Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness’

Sunday Times -Jan 18th2026

CHRISTINA LAMB

You have ten minutes to cry,” came the officer’s curt command to the couple as he revealed the corpse of their twentysomething daughter, gunned down in the historic streets of Isfahan.

After searching morgues and hospitals for days when she didn’t come home from the demonstrations, they paid 700 million tomans (£3,700) in so-called “bullet money” demanded by the security forces and were driven five hours to another town where her body had been thrown into an old grave.

Yet in one respect they were fortunate. A complete communications and internet shutdown for the past ten days has left tens of thousands of Iranians with no idea if their loved ones are alive or dead as the regime has tried to stifle protests with what one doctor has called “genocide under cover of digital darkness”.

Families search the Kahrizak coroner’s office, south of Tehran, for the bodies of loved ones killed during this month’s protests

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Yesterday, for the first time, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, admitted that “several thousands” have been killed since the protests began three weeks ago.

In a broadcast to the nation on state TV, he blamed protesters themselves, describing them as “foot-soldiers of the United States” and claiming that “rioters were armed with live ammunition that was imported from abroad”.

But The Sunday Times has obtained a new report from doctors on the ground, which says at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured, most of them in two days of utter slaughter in the most brutal crackdown by the clerical regime in its 47-year existence.

Ayatollah Ali Khameini speaking in Tehran on Saturday

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Most of the victims are thought to have been younger than 30. Heartbreaking Instagram posts record deaths of a female fashion designer of 23, three young footballers — including one who was just 17 years old and captained a youth team in Tehran — a champion basketball player of 21, a fledgling movie director and a student hoping to study for a doctorate at Bristol University, whose first protest was his last.

“This is a whole new level of brutality,” said Professor Amir Parasta, an Iranian-German eye surgeon and medical director of Munich MED, which treated many of those injured during the Women, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and helped create a network of doctors across Iran that produced the report. “[In 2022] they were using rubber bullets and pellet guns taking out eyes. This time they are using military-grade weapons and what we are seeing are gunshot and shrapnel wounds in the head, neck and chest.

“I’ve spoken to dozens of doctors on the ground and they are really shocked and crying,” he added. “These are surgeons who have seen war.”

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