Forty-eight hours in Isfahan

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BBC World Service.

This episode contains scenes of violence and descriptions

that you may find upsetting.

Radio communications, apparently from the middle of mass protests

in Iran at the start of this year.

This appears to be members of Iran's security forces

in the city of Isfahan, calling for reinforcements.

We've translated what they say.

They're asking for help to contain the demonstrations

that erupted right across the nation back in January.

There are now Iranians from all walks of life,

marching through the streets, calling for change

in all corners of the country.

From east to west, north to south,

public anger mounting amid reports of demonstrators being shot dead.

We don't know the full extent of the crackdown.

The BBC and many other international news media

weren't allowed to report from inside the country

to cover the protests,

but it's clear they were put down with unprecedented force.

Body bags keep arriving, families keep searching.

The death toll now reported to be in the thousands.

The brutality of the regime's response

precipitated the US military buildup

that paved the way for the current war.

But the full story of what happened in Iran

on the 8th and 9th of January is yet to be told.

This programme pieces together a snapshot of events in Isfahan,

the country's third largest city.

We thought,

if there's going to be millions of people on the street,

that's it.

The regime cannot defeat us,

so we're going to win this time.

Despite one of the world's longest and most severe internet shutdowns,

we've managed to correspond with people who are there.

You may find some of their descriptions of violence upsetting.

I saw the blood on the street.

It felt like they're here to kill us.

Everyone has a dead person in his family.

I think it's a massacre, yes.

Isfahan, like other Iranian cities,

has had big protests before,

but witnesses say this time things were different.

I saw some heavier weapons, some multi-motion gun equipment,

but the first time that I see that they're really shooting directly to people.

I'm Caroline Hawley, a diplomatic correspondent at the BBC,

and this is 48 hours in Isfahan.

I know myself as born and raised Iranian.

I was born in Isfahan, which is a central city of Iran.

Perna is 25.

Every alley and every street that you walk in,

you see history, you see monuments,

you see bridges that are architecturally very beautiful,

and goes back to like thousands years ago.

The city's home to more than two million people.

There are very kind and welcoming people in Isfahan.

Any excuse they would find, they would just gather on the street and try to be happy.

Perna lived abroad now, but traveled back to Isfahan in December to visit family and friends.

Everything was normal, but obviously, once you enter Iran, you cannot ignore how people are suffering.

People that were really suffering for necessities, for milk,

there are families that it's been years since they had meat,

so just to stay alive was becoming impossible.

Crippling sanctions and economic mismanagement

combine to collapse the value of the Iranian currency, the real,

the cost of food and goods spiraled,

pushing many ordinary Iranians into poverty.

There are hopes and no dreaming of wanting to be better in life and reach great things.

We're becoming further and further, so yes, I could see that this is getting out of hand,

disinflation. I could see that people were angrier and angrier.

Anger that started being voiced openly on the streets of Tehran

at the very end of 2025.

Market traders here walking out of work and calling on others to join their strike.

And I was just going on Instagram.

It was full of videos actually showing different cities in Iran,

showing in the great bazaars and the great malls.

All the owners shut down their stores and they all came on the street and started protesting.

So the question was, is it happening in my city as well?

Is it happening in Esfahan?

And it was.

In Ferdossi street, we have this huge street full of electricity and like

phone shops. They import all the phones and their work is obviously based on the currency.

So all of the Ferdossi street was shut down.

They all started a march.

It was like, okay, so it is happening in my city as well.

It seems like it's everywhere.

The whole Iran woke up.

Episodes of unrest aren't uncommon in Iran.

And the regime under the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hamani,

who was killed by US and Israeli strikes on the 28th of February,

is practiced at suppressing them with violence and intimidation.

The speed at which these early protests in January spread around the country

drew a familiar response and global attention.

At least six people have been killed in Iran as protests over the

soaring cost of living continue.

The authorities have been quick to crack down.

Reports of protesters being killed trickling out from around the country.

Then on the 2nd of January, a verbal intervention from US President Donald Trump.

On his social media platform Truth Social, he said,

if Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom,

the United States will come to their rescue.

He added, we're locked, unloaded, and ready to go.

What started as protests over the cost of living

had quickly spiraled into fury over decades of deep grievances against the regime,

and hope that it might be overthrown.

People were heard openly chanting for the return of the Shah or the King.

Days later, Resa Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, deposed back in 1979,

posted a video from Exile calling the ongoing resistance inspiring

and urging protesters to rally their efforts around two key dates.

Today, I'm sharing my first call to action with you.

This Thursday and Friday, January 8th and 9th, starting exactly at 8pm.

I call on you to begin chanting at this time, whether in the streets or even from your homes.

It is critical to keep these demonstrations disciplined and as large as possible.

