The Daily Populous Monday January 12nd, 2026 evening edition
Authored by news.sky.com and submitted by nerdose

The extent of the state's crackdown on Iranian protesters is beginning to emerge, despite the internet shutdown.

Several videos centre around a forensics institute in the neighbourhood of Kahrizak, south of the capital, Tehran.

Some have been filtered out via Starlink, but Iranian state TV has footage from the same location.

All show a multitude of body bags, some lined up on the floor or on mortuary trolleys, others in long rows outside as relatives search for loved ones.

It films a screen inside the forensics centre which identifies the dead through a long list of photos, as a loudspeaker calls out their names and asks relatives to collect the body.

On the left of the screen is a long list of jpeg numbers, correlating with the photos of the deceased. There are 250 of them.

The date on the screen is 9 January, Friday.

This suggests that in this morgue alone there are the bodies of 250 people, killed during Thursday night's protests.

Image: On the left of the screen is a long list of jpeg numbers, correlating with the photos of the deceased. There are 250 of them.

Twenty-three-year-old Robina Aminian was shot in the head that night.

She was studying fashion at university in Tehran and had gone to join the protests after class.

Two family members told Sky News how authorities tried to prevent them from retrieving her body.

They finally managed to take her to Kermanshah in western Iran, where they gave her a secret burial.

From their reports, it would appear the regime wants to avoid the spectacle and momentum which large-scale mourning might give to the protests, as it did during the revolution which brought the ayatollahs to power in Iran in 1979.

"The Iranian tradition of funeral is that when somebody dies, on the 40th day of the passing of the deceased, people gather to commemorate the death," says Sina Azodi, director of the Middle East studies programme at George Washington University.

"In 1978, the revolution and the 40-day ceremony mobilised people to chant against the shah's regime, and then there were more people killed during those demonstrations so there was a cycle, creating martyrs for the revolution.

"The Islamic Republic has learned that lesson."

Analysis - Regime more vulnerable than it has ever been

Everything you need to know about the protests

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The scant information filtering out of Iran makes an already murky situation even more difficult to understand.

The US president promised retaliation if the Iranians started firing on protesters, and now he will be weighing his options.

One further point of comparison with these protests and the revolution which unseated the shah is that then, as the system started to crumble, the security forces knew the West would welcome them with open arms.

That is very far from being the case now.

Which means the probability the Revolutionary Guard hunkers down, staying loyal to the hand which feeds them, that bit more likely - a dangerous proposition for the protesters on Iran's streets.

elitegenes on January 12nd, 2026 at 10:01 UTC »

It's not just Iran. In any dictatorship, when those in power are cornered, they WILL shoot their own people. It's their last resort.

In Russia, for example, there's a fairly new law that allows Rosgvardia - Putin's personal internal army - use military firearms and equipment against civilians in "specific situations" and to prevent mass riots. They literally passed a law putting it in writing.

These gremlin regimes in countries like Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc. need to become a thing of the past, and it's long past time we left them there.

canadianbuddyman on January 12nd, 2026 at 09:52 UTC »

On Iranian state television they were warning people to stay off the streets. That parents need to watch their kids and if they get shot by stray bullets to not come to us and complain. That security forces would be given permission to murder anyone they even remotely suspected of standing up for a free iran

The regime has killed anywhere from 2 to 5 thousand people alone over the weekend.

Hospitals and clinics are flooding with the injured and dead.

Iranian security forces are stealing the bodies of the dead to use as leverage against their living family members.

They turned off the internet to try to hide all this. The regime is completely willing to murder as many as it takes to put down the protests.

This is what the Iranian people have risen up against. We need to support them.

barney_muffinberg on January 12nd, 2026 at 09:34 UTC »

Tragic. Genuinely hoping these sacrifices aren't in vain.