still could not receive BBC Persian.¹⁰⁰

Yle showed the same selectivity in Helsinki, and a visible appetite for exile stories that fit separatist or Marxist opposition templates while what Iranian citizens were actually demanding in January, a country they could live in without this slaughter, freedom from the Supreme Leader's order, and a future they would choose at the ballot box rather than accept from the IRGC, could pass with little or no domestic play. On 17 January it filed a full domestic report on a No War On Iran gathering at the Three Smiths statue that its own text described as kymmeniä, a few dozen people, with drums, dance, and speeches against outside military intervention and no Lion-and-Sun or imperial standard in the photographs it published.¹⁰¹ Diaspora video from the square that weekend carried the same MEK death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader line its copy never named. The piece was long and updated again on 20 January, while repeated embassy demonstrations the same month brought crowds an order of magnitude larger, often about 100 or more, with Lion-and-Sun flags and portraits of Reza Pahlavi; Yle covered the 13 January embassy rally through Trump, auta and possible American intervention, not why citizens had filled the streets after the 8 p.m. call or the scale of the massacre.¹⁰² When 250 people filled Narinkkator on 25 January, Yle led with Kurdish suffering in Iran and Syria rather than the nationwide citizen rising for that same freedom that Iranian witnesses and diaspora marches said had brought millions into the open in Tehran.¹⁰³ Finnish Iranian activists say weekly Helsinki marches that repeat what people shouted inside Iran, regime change, not reform, and the end of clerical rule, many far larger than the Three Smiths circle, earn at most a short notice. In spring 2026 Iranians gathered outside Yle's headquarters to protest distorted reporting; diaspora posts called the building "Ayatollah Yle." The regime's frame, the anti-Trump frame, and the MEK's anti-Shah line could all run without centering what Iranians filmed on 18 Dey: unarmed citizens asking for their country back.

Berlin showed the boycott in scale. On 17 January police counted about 1,400 people on Kurfürstendamm with Lion-and-Sun flags, portraits of the Crown Prince, and chants for Pahlavi; the Association of Iranian Refugees in Berlin reported four exile demos that day and described the Pahlavi march as the largest, distinct from MEK and other blocs.¹⁰⁴ Photographers on the march described thousands in the column with the pre-1979 flag beside Israeli and US flags. That gathering did not become the BBC or ARD picture of Iran abroad. The Guardian gave prominent play to a London embassy stunt replacing the regime flag with the Lion-and-Sun standard¹⁰⁵ but not to Berlin's mass. This archive holds a protester blinded in one eye in Iran, confronting regime supporters in Berlin with the Lion-and-Sun flag. Diaspora shock was not only undercounting the dead. It was watching human-rights slogans attach to one exile faction while the flag on Kudamm matched the flag on 18 Dey.

The Crown Prince's own printed position did not match the "power-hungry shah" file. On 24 January he told Germany's ARD that he rejected holding or seeking office, that the outcome of any transition must be decided at the ballot box, and that he presented himself as a facilitator of a managed change, not a claimant to power.¹⁰⁶ On 27 January he addressed the families of the national uprising's martyrs directly.¹⁰⁷ In his 17 January press conference, recorded on his site, he asked foreign governments to degrade IRGC command, not to occupy Iran.⁷⁹ ABC's February interview quoted him saying the end of his political mission would be the day Iranians vote in a final referendum on their future system, after which a transitional authority would hand power to an elected parliament and government.⁸⁰ Western copy still treated him as nostalgia while the street tapes named him as the transition figure people trusted.

The Germany trip showed the gap in person. On 23 April he spoke at the Federal Press Conference in Berlin beside families whose sons and daughters were killed on 18 and 19 Dey, and met diaspora activists in the city.¹⁰⁸ When journalists asked whether Europe would stand with Iranians, he told the room the choice was theirs, then said: "The choice is yours. With or without the world, with or without Europe, with or without Germany, our fight goes on." He added: "We will not rest until our nation is free, until our people have their dignity restored, until justice is served."¹⁰⁹ He told JNS that more than 150 European reporters attended briefings in Stockholm and Berlin, yet not one asked about 40,000 slaughtered on the streets, about 19 political prisoners hanged in the previous two weeks, or about 20 more under death sentences. When he stood next to a mother and a father who lost sons on 8 and 9 January and invited journalists to hear them, he said, no one in the room asked those parents a question.¹¹⁰ ARD's Tagesthemen interview on 23 January did carry his line that he was not running for office and wanted to be an "agent of change," but it still opened the Shah's son through 1979 abdication, not through the January dead.¹¹¹ Diaspora shock was not imaginary. It was the experience of watching human-rights institutions speak in generalities while named Iranians were ignored.

The executions continue, with almost no Western airtime. Iran Human Rights counted at least 33 protesters hanged since 18 March, 31 of them tied to the January rising, and warned that more than 100 protesters were at risk of the same fate.¹¹² Human Rights Watch, between March and August, documented an accelerating campaign of politically motivated hangings after grossly unfair trials, including teenagers.¹¹³ In the first eight months of 2026 alone IHRNGO verified 532 executions nationwide, 27 of them on security charges that included protest cases.¹¹⁴ The Prisoners' Rights League's Breathing in Confinement map, updated through 4 October 2026, documented more than 1,000 hangings in the calendar year, a wave distinct from but fed by the post-massacre terror.¹¹⁵ This catalog holds the faces legacy desks skipped: Ali Hemmati and Majid Nikandish, January detainees executed in Mashhad, wrestler Saleh Mohammadi, forced confession then hangman, Siavash Jamshidi after fabricated charges. The regime announces some killings itself. Most pass in silence. The slogans on the mastheads still say democracy and human rights.

This archive

January 2026 Massacre, Iran Massacre 2026, and Lion and Sun Revolution labels in this catalog name one rising. They stay on this note.