Forty days after security forces unleashed what human rights groups are calling the deadliest crackdown in the Islamic Republic's history, Iran is not quiet. It is simmering — and in places, it is boiling again.
On Saturday, students at two of Iran's most prestigious universities — Sharif University of Technology and Amir Kabir University of Technology — took to their campuses in open defiance of the regime. They chanted: "This is the last message; the target is the entire regime" and "We will fight, we will die, we will take Iran back." When Basij paramilitary forces moved in to break up the gathering at Sharif University, students stood their ground, responding to the Basij's provocative royalist chants with shouts of "Shameless, shameless" before clashing directly with the forces.
The same day, in the city of Abdanan in Ilam Province, citizens surrounded the local intelligence headquarters after authorities arrested Yaghoub Mohammadi, a teacher and prominent union activist. What began as a targeted demonstration quickly spilled into the city center. Thousands gathered near the graves of protest victims across the country — in Gorgan, Mashhad, Siahkal, Bushehr, and dozens of other cities — in a national wave of mourning that has transformed, almost ritually, into renewed revolt.
The Forty-Day Flame
In Shia Muslim tradition, the fortieth day after a death is a sacred moment of communal grief. For Iran's government, it has become something it cannot control: a recurring flashpoint.
Families gathered this week at Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran's vast cemetery, to mark 40 days since the nights of January 8 and 9, when thousands were killed during an unprecedented communications blackout imposed by the state. Similar ceremonies took place from the northern forests of Gilan to the coastal towns of Bushehr, with mourners carrying banners, chanting anti-government slogans, and weeping over the graves of people who, in many cases, were simply in the wrong place when security forces opened fire.
In the village of Chenar in western Hamadan Province, residents marched to honor a father and his 13-year-old son who were shot dead together during the protests. As the crowd chanted "Death to the dictator," armored vehicles from the security forces deployed to the outskirts of the village.
The grief has not remained private. Teachers across Iran called strikes in solidarity with students killed during the unrest. Schools in Shahr-e Rey, Baharestan, Pakdasht, Varamin, and Eslamshahr — all near Tehran — were effectively shut by the absence of students and teachers alike. In the town of Andisheh, high schoolers refused to attend classes as an act of tribute to their peers who did not survive January.
Iran's parliament acknowledged that teenagers made up 17 percent of nationwide protest participants, with some provinces reporting that up to 45 percent of those who took to the streets were under 20 years old.
A Death Toll the World Cannot Agree On
The question of how many people died remains one of the most contested and politically charged disputes of the crisis.
Iran's Foreign Minister has released an official government list of 3,117 people described as "victims of terrorist operations," including roughly 200 security personnel. He challenged the international community to provide contrary evidence, insisting the state's figures are accurate. Tehran has consistently blamed foreign-backed "terrorists" for infiltrating the protests and causing the violence, a framing that has found little acceptance outside the country.
The numbers from independent sources tell a different story. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has documented more than 7,000 confirmed deaths, with nearly 12,000 additional cases still under investigation. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran has said the true figure may exceed 20,000 civilian deaths — though she acknowledged that the sustained communications blackout makes precise verification impossible. US President Donald Trump told reporters the death toll stood at 32,000, a figure he offered without elaboration.
Thirty UN special rapporteurs and international human rights experts issued a joint statement on Friday urging Iranian authorities to disclose the fate of those arrested, disappeared, or missing, and to immediately halt all executions connected to the protests. The vast majority of those detained or killed, they said, were ordinary civilians — including children — from every province and ethnic background in the country, along with Afghan nationals. Among those caught up in the crackdown were lawyers who tried to represent protesters, doctors and nurses who treated the wounded, journalists, artists, and human rights defenders.
The UN experts warned of "unverified reports of burial sites and secret executions" emerging in the absence of state transparency, calling the situation a profound affront to international law.
Children on Death Row
Among the most alarming developments of the past 48 hours: Amnesty International and UNICEF have both raised urgent alarms over reports that children are among at least 30 people currently facing execution in Iran in connection with the January uprising.
Amnesty says it has documented at least 30 individuals at risk of the death penalty, several of whom were under 18 at the time of their alleged offenses. At least eight of those sentenced were condemned within weeks of their arrest, in proceedings Amnesty described as "rushed, tainted by torture, and profoundly unfair." Among those at risk are at least two 17-year-olds, whose cases — like many others — allegedly involved confessions extracted under duress and denial of access to independent legal counsel.
UNICEF, in a formal statement, called for the immediate release of all children detained during the unrest, urging Iran to uphold international standards protecting minors in custody.
Iran's Justice Minister confirmed this week that some minors arrested during the protests remain incarcerated, saying only that "many" had been released without providing any specific figures.
A Regime Official Admits the Unthinkable
A bombshell revelation emerged on February 19, when Javad Tajik — the CEO of the Behesht Zahra Organization, which administers Tehran's main cemetery — publicly confirmed at a press conference that security forces had administered "coup de grâce" shots to wounded protesters during the January crackdown. The term refers to a fatal finishing shot delivered to someone already incapacitated.
The admission validated what opposition groups, exile networks, and families of victims had alleged for weeks, and added a new and deeply disturbing dimension to the international community's understanding of the crackdown's character.
It came as state television simultaneously broadcast what experts widely described as forced confessions — footage from court sessions in which defendants expressed remorse for acts committed during the protests, including setting fire to motorcycles, a mosque, and copies of the Quran.
How It Began: Economic Desperation Meets Political Fury
The current uprising did not begin with political slogans. It began with shopkeepers shutting their doors.
On December 28, 2025, merchants in Tehran's Grand Bazaar closed their stalls in protest after the Iranian rial plummeted to a record low — 1.5 million to the US dollar, compared to roughly 700,000 a year earlier. Food prices had surged an average of 72 percent year-on-year. Inflation was running above 40 percent. For ordinary Iranians, everyday survival had become a daily crisis.
The protests spread rapidly, with students, workers, and citizens from across the country joining what had started as a sectoral economic grievance. By January 8 and 9, demonstrations had reached more than 400 cities across all 31 provinces — the largest anti-government mobilization since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The government's response was immediate and overwhelming: a near-total internet and mobile communications blackout was imposed on January 8, cutting Iran off from the outside world as security forces moved in.
The shutdown lasted days. When connectivity was partially restored, the images and accounts that emerged painted a picture of mass killings, overwhelmed hospitals, and a state that had chosen to answer its people with lethal force on an extraordinary scale.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent subsequently admitted in public remarks that Washington had deliberately engineered a dollar shortage in Iran — simultaneously squeezing oil export revenues and international banking access — as part of a broader maximum-pressure strategy intended to strain the Iranian economy and generate internal pressure on the regime.
A Regime Under Siege, From Within and Without
Iran's government is now navigating multiple simultaneous crises. It faces a deeply angry population that has, in significant numbers, abandoned any faith in reform or compromise and is calling openly for the end of clerical rule. It faces an international community increasingly framing its actions as potential crimes against humanity. It faces US threats of military action — Trump has warned Iran of consequences "very traumatic" if nuclear negotiations fail. And it faces a second round of US-Iran nuclear talks that remains uncertain, conducted through Omani intermediaries, even as the USS Gerald Ford carrier group is reported to be heading toward the region.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has acknowledged that "several thousand" people were killed, blaming the United States and Israel for inciting the unrest. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was elected in 2024 on promises of liberalization and economic relief, has acknowledged "widespread dissatisfaction" and said the government is ready to "hear the voice of the people" — while reaffirming his loyalty to Khamenei and the regime's so-called red lines.
Four senior Iranian officials reportedly told Khamenei in private briefings that public anger has now reached a point where "fear is no longer a deterrent" — a stunning acknowledgment from within the regime's inner circle that the traditional tools of suppression may be losing their power.
The Uprising Continues
Universities are flashpoints. Cemetery ceremonies are becoming protest rallies. Teachers are striking. Mothers of the dead are addressing crowds. Prison letters from death-row detainees are being smuggled out and published.
The 40-day mourning cycle, by its nature, will produce another commemorative moment roughly 40 days from now. And then another.
Iran's government has survived previous protest waves — in 2009, in 2019, in 2022 — by combining lethal repression with the exhaustion of its opponents. Whether the scale and character of what happened in January 2026 has altered that calculus, whether the sheer number of dead has crossed a threshold from which there is no return to normalcy, remains the question that will define this country's trajectory in the months ahead.
What is clear, on the streets of Abdanan and the campuses of Tehran, is that the people who survived January have not forgotten it. And they are not done.
Photo: Archive, New York Times