Just How Many Iranians Were Killed in the January Uprising?

And What Caused The People to Rise Up?

My former sweetheart Megyn Kelly should, as she might say, “stay in her lane.” Last week, I tuned in to get a Nancy Guthrie update, Kelly’s lane, and heard her instead opine about the search for the downed American airman then underway. Commenting on the reward the mullahs offered to find the airman, Kelly sniped, and I paraphrase, “I thought they said we would be welcomed as liberators, but now the Iranians are all out hunting down our guy.”

Without intending, Kelly made the exact opposite point she intended. If an Iranian airman was shot down over, say, Kansas, every red-blooded gun owner in the state would have gone out looking for him without prompting, no reward needed.

As to welcoming the US as liberators—an idea floated in the Iraq War, Megyn, not this one—the Iranian people are understandably cautious. In January, they rose up in protest against the government and paid dearly for their audacity. In that our media are quietly siding with the mullahs, they are reluctant to talk about this bloody stain on the regime’s record.

Then, too, our media were obsessed with Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which was taking place at the same time. The day Renee Good was shot while attempting to run over an ICE agent, scores of protestors were. being shot in the streets of Iran simply for being in the streets. Our media preferred the Renee Good story, at least their version of it. Few tears were shed for the Iranians.

Less afflicted by TDS, the British media have been more forthcoming. The protests kicked off on December 28 in the Tehran Bazaar, a heavily Islamic commercial center historically aligned with the government. What prompted the protest was the collapse of the Iranian currency. From the Bazaar, the protest spread to the provinces in the first weeks of January, and the regime response escalated quickly from negotiation to massacre.

If the 12-day war in June 2025 did not spark the protest, it may have triggered the regime’s brutal crackdown. The decline of proxy forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas, when coupled with the demoralizing effects of the Israeli and American bombing raids, heightened the insecurity of the regime and its loyalist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The 2024 overthrow of Syria's Iran-backed Bashar Assad added to the unease.

The left-leaning UK Guardian, no friend of the Trump administration, has done the most thorough reporting on the crackdown that I could find. Initially, police responded to street protests with batons and pellet guns. So reported a doctor “Ahmadi,” the Guardian’s verified source. On day two, the injured kept checking in, but their injuries were more serious “close-range gunshots and severe stab wounds, typically to the chest, eyes, and even genitals. Many proved fatal.” Ahmadi reported more than 40 killed in his small town.

With the internet blacked out, Ahmadi assembled a network of 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces. “Comparing the number of dead they witnessed with hospital baselines, they estimate [the death toll] could exceed 30,000, far surpassing official figures.” The Iranian government has acknowledged more than 3,000 killed, but all other responsible entities know it to be much higher. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency cited more than 6,000 deaths and close to 42,000 arrests.

“From a medical standpoint, the injuries we observed demonstrate a brutality without limit—both in scale and in method,” said Ahmadi. Another doctor, based in Tehran, told the Guardian: “I am on the verge of a psychological collapse. They’ve mass murdered people. No one can imagine … I saw just blood, blood and blood.”

The Guardian spoke to several witnesses who independently verified mass burials involving hundreds of bodies as a way for the government to minimize an official death count. One witness, who was granted access to a burial site to look for the body of a friend, told the Guardian he personally searched through hundreds of “stacked” bodies. The graveyard staff reportedly told him they had “received thousands of bodies just in the past two days.”

The regime has done its best to obscure the death toll. Said Ahmadi of the various strategies used, “They form a system designed not only to suppress protest, but to suppress memory.” American leftists have done their best to help with the memory suppression. In searching through the signs at the many “No Kings” protests, I have seen not a single reference to the slaughter of the Iranian people.

If anything, our woefully myopic, self-indulged protestors back the regime. And why not? The IRGC can’t be any worse than ICE, can they? After all, who is it that wears the masks?