Cartoon by Iman Rezaee

'We all know someone who was killed' - Iran protesters tell BBC of brutal crackdown

Soroush Negahdari and Ghoncheh Habibiazad

BBC: "My friends are all like me. We all know someone who was killed in the protests."

For Parisa, a 29-year-old from Tehran, the crackdown by security forces in Iran earlier this month was unlike anything she had witnessed before.

"In the most widespread previous protests, I didn't personally know a single person who had been killed," she said.

Parisa said she knew at least 13 people who had been killed since protests over worsening economic conditions erupted in the capital on 28 December and then evolved into one of the deadliest periods of anti-government unrest in the history of the Islamic Republic.

With one human rights group reporting that the number of people confirmed killed has passed 6,000, several young Iranians able speak to the BBC in recent days - despite a near-total internet shutdown - have described the personal toll.

Parisa said one 26-year-old woman she knew was killed by "a hail of bullets in the street" when the protests escalated across the country on Thursday, 8 January, and Friday, 9 January, and authorities responded with lethal force to crush them.

She herself took part in protests in the north of Tehran that Thursday, which she insisted were peaceful.

"No-one was violent and no-one clashed with the security forces. But on Friday night they still opened fire on the crowd," she said.

"The smell of gunpowder and bullets filled the neighbourhoods where clashes were taking place."

Mehdi, 24, who is also from Tehran, echoed her assessment of the scale of the protests and violence.

"I had never seen anything even close to this level of turnout and such killings and violence by the security forces," he said.

"Despite the killings on Thursday [8 January] and threats of more killings on Friday, people came out, because many of them could no longer endure it and had nothing left to lose," he added.

Mehdi described witnessing multiple killings of protesters at close range by security forces.

"I saw a young man killed right in front of my eyes with two live rounds," he said.

"Motorcyclists shot a young man in the face with a shotgun. He fell on the spot and never got back up."

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) says it has so far confirmed the killing of at least 6,159 people since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. It is also investigating 17,000 more reported deaths.

Skylar Thompson, from Hrana, told the BBC the confirmed number of dead was very likely to rise.

"We are really committed to ensuring that every single piece of verified information that we report on sits next to a name and a location," she added.

Another group, Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), has warned that the final toll could exceed 25,000.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people had been killed, but that the majority were security personnel or bystanders attacked by "rioters".

Most international news organisations, including the BBC, are barred from reporting inside Iran. But videos showing security forces firing live ammunition at crowds have been verified by the BBC >>>