Pahlavi says Pahlavi's words encouraged her to join protests on the streets of Esfahan

in the days to come.

So on 7th, I started posting saying, oh, I'm going on a walk on 8th and 9th.

Let me know if you want to join me, because you cannot be directly posting saying,

oh, I'm going to the protests tomorrow.

And everybody was asking me, where are you going, where do you want to go?

Should we go together?

And I was like, oh my god, everybody is going to be out.

We thought, if there's going to be millions of people on the street, that's it.

The regime cannot defeat us.

And America is going to come and help us.

We thought, okay, when a president of America is saying help is underway,

then help is underway.

We thought, we're going to be supported this time.

Aware of the brutal way protests have been dealt within the past,

Pahlavi Niaq got ready to go out on the 8th of January.

So I just dressed up all black, big scarf,

so that I could cover my face and sharp 8th PM.

As soon as I stepped out of my house, I saw a lot of people.

Everybody was wearing black.

You could hear chanting from all the houses.

I started chanting actually from the alley.

I said down with harmony and everybody like an echo from their houses.

Reply to me saying down with harmony.

It was actually a very weird feeling.

Stress but combined with hope and happiness even.

She joined a group on foot crossing a bridge over the Zeyun De Raj river,

guided towards the loud chanting of a crowd they could hear in the distance.

Finally, ending up on Hakim Nezami Street,

an avenue normally lined with people meeting up in cafes.

When I got there, I was shocked.

I tried to see, okay, where does this crowd end?

And I couldn't see the end.

There was a lot of us.

It was dark.

It was very cold.

And I could see a very young people from like seven, eight years old,

to older age like 70 or 80.

And there was an old woman on the wheelchair.

She was going towards the crowd.

She was saying Javi Shah, Javi Shah, like long lived the king.

It felt like people were getting their frustration out

by the chanting that they would say.

That's when I heard them multiple times.

It was all horror from even just hearing them.

She reckons 30 motorbikes turned up, each with someone driving,

and another on the back armed.

These kind of waterbikes with these kind of forces and these uniform and guns,

they're only for suppressing people.

She says the bikers formed a line in front of Filesi Bridge,

facing the crowd of protesters.

I think I was 15 to 20 steps from the guards.

I saw that nobody moves and they kept chanting.

They kept saying down with comedy, they were even louder.

And back in the years when the forces, the RGC forces,

they would come, they would shout like, go home, get lost.

But this time silence.

And then they started with shooting a very huge tear gas.

Everything went cloudy.

And then I was hearing screaming, gone fire.

I thought maybe it's just a sound, you know, to scare us, to go home.

And I saw people one by one falling down.

And I saw the blood on the street.

That's why I realized, no, they're actually shooting people.

Also in Esfahan on the 8th of January was Sohail.

It was 9 o'clock that I started to go out of halls.

I thought that the streets are safe.

Actually, I was with my car driving with my family.

I wanted to see what's happening in the streets.

It was from curiosity.

He ended up on Bozogmeer Street, a wide boulevard that says he didn't get very far.

I see ordinary people, I see normal people,

stopping the car making a traffic jam.

The streets were blocked and they told us to come out of their car and tell the best to come in and drive it.

With his children sat in the back, he says he did a U-turn, but ran into more traffic.

It was something like one hour or maybe more,

that we were blocked in the streets.

We were seeing people, groups of protesters running along Mojdara Street.

I saw the police chasing them.

I heard repeated shooting.

They were shooting just uncontrolled people.

Further down the street, he says he saw something he'd never witnessed being used in protests before.

High-calibre weapons.

Near Bozogmeer Square,

I saw some heavier weapons, some mounted machine gun equipment,

much bigger than a machine gun.

I have seen these machines.

They are anti-aircraft.

They were on the back of the truck.

He watched regime forces fire tracer rounds through the night sky,

rounds that leave trails of light marking where the bullets go.

And I see that they are shooting to the Bozogmeer Street,

not to the level of human head,

but a little bit higher, maybe one or two meters higher than people's head.

The crowd was visible.

I don't want to judge anything,

but it was obvious that the bullets,

it will certainly shoot someone's head,

but the first time that I see that they are really shooting,

and it was very big crowd of policemen in the street.

The first time I saw that they are shooting directly to people.

A few kilometers away on the other side of the river,

25-year-old Parnia,

was surrounded by tear gas and the sound of gunfire on Hakim Nezami Street.

I could just see bodies falling down.

I couldn't even see where they're hurt,

where they were shot.

Everything was in clouds and smoky,

and they were shooting back to back.

It was so loud and so scary,

because you think is it hitting me?

Has it hit me?

It was like a war zone.

It felt like they're here to kill us.

We just wanted to get out of it and we started running.

