Iran After the Protests: Enforced Silence, Rising Death Tolls, and a Deepening Political Reckoning
After weeks of nationwide unrest, street mobilization across Iran appears to have been contained—at least for now—through an exceptionally heavy, unprecedented, and indiscriminate security crackdown.
After weeks of nationwide unrest, street mobilization across Iran appears to have been contained—at least for now—through an exceptionally heavy, unprecedented, and increasingly indiscriminate security crackdown. The visible calm in many major cities should not be mistaken for political resolution. Rather, it reflects the state’s regained control of public space through lethal force, mass arrests, prolonged internet shutdowns, and the systematic intimidation of families, journalists, and civic actors.
Independent monitoring continues to point to an enormous and rising human toll. According to the latest cumulative data compiled by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), at least 4,029 deaths have been confirmed to date, with an additional 9,049 reported death cases still under review. HRANA breaks this total down into 3,786 protesters, 28 children, 180 government-affiliated forces (military and non-military) and 35 non-protesters and civilians. HRANA has also documented 26,015 arrests nationwide, alongside at least 5,811 individuals who have sustained severe injuries, including cases of permanent eye damage caused by direct targeting. These figures have emerged under conditions of prolonged and near-total information blackout, suggesting that the true scale of fatalities, injuries, and detentions may only become fully clear once communication channels are restored and independent verification becomes possible.
Politically, the authorities have paired a discourse of “leniency” for so-called “misled” participants with explicit threats of swift and exemplary punishment for those labeled “rioters,” “terrorists,” or “ringleaders.” This dual messaging has widened the scope for criminalization while accelerating judicial proceedings.
At the same time, there are signs that the state is moving beyond temporary disruption toward a more durable, tightly filtered internet environment, restoring limited functionality while restricting access to global platforms and independent information.
Within the protest movement itself, a more complex and fragile phase is now unfolding. For many participants, signals from U.S. President Donald Trump and former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi were understood not merely as moral support, but as an indication that meaningful U.S. pressure—or even military action—would restrain the Iranian security apparatus from using maximum force.
As the crackdown unfolded with exceptional brutality and no concrete external plan materialized, a sense of abandonment and strategic miscalculation has begun to take hold. While some activists continue to track reports of U.S. naval movements and military signaling around Iran, disillusionment is growing among those who now question why mass mobilization was encouraged without any clear, realistic framework to protect protesters from foreseeable repression. Political action driven by expectations of foreign rescue that fails to materialize often does not produce renewed resistance but deep demoralization, withdrawal, and long-term political disengagement.
This atmosphere has been further complicated by reports and images of violence attributed to some protesters, including acts circulated by opposition-adjacent platforms themselves. Even where such reports are fragmentary or unverified, their political impact is evident: they reinforce the state’s security narrative, help justify harsher repression, and facilitate the mobilization of security forces and conservative constituencies behind maximal force. In this sense, protest-side violence—regardless of scale—has become strategically consequential.
Amid this convergence of state brutality, protest-side violence, and external militarization, a public statement signed by fourteen prominent Iranian intellectual, religious, and political figures—including Abdolkarim Soroush, Hamid Dabashi, Mohsen Kadivar, Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, Yaser Mirdamadi, and Alireza Rajaei—offers a rare, comprehensive intervention from within Iran’s broader civil and moral landscape. The statement begins from a clear ethical premise: the sanctity of human life is absolute. It argues that even a single unjust killing constitutes a moral, legal, and religious catastrophe, and that the recurring pattern of protests ending in bloodshed is evidence of a deep structural crisis and chronic inability to manage social conflict without violence. The authors insist that the state bears full responsibility—by reason, law, and religious duty—to protect lives and ensure the safety of protesters.
While acknowledging reports of foreign interference or provocations, the signatories stress that such claims in no way diminish the responsibility of Iran’s senior political, intelligence, and security leadership. On the contrary, they argue that the repeated failure of security institutions—despite years of expanded powers and curtailed freedoms—demonstrates that the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security has produced neither safety nor stability. Suppressing freedoms, they contend, has itself become one of the country’s most serious security liabilities.
The statement sharply criticizes the redirection of security institutions toward policing lifestyles, silencing critics, and marginalizing civil society, warning that sidelining independent experts and mediating institutions has left society voiceless and combustible. It calls for an independent, neutral fact-finding mechanism to publicly document the number of those killed and the circumstances of each death, arguing that only transparency and accountability can begin to address the profound collapse of public trust.
At the same time, the signatories advance a parallel and equally forceful argument against violence and war. They categorically condemn all forms of foreign military intervention, warning that neither Israel nor the United States can plausibly claim to act in the interests of the Iranian people. External powers, they argue, pursue their own strategic agendas, whereas Iran’s future must be determined by Iranians. Appeals to foreign force are described as either dangerously naïve or politically opportunistic, and likely to expose the country to irreparable harm.
Crucially, the statement also rejects violence by protesters themselves. While state violence is unequivocally condemned, the authors warn that retaliatory or confrontational violence undermines democratic legitimacy and directly feeds the machinery of repression, providing authorities with justification to escalate force and securitize the entire movement. Sustained reliance on violent tactics, they caution, risks inflicting long-term damage on the prospects of future democratic change in Iran.
This position closely echoes the views of artist and activist Parastou Forouhar, who has likewise warned that violence—whether initiated by the state or by protesters—leads not to liberation but to the normalization and expansion of coercive power. In her assessment, violent acts attributed to protesters not only cause immediate harm but also strengthen the state’s hand, allowing it to consolidate security forces and reframe civic protest as a security war.
Meanwhile, the government has intensified control over domestic media and public discourse. The suspension of the reformist-leaning newspaper Ham-Mihan has become emblematic of this trend. Critics of the move, including its managing director Gholamhussein Karbaschi, have argued that the closure contradicts promises of moderation and has imposed heavy social and economic costs, including job losses, while further narrowing the already constrained space for lawful dissent.
Ham-Mihan journalist Elaheh Mohammadi, who was imprisoned in retaliation for her reporting on the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, posted on X regarding the suspension of her newspaper and the mood in Tehran after the crackdown. Mohammadi wrote, “It’s been a day or two, our filter breakers work for half an hour to an hour a day and we connect to the internet. We announce that we are alive. The city smells of death, I’ve never seen it snow in Tehran in my entire life and no one even smiles. The newspaper Ham-Mihan was shut down after three and a half years of publication. We tried to write about the dead and injured all the days before. From Malekshahi, from Behesht Zahra, Kahrizak and the eyes waiting for the bodies of loved ones, from the hospitals, nurses and doctors who saw the disaster with their own eyes, shed tears and did everything they could. Difficult days have passed and everyone is shocked; The country is mourning, the country is angry, the country is heartbroken.”
International consequences are also multiplying. Diplomatic distancing, the withdrawal of invitations from major global forums, aviation risk warnings, and flight suspensions all signal how internal repression and the specter of military escalation are converging into a broader environment of isolation and instability.
Taken together, these developments point to a stark conclusion: Iran’s protest movement has been pushed into an enforced quiet, not by consent but by overwhelming coercion. The human cost continues to rise, even as verification grows harder. Expectations of foreign protection—especially among those mobilized by pro-Pahlavi currents and emboldened by Trump signals—are colliding with the reality of strategic ambiguity, producing grief, anger, and disillusionment. And a growing current within Iran’s civic and intellectual sphere is now articulating a dual warning: that state repression, protest-side violence, and foreign military intervention all risk reinforcing one another, driving the country toward deeper cycles of trauma, radicalization, and authoritarian entrenchment rather than a credible, internal, and nonviolent political future.