Until the nationwide uprising that erupted in Iran in January 2026, the Mesbah district of Karaj, a major city west of Tehran, was not exactly a hotbed of protest.
Many residents of the district come from deeply religious families, and the neighborhood is also home to several government and security officials, among them Sheikh Hassan Kordmihan. He is a cleric linked to the 2016 attacks on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and to efforts in Syria to build cultural and paramilitary networks with the support of commanders such as Hossein Hamadani and Qassem Soleimani.
For years, people living there thought that their ties to the government would keep their neighborhood safe from the unrest seen elsewhere in Iran.
They were wrong.
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Sudabeh, a 38-year-old resident who asked to use a pseudonym for safety, remembered that on Jan. 8, just after sunset, as she was boiling water for tea, a voice boomed across the rooftops — a voice once familiar to millions of Iranians.
It was the unmistakable voice of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an exiled Iranian singer and satirist, who was found stabbed to death in Bonn on Aug. 8, 1992. His murder is attributed to Iran’s Islamic government because of his outspoken criticism of the regime. He remains a symbol of cultural defiance for many dissidents.
Hearing Farrokhzad in Mesbah was unimaginable.
“It didn’t make sense at first,” Sudabeh said. “Then suddenly, someone shouted ‘Javid Shah’ from a balcony. Then another voice. And then another.”
The sound spread through the narrow alleys of Mesbah. Doors opened, and people came outside. Within minutes, groups of residents moved toward Mesbah Square, a place that had rarely seen a public protest.
Sudabeh and her husband had planned to drive toward Gohardasht, a district known for previous protests. But the unusual stir inside their own neighborhood made them stop.
“We had never seen anything like this here,” she said. “Mesbah had never protested.”
By 8 p.m., hundreds of people had gathered around Shalchi Alley, which leads from Mesbah Square to an old sugar factory. Families stood together. Teenagers climbed onto parked cars. Older men in wool coats held prayer beads in one hand and raised the other as they joined the chants that echoed across the boulevard.
“Death to the dictator.”
“This is the year of blood — Seyed Ali will be overthrown.”
“Freedom.”
Basij militia motorcycle units lined the edges of the square. Their engines rumbled in short bursts as the crowd grew.
By about 9 p.m., Sudabeh and her husband turned onto a side street when they saw nearly 20 Basij members closing in on a young woman.
“She kept saying her father was sick,” Sudabeh recalled. “She said she needed medicine. They told her if she didn’t turn back, they would shoot her.”
After minutes of pleading, the woman finally stepped away. A gunshot cracked above her head. The Basij, responding to a radio call, abruptly turned their motorcycles toward the square.
“That was when we understood,” Sudabeh said. “They had been waiting for the order.”
Moments later, gunfire erupted.
“There was no warning,” she said. “No loudspeaker, no tear gas first. They fired directly at people.”
Panic spread through the crowd. Families ran into alleys. Some people tried to help the wounded and pull them to safety. Bullets bounced off storefronts and concrete walls. Stun grenades went off, sending white light across the dark square.
People knocked over police booths and set trash bins on fire, acting out of fear rather than planning. An internet blackout cloaked the neighborhood in silence.
The shooting went on for almost two hours. When it finally stopped after midnight, Mesbah was left dark, burned, and damaged. The smell of spent ammunition hung in the air.
When Sudabeh and her husband returned to their apartment, they saw no bodies — only fire, smoke, and shattered structures. They hoped that they had seen the worst of it.
But at dawn, they woke up to reality.
“My husband went out to buy bread,” she said. “He came back pale. He said there were bloodstains everywhere.”
She walked outside.
“There were streaks of dried blood on the street and sidewalk,” she recalled. “Some were small, others were large. I couldn’t take more than a few steps. It felt like something was crushing my chest.”
A couple from the neighboring building stood in their doorway, holding each other and crying.
By midday, mourning posters appeared on nearby walls and utility poles. There were 20 of them in just a short distance.
“They killed the fast-food vendor,” Sudabeