When people die in silence, the killing does not stop. It spreads.
A woman lights a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei. (Source: @melianouss via X)
Shervin Issakhani
Contributing Author
I am an Iranian student at Yale. My country is experiencing one of the most violent and systematic crackdowns on civilians in its modern history, and most people around me do not know it is happening.
Across Iran, peaceful protesters — students, women, workers, elderly people — have gone into the streets demanding the most basic rights: freedom, dignity, and the ability to live without fear. They are not armed. They are not extremists. They are ordinary people asking for a future.
The regime’s response has been bullets.
Security forces have fired live ammunition into crowds. People who were wounded and sought medical help were not safe. Security forces entered hospitals, shot injured protesters inside emergency rooms, and arrested others directly from their beds. Medical spaces became extensions of the battlefield.
Thousands have been detained. Many have disappeared. Families report bodies taken from the streets and never returned. Others are warned not to hold funerals or speak publicly about their dead. There are videos of body bags lined up on sidewalks, morgues overflowing, and hospitals turned into sites of repression.
Women and children are among the dead. In some cases, their bodies are kept by the state and not released to families — used as tools of fear, bargaining, and propaganda. Families are told that if they speak, they will lose the bodies forever.
I have heard stories of people being arrested, dragged into sham courts, and executed in groups overnight. No real trials. No evidence. No legal representation. No contact with families. Names are erased. People simply vanish.
At the same time, the country was placed under a near-total information blackout, except for those who illegally accessed Starlink. Internet access was cut, and even now it is still restricted. Journalists are silenced. Phone lines collapse. Martial law is imposed in many cities. Non-Iranian security forces have reportedly been brought in to assist with repression. The goal is simple: hide the numbers, hide the reality, hide the bodies.
Independent estimates suggest the death toll may be around 40,000 or more, but exact figures are impossible to verify because the regime controls all information, all media, and all communication.
The world is seeing wildly different death numbers from Iran for one reason: the government is trying to make sure the real number is never known. They cut the internet. They control hospitals. They threaten doctors. They arrest journalists. They force families into silence. When people disappear, there is no record, no report, no grave to visit — just another life erased.
Some sources say thousands are dead. Others say tens of thousands. That is not confusion. That is what mass killing looks like when the state turns off the lights. Families don’t know if their children are in prison, in secret graves, or in state morgues they will never access.
Dead Iranian protesters lined up in bodybags on January 13, 2026. (Credit: @Vahid via X)
What makes this even more unbearable is the silence outside Iran.
Western media can devote endless hours to a single killing when it fits neatly into domestic narratives. One video, one hashtag, one story can dominate coverage for months. But when tens of thousands are killed in Iran, it becomes a brief headline. “Unrest in the Middle East.” Then it disappears.
It is impossible not to feel that Iranian lives are treated as cheaper. Less visible. Less urgent. Less worthy of sustained outrage.
People say it is “too complicated.” That it is “hard to verify.” That it is “far away.” Meanwhile, thousands of videos, testimonies, and eyewitness accounts exist: bodies in the streets, mass graves, hospitals turned into execution zones.
Iranians are not asking for pity. We are asking for recognition — that our lives matter at least as much as any other lives on this planet. It is a basic human question: what does the world do when a state openly massacres its own people at scale?
So far, the answer has been words.
Statements. Condemnations. Carefully crafted language. Symbolic gestures that change nothing for the people being hunted in the streets. Meanwhile, the killing continues.
Iranian students are trying to study, teach, and work while wondering if their families are alive. We refresh news feeds knowing we are seeing only fragments of the truth. We carry fear and grief into classrooms that feel completely disconnected from reality.
Silence is not neutrality. It is participation through absence.
Universities exist to confront reality, not avoid it. The media exists to expose the truth, not manage optics. Those principles mean nothing if they stop at borders.
In the world outside Iran, many people speak on behalf of us and reduce what is happening to something small and convenient. They say it is only about the economy. They say it is only about “Women, Life, Freedom.” They try to package it into something simple and limited. But what is happening in Iran is an active revolution. People have wanted change for years, but they do not have the force to achieve it alone.
Inside Iran, the only thing many people have left is the small hope that we can spread the truth far enough that the world understands that the people need real, practical support. It is not about fundraising that will never reach the people who need it. It is not about symbolic policies that change nothing on the ground.
Many people believe that the system that has controlled Iran for more than four decades has held the population hostage through fear, violence, and repression. They believe it will not change unless it is forced to change. Many believe outside pressure is necessary, because internal resistance alone has been met with bullets, prisons, and executions.
There is a dangerous illusion, especially in comfortable democracies, that every regime can be negotiated with if the right concessions are offered. But there are governments that do not treat negotiation as compromise — they treat it as oxygen. Money, trade access, and diplomatic normalization do not moderate systems built on repression; they strengthen them. They provide resources, legitimacy, and time — time that can be used to expand surveillance, fund proxy violence, and tighten control over their own populations.
When a government has repeatedly shown that it is willing to jail, torture, and kill to stay in power, negotiation without real leverage does not protect civilians. It signals to those in power that the world will continue doing business while people die. And when that happens, repression does not shrink.
It scales.
What people outside Iran often do not see is the scale of the violence. I have seen thousands of images — people killed in the streets, families destroyed, entire communities living in fear. The reality is not abstract. It is physical. It is bodies. There is blood in the streets. It is families searching for loved ones who never come home.
When people die in silence, the killing does not stop.
It spreads.
—
Author’s note: Us Iranians, are spreading information as much as we can, and I encourage the readers to search our top 3 trending hashtags on X, to find out the most recent and more detailed information about this massacre:
#IranMassacre
#IranRevolution2026
#KingRezaPahlavi