FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Returning home after attending a protest in Tehran on January 8, Reza hugged his wife, Maryam, to protect her.
"Suddenly, I felt my hand go limp, I only had her jacket in my hands," he told a family member, who later spoke to BBC Persian. Maryam had been shot dead and they had no idea where the bullet had come from.
Reza held Mariam’s body for an hour and a half. Exhausted, he sat down in an alley. After a while, the door of a nearby house opened. The people who lived there brought a white sheet and wrapped Mariam’s body in it. A few days before Mariam went to the protests, she had told her children – aged 7 and 14 – about what was happening in their country.
"Sometimes parents go to protests and never come back. My blood and yours is no more precious than anyone else's ," she said. The names of Reza and Mariam have been changed for security reasons.
Maryam is one of thousands of protesters who should have returned home but never did, as authorities responded to the rapid spread of protests across Iran with a deadly crackdown.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says it has been able to confirm the killing of at least 2,400 protesters, including 12 children, in the past three weeks. It is extremely difficult to determine the death toll, which is expected to rise in the coming days, because the country remains under a near-total internet blackout imposed by Iranian authorities on Thursday evening.
Human rights groups do not have direct access to the country and, along with other international news organisations, the BBC is unable to report on the ground. Iranian authorities have not released a death toll, but local media have reported that 100 members of the security forces have been killed, while protesters - who they have described as "rebels and terrorists" - have set fire to dozens of mosques and banks in several cities.
The protests began in the capital, Tehran, on December 29, following a sharp drop in the value of the Iranian currency against the dollar. As the protests spread to dozens of other cities, they turned against Iran’s clerical rulers. Security forces quickly launched a violent crackdown, with at least 34 protesters killed by January 7, the 11th day of unrest. However, the bloodiest crackdown was seen last Thursday and Friday, when thousands of people took to the streets across the country and demanded an end to the rule of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
BBC Persian has received dozens of testimonies from inside Iran. Unrepentant despite the potential consequences, witnesses said they wanted to make sure the rest of the world knew about the violence against protesters. “Our neighborhood smells of blood, they killed so many people,” one told BBC Persian. Another recalled that security forces were “shooting mostly in the heads and faces.”
Like Sorena, many of the other protesters killed were young and full of dreams. Robina Aminian, a 23-year-old fashion design student who had hoped to study in Milan, was shot and killed in Tehran on Thursday. Her mother spent about six hours traveling from their home in the western city of Kermanshah to collect her body from Tehran. On the way back, she held her beloved daughter in her arms. But when she arrived, security forces forced her to bury the body in a remote cemetery outside the city — with no other family or friends present.
Not all of the dead were protesters. Navid Salehi, a 24-year-old nurse in Kermanshah, was shot multiple times as he left work on Thursday. The bodies of many protesters were taken to the Kahrizak Medical Center in Tehran. The scenes there were so horrific that Shahanad, who did not want to give his real name, decided to travel nearly 1,000 kilometers to a border region so he could send video using the mobile data networks of neighboring countries. By Saturday, Shahanad had seen more than 2,000 bodies lying on the ground, he said.
A young woman, speaking to BBC Persian on condition of anonymity, described last week's events as a "war". Protesters remained "more united than ever", but she feared for her life and this week had fled the country, like many others, gripped by anxiety that the authorities would launch a new wave of executions and persecution. "I am very afraid of what might happen to those who are still in Iran", she added.
Lini një Përgjigje