Irans rulers are insisting that the nationwide uprising convulsing their country has been crushed, even as mounting evidence suggests a bloody crackdown whose full scale remains deliberately obscured.
According to Breitbart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared on Monday that the unrest is now under total control, a claim delivered after security forces reportedly killed hundreds, and possibly thousands, of civilians. Estimates of the death toll diverge sharply, underscoring both the opacity of the regime and the difficulty of obtaining reliable information amid a state-imposed blackout.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has reported that 496 protesters have been killed, along with 48 members of Irans security forces, and that roughly 10,600 people have been arrested over the past two weeks.
Iran Human Rights (IHR), a Norway-based monitoring group, has cited unverified reports that suggest the possibility that over 2,000 people may have died since the regime began shutting down Internet and mobile phone access on Thursday to conceal its operations. The massacre of protesters occurring since the 3rd, especially after the nationwide internet shutdown, may be far more widespread than we can imagine, warned IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, who urged Western governments not to look away.
The international community must mobilize all possible means to stop this, he added, pressing for a stronger response from democratic nations that routinely speak of human rights but often hesitate when action might inconvenience Tehrans rulers.
The communications blackout has made it extraordinarily difficult for outside observers to track the violence in real time, yet some harrowing videos have still slipped through the regimes digital curtain. Several clips appear to show large numbers of corpses and body bags, while Iranian doctors who have managed to communicate with the outside world report that hospitals in multiple cities are overwhelmed with casualties.
State media, meanwhile, has focused on inflating its own narrative of victimhood, claiming at least 121 security officers have been killed, a figure far higher than any independent estimate. Officials have conspicuously refused to disclose the number of dead among protesters, a silence that speaks volumes about the scale of the bloodshed.
CBS News has highlighted one widely circulated video showing dozens of bodies wrapped in black bags outside a morgue in the southern city of Kahrizak, where grieving civilians are seen searching through the dead for their loved ones. Disturbingly, the regime appears to have allowed this particular footage to spread, a rare departure from its usual obsession with censorship.
According to CBS, Tehran may be using the images to show sympathy with the protesters and to bolster their narrative that it is more radical actors, inspired by Mr. Trumps messages of support, behind the violence, not the government. In other words, the regime is attempting to weaponize the tragedy to smear both domestic dissenters and foreign conservatives who have voiced solidarity with the Iranian people.
The situation is now under total control, Araghchi told a group of foreign diplomats on Monday, projecting confidence that belies the scale of the unrest. The ambassadors from Italy, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom were summoned to the foreign ministry in Tehran and bluntly instructed to withdraw all public support for the protests, which Iran denounced as an unacceptable intervention in the internal security of the country.
Araghchi advanced the familiar regime line that some demonstrators were ordinary citizens with legitimate grievances, while others were violent agitators supposedly stoked and fueled by foreign powers. He vowed that security forces would hunt down these alleged instigators, language that signals an ongoing campaign of repression rather than any genuine effort at reform.
The foreign minister further claimed that 53 mosques and 180 ambulances were set on fire during the unrest, insisting that no true Iranian would attack a mosque. Such rhetoric is designed to delegitimize the protests by painting them as sacrilegious and foreign-inspired, a tactic long used by the theocracy to discredit any challenge to its authority. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed this narrative in a speech on Sunday, blaming the United States and Israel for unleashing rioters and terrorists onto Irans streets.
The U.S. and Israel are sitting there, giving instructions saying, Go ahead, we are with you. The same ones who attacked this country and killed our youth and our children are now instructing these people to carry out these acts, telling them to destroy and promising support afterward, he said, attempting to shift responsibility for the regimes own failures onto its traditional enemies.
Pezeshkian also appealed to families to keep their children away from the demonstrations, using graphic language to demonize the opposition. Families are pleading that they not allow their young people to mix with rioters and terrorists who behead and kill people. Protest if you must, we must listen to your protest. Your concerns must be addressed. We must sit together, hand in hand, and resolve them, he said, offering vague promises of dialogue that ring hollow against the backdrop of mass arrests and reported massacres.
Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baaher Qalibaf, a hardline loyalist of the clerical establishment, went further by framing the crackdown as a war against terrorists, casting peaceful demonstrators as part of a broader conspiracy. He described the unrest as one front in a four-front war against Israel and the United States, a sweeping claim that conveniently justifies ever-expanding state power and militarization.
Qalibaf warned Washington against any effort to defend the protesters, issuing a threat that underscores the regimes reliance on confrontation with the West to shore up its domestic legitimacy. Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories, as well as all U.S. bases and ships, will be our legitimate target, he said, using the occupied territories as a pointed reference to Israel.
While Tehrans leaders rail against supposed foreign interference, they continue to rely on anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric to distract from economic mismanagement, corruption, and the basic demand of their own citizens for dignity and freedom. For conservatives who believe in self-determination and limited government, the spectacle of an unelected theocracy gunning down its people while blaming outside forces is a stark reminder of what happens when power is unmoored from accountability.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday he was shocked by reports of violence and excessive use of force by Iranian authorities against protesters, a rare moment of moral clarity from an institution often hesitant to confront authoritarian regimes. All Iranians must be able to express their grievances peacefully and without fear, he said through a spokesman.
The rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, as enshrined in international law, must be fully respected and protected.
Guterres called on Iranian officials to show greater restraint in dealing with demonstrators and to immediately lift their blackout on communications, a step that would at least allow the world to see what is happening on Irans streets. Whether the international community will move beyond statements to meaningful pressure remains uncertain, but for the thousands risking their lives against a brutal regime, the need for principled support from free nations could not be more urgent.
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