Bodies are piling up on bodies. And those who have survived are searching for signs of their loved ones through mountains of corpses. This is no longer a metaphor. This is not a story. This is not a film. This is a reality ridden with bullets day after day.
On December 28, the Iranian people launched a powerful uprising against their hated rulers—the theocratic fascists of the Islamic Republic (IRI). It quickly spread across the country to some 180 towns in all 31 of Iran’s provinces, involving many tens of thousands of Iranians, perhaps millions.
To crush this tsunami of mass protests, the IRI unleashed a campaign of mass murder, arrests and terror across the country. Rivers of blood flow through the streets of Iran, in every city and region.
Beginning around January 8, when the protests leaped in size and scope, the regime’s repressive forces began firing directly into the crowds with live ammunition, sometimes at close range. Rooftop snipers assassinated overwhelmingly unarmed demonstrators. Machine guns were used against protesters according to some reports. Security forces were seen “finishing off” wounded protesters—sometimes even in hospitals.
As the Islamic fundamentalist rulers unleashed this bloodbath, they also imposed a near-total cutoff of internet and cellphone access to prevent the protests from spreading further and to prevent the world from witnessing their towering crimes.
Yet glimpses of the carnage and stories of the regime’s depravity leaked out of Iran nonetheless.
The numbers of those killed are uncertain. Some say that at least 3,400 protesters have been slaughtered by the regime, with thousands wounded. The Sunday Times of London wrote this weekend that they had received a report from doctors in Iran documenting the murder of 16,500 protesters who have died and 330,000 who have been injured. The fascist theocrat-in-chief, Khamenei himself, has admitted to the murder of "several thousands" of protesters. At least 10,000 protesters, and maybe double the number, have been arrested and jailed, some 800 threatened with execution. It's likely that most of those killed are under 30.
Bodies lie in body bags on the ground outside Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre in Tehran, Iran, January 11, 2026. Photo: Middle East Online
The Islamic Republic’s depraved killing and terrorizing spree extended into hospitals, family homes, even funerals for those it murdered. One doctor reported that his hospital was overwhelmed: “This was a mass-casualty situation… Our facilities, space and personnel were far below the number of injured people arriving. The trauma cases I saw were brutal, shoot to kill.” An ophthalmologist in Tehran told The Guardian that a single hospital documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots.
The IRI’s armed thugs are occupying and searching hospitals for wounded protesters, arresting them on the spot, sometimes taking them away before they’ve been treated. Families who come to morgues or hospitals to retrieve the bodies of loved ones have been forced to declare that their relatives were members of the regime’s hated Basij militias, or that they’d been killed by “terrorists” (i.e., the protesters) in order to receive their bodies. Families have also been made to pay—sometimes according to the number of bullets used—for their release.
A Righteous Uprising, a Damning Indictment of the Islamic Republic
This uprising began on December 28, 2025, with a strike and protests by merchants in Tehran due to an economic crisis. But the rebellion spread quickly across Iran, largely driven forward by students demanding “Down with the Dictator,” “Down with [Ayatollah] Khamenei,” “Freedom, freedom, freedom.”
But this uprising is not merely economic. As a post by Arash Seyfi on Osyan's instagram feed states, "Although the initial spark of this uprising were the economic demands... what soon became clear was that it went beyond limited demands for a livable income and any kind of bargaining with the system. The current revolutionary uprising targets the entirety of the Islamic fascist regime—a system that is neither capable of providing a minimum subsistence nor of providing a meaningful future for society."
The Islamic Republic is justifying their mass murder with the lie that the protesters are “terrorists,” inspired or directed by the U.S. or Israel. While there are many different forces involved in Iran’s protests, including pro-U.S. reactionaries, at its heart is a thirst—and a courageous determination—for freedom and emancipation.
Meanwhile, the fascist commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism, Donald Trump, threatened to intervene, saying “help is on the way,” and urged the protesters to “take over your institutions if you can."
Whatever attack Trump is threatening will be of no "help" to the people of Iran, but would be aimed at attempting to solidify U.S. domination of the Middle East. (The U.S. would, among other things, like to deal a blow to its main imperialist rival, China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner and buys 90 percent of Iran’s oil.)
A statement on January 7, 2026 from the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist, Maoist) who base themselves on the new communism developed by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, called on people not to choose between oppressors of this same system of capitalism-imperialism, but to fight for a liberating revolution opposing both the Islamic fascist regime of Iran and the U.S. imperialists:
We will bury the murderous Khamenei and the entire theocratic, plundering, misogynistic, freedom-murdering system of the Islamic Republic of Iran!
We will break down the prison doors! Prisons are no place for the masses of people. Instead, we will hold the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s political, security, military leaders, and economic plunderers in prison!
We will destroy the project that the fascist Trump, genocidal Netanyahu, and their Iranian minions have for the future of Iran!
Together with the people of the world, we will fight to emancipate humanity from all these enemies of humankind and nature!
This is an uprising against fascist tyranny and torture chambers, bitter oppression and poverty, the medieval oppression of women, the systematic discrimination against religious, ethnic, and national minorities, and the suppression of speech, thought and art.
To take one dimension of this, millions of Iranians yearn for a country where women are no longer enslaved by the IRI’s system of gender apartheid, subject to the dictates of patriarchy—in public and family life. Videos of the protests have been full of women tearing off their forced hijab (veil), and lighting their cigarettes on burning images of Khamenei (women smoking in public is highly stigmatized). In Iran, misogyny is the law of the land: women’s testimony receives less weight than men’s; men can prevent their wives from holding jobs or traveling abroad; women cannot sing alone in public or attend many men’s sporting events; and violence against women often goes unpunished. On top of this, being LGBT is illegal, and sentences for same-sex relations include flogging and even death.
Trump Seems to Back Off Threat of Attack, but the Danger Still Looms
As we reported last week, after the uprising in Iran first broke out, Trump threatened Iran’s rulers that if they killed protesters, the U.S. would attack: “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
Then, after the Islamic Republic announced it would not execute any protesters (at least for now), Trump seemed to reverse course. In the wake of the Islamic Republic’s mass slaughter of protesters, Trump praised the regime for halting the public executions that it had threatened, basically claiming it as a “win” for his bullying. “Iran canceled the hanging of over 800 people. They were going to hang over 800 people yesterday,” Trump said. “And I greatly respect the fact that they canceled that.” He even repeated some of the IRI talking points, saying that protesters had been firing at regime forces and killed hundreds of them--i.e., they were “terrorists”—so the IRI was justified in clamping down.
But whether Trump is actually backing off these threats or not is extremely uncertain. On January 15, Trump’s press spokesperson said that “all options” remain on the table in Iran. Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group are heading toward the Persian Gulf and an additional dozen American fighter jets have arrived in Jordan over the past 24 hours. In response to Trump's threats, the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian tweeted a warning that a strike against Khamenei would amount to a full-scale war with Iran.
If Trump does go ahead with an attack on Iran, this would not only bring down extreme suffering on the people of Iran, it would create even greater danger in the whole region of the Middle East. There's a whole other dimension in which Iran is a key potential prize in the brewing global conflict involving the major nuclear armed powers of U.S., China and Russia. One or another of these powers could end up seeing vital interests at stake in not backing down. In this way, such an attack could start as one thing and, intentionally or not, erupt into a much wider, more destructive and more all-engulfing conflict.
Such a war would not only be opposed to the interests of humanity, it poses the real threat of human extinction. Trump, this egomaniacal fascist lunatic, is walking around with his finger on the nuclear trigger.
The Protests Continue from the Rooftops... Even as the Future Is Uncertain
It is very difficult to know precisely what is happening in Iran today due to the butcher regime’s media, cellphone and internet blackout. The New York Times is reporting that there have not been any large scale protests since January 11. So it is possible that the uprising may have been suppressed for the moment. Though even in darkness, there seem to be outbursts of protest through the night. Video from January 15 posted on the instagram from Burn the Cage, a movement to free Iran's political prisoners, shows a nighttime protest with call and response from the rooftops: "Death to Dictator. Khamenei is a butcher. We will bury you and drag you down. Like what people did during the Shah." (The Shah of Iran was a U.S.-backed tyrant who was overthrown in 1979.)
People in the U.S. have a special responsibility to stay alert: opposing Trump's fascist aggression on Iran and the world, and standing with the people of Iran courageously rising up. And people in the U.S., and around the world, have a responsibility to grapple with the questions posed by the new communists with the Communist Party of Iran, Marxist-Leninist Maoist:
Will another oppressive regime ride in to replace this one atop the wounded bodies of the people? Or, by spreading social understanding of what a real revolution is, will the overthrow of the IRI pave the way for a real revolution, replaced not by another oppressive and exploitative regime, but by a new socialist republic? Now, the overthrow of the IRI is on the immediate agenda—but the even more vitally important challenge is how this question gets answered.
See: From Atash/Fire, Communist Party of Iran, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist—The Islamic Republic Must Go!