I just looked back and I could see that they started

getting onto their bikes to come and chase us,

because we were kind of a big crowd running the same way.

Parnia and a friend she was with turned down an alleyway.

They were like,

hi, hi, they're coming,

and that was a time when a woman opened her house and she said,

come in, come in.

I didn't even look back.

I just got in and the door was shut and I was so shocked,

and we literally saw the motorbikes passing the house.

We were all in darkness,

because we couldn't turn any light on.

I looked around and I saw first, I saw shadows.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness,

she described seeing more than a dozen other people taking refuge in the house.

I saw that everybody is bleeding.

I saw a hand full of pellets.

The fingertip was not there anymore.

I saw them that they're actually hurting,

but they couldn't actually make a sound that they were hurt,

because they could hear us.

The forces, the RGC forces,

imagine if they would find us all of us in that house,

they would break the door and kill us on the spot.

So the lady in the house,

she was providing us with fresh water,

with fresh towels for people who were hurt,

she would put pressure on the wounds,

she just helped us.

Parnia says she tried to message loved ones

to let them know she was okay,

but suddenly, like everyone else,

she found her phone wasn't working.

At 9.30, everything went down.

No signals, no bars, no communications.

You couldn't call text message.

Internet was a joke at that point.

And that's when I lost the connection to my mom.

I don't want to imagine what she went through.

She could hear all the gunfires.

She could hear all the screamings,

but she couldn't reach us.

Roughly an hour later, Sahel was still stuck in traffic.

It was something like 10.30.

I was in Haji around about.

And it was the door of the television area.

Iran television, Iran government,

and television is placed there.

The state-run broadcasting station in Esfahan

is surrounded by a wall and a courtyard.

And it was six, seven people.

From what I saw,

we were trying to shoot firebombs,

something like homemade firebombs.

I think to the yard.

And I see one of them was young and slain,

and he was shot to the head.

I didn't see by home,

but first full of police passage.

Sepah, everyone was there.

He fell backward and his back of the head

hit the wall and he fell back on the

streets and he was laying down.

After shooting, I see many people are running away

to the other side of the road.

Maybe it takes two minutes from the shooting

that I reached him.

I see his to the left side.

And the wall was full of blood.

And also the ground was full of blood.

And he was wearing gray and yellow

corruption overcoat.

Actually, he was dead.

That was first time I saw a human being

that is being died in the street

by shooting.

It was very shocking for us.

I'm really sorry for that person who is dead,

but I wanted to show it to BBC

that someone is dead here.

But police were on the car

and they say stop filming is stopping.

So I couldn't take pictures.

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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the documentary

on the BBC World Service.

I'm Caroline Hawley.

In this episode, we're hearing about how mass protests

in the Iranian city of Esfahan

were brutally suppressed by regime forces.

Posted on social media, we find this.

A five-minute recording of what appears

to be radio communications between regime forces

across Esfahan on the night of the 8th,

which we've translated.

We don't know how it was recorded or by who,

but it's consistent with the sound of other

walkie-talkie conversations between the Iranian forces

that have been sent to the BBC.

They name streets in Esfahan

where they say they're tackling demonstrations.

In one exchange, a voice says he wants

to send reinforcements to the TV and radio station

that Suhail drove past.

Another talks about tackling protests

in the next street over from where Parnia was.

Both Parnia and Suhail made it back

to their homes later that evening.

So you could hear garland fires and screaming

till 12, 1 midnight,

and then you could hear sirens of ambulance

till 4 a.m.

and then it was dead silent everywhere.

In the morning, all the shops were closed

and I saw that people from

the municipality were walking

to fix the barriers in the street.

And also, I see people washing their streets.

It shows that they are trying to clean the streets

since 5, 6 in the morning.

And the machine gun still was in the north east

of Bozogmer Square,

inside the fighting station.

It was two machine guns there.

And it was full of people.

They're from Basage and Separ.

I see also some polices are there.

Suhail says he walked back to Harju Square

to get a photo of where he saw the protester

die the night before.

When he got there, the body was gone.

I went to see what's happened there.

To prove last night I saw some person as dead.

It was obvious that they have tried to wash the blood,

but blood is not easy to wash.

They're written to show that nothing is happened in the streets,

to show that everything is normal.

But inside the city's mortuary,

video footage seen by the BBC

suggests things were far from normal.

Room after room, packed with people,

echoing with a sound of bereavement.

Hanging on the wall there's a digital board

listing the identities of the dead being prepared for burial.

From a still photo, we count 60 names on one page of the display.

One of them is Kiarash Safari.

His friend told the BBC he was with Kiarash

to protest when he was killed.

He's afraid of being identified if we use his real name,

so we're calling him Ali.

