Omid, a protester in his 40s from a small town in southern Iran, recounts the recent events with fear, asking to remain anonymous for his personal safety. “I saw it with my own eyes, they fired directly into the rows of protesters and people fell where they were standing,” he says. He has taken to the streets to protest the worsening economic hardships and says security forces have used automatic weapons against unarmed protesters.
Similar evidence, the BBC reports, has been received from various cities in Iran, where following widespread protests last week, authorities cut off internet access, making reporting much more difficult.
The largest nationwide protest took place on Thursday, the twelfth night of demonstrations. The following day, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that “the Islamic Republic will not retreat,” and it appears that the biggest massacre occurred after this warning, when security forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out his orders. Iranian authorities accused the United States and Israel of fomenting unrest and condemned “terrorist acts,” according to state media.
A young woman from Tehran described last Thursday as “judgment day.” “Even the most remote neighborhoods of Tehran were filled with protesters, places you wouldn’t believe,” she said. “But on Friday, the security forces just kept killing. Seeing it with your own eyes was so traumatic that I completely lost my morale. Friday was a bloody day.”
After the killings, people were afraid to go out into the streets and started cheering from their yards and inside their homes. “Tehran was a battlefield,” she said, “with protesters and security forces taking up positions and taking cover in the streets. But in war, both sides have weapons. Here people just cheer and get killed. It’s a one-sided war.”