He wrote to us about what he says he saw.

We voiced extracts of his account.

Their forces were stationed at Al-Ahmad Intersection.

There was a Hilux pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on it.

Some people in the crowd were throwing Molotov cocktails

and firecrackers at the security forces.

But Mian Kiarash had gone empty handed.

We were just chanting.

Ali wrote the Kiarash saw a security guard beating a girl.

He pushed through the crowd and went straight at the forces,

kicked the one who was hitting the girl right in the stomach.

That was when one of the officers loaded his shotgun

and fired at his genitals.

My friend Kiarash Safari went down.

There was blood everywhere.

They picked him up and took him to a container

and threw him in there on top of the other bodies.

In Ali's account, he said he tried to stop them

from taking Kiarash's body,

but for his own safety, protesters in the crowd held him back.

In the morning, I heard that my sister's friend's brother was killed

that night in front of his family, his parents.

Also, there was so-called Supreme Leader Hamenei,

he was going to give a speech on Friday morning.

He said there are some terrorist groups in the country now.

The people who are on the streets are terrorist groups

and the forces and IRGC

is going to deal with them as terrorist groups.

Despite what she'd been through the night before,

Parnia says she wanted to join protests again

that were planned for that evening.

Relatives weren't keen.

This time they said, please don't go.

Do not go.

There you will be killed.

And I said, why should an I go?

Why should I be the one like sitting at home

and expect other people to go out there

and maybe get killed for my freedom?

And again, we were hopeful.

We were like, they cannot just mask kill us

because the word is washing us.

So I went out and the color of the sky this night

it was kind of orange and so cloudy and smoky

from the doorstep of my house.

I wanted to get on the main street

but there were like one or two guards in front of every alley

and they would see a shadow

and they would shoot in the dark.

We were controlled and shot at at our doorstep.

So we couldn't actually reach the main streets

and get together and make a big crowd on Friday

at least where I was in Esfa.

And sometimes even there was nothing, nothing was happening.

They would just go around and start shooting

just to horrify people.

So it was like a prison.

Someone who says she did reach a main street

in Esfa Han on Friday was a woman we're calling Tara.

She feels it's too risky for us to use her real name.

Tara's been corresponding with the BBC

sending voice notes and messages that we've voiced up.

On the afternoon of 9th January,

I went with my friend towards Azadi Square.

There is a white central path with trees

and a pedestrian walkway.

People were chanting death to the dictator,

long lived the Shah, death to harmony.

She wrote that government forces on motorbikes arrived

and began shooting at small groups of people

before they could gather in larger crowds.

All you could hear in the city was gunfire.

She said both she and her friend were hit

by shotgun pellets.

My friend fell to the ground.

His back was covered in blood.

Then I felt a burning pain.

I screamed for help.

People gathered around us.

They put him into a car

and asked the driver to take us to the hospital.

But I said don't take us to the hospital.

She told the BBC she was frightened of being found

and arrested if she went to a hospital.

All the alleyways were full of security forces.

So I asked a couple standing at their front door

to let us in.

They took us into their house.

They put a blanket on the floor for us.

She managed to send the BBC a photo showing

her lower legs peppered with wounds from shotgun pellets.

Her friend's injuries were more extensive.

I lifted my friends clothes.

His back was covered in blood.

His legs from top to bottom were full of pellets.

A doctor came and washed the wounds with saline.

He said I can't do much for him.

He needs surgery.

You must take him to the hospital.

Tara's been treated at home now.

We don't know what happened to her friend.

No one knows exactly how many people

were killed and injured in the January protests.

But the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency

says that across the country,

more than 25,000 civilians were wounded,

along with close to 5,000 members of the security forces.

It's confirmed the identities of more than 7,000 people killed

and is still investigating nearly 12,000 other cases.

Sohail says he personally knows of six people who died.

One of them, a colleague from work.

He was a good friend of me.

All people were shocked and we wanted to stick some black flag on the walls

and also on the door.

But the police and the security guards told us no black flag,

no declaration of this.

I feel some responsibility to say to the people of the world

there is a huge catastrophic situation in Iran.

Everyone has a dead person in his family.

I think it's a massacre, yes.

The Iranian government acknowledges that more than 3,000 people were killed,

but it blames the bloodshed on what it calls rioters and street terrorists,

backed by the country's enemies.

The UN had called for an independent, transparent investigation.

But all that may be overshadowed

as the current conflict engulfs the country

and the stability of the Middle East.

Parna left Iran soon after the 9th of January.

She said she didn't want to go but was persuaded to.

I really wanted to stay,

but one thing made me actually come was

my friends and my family, they said,

you saw what's happened and you are going to a free country

and you can be our voice.

So go to tell the word about what's happening because we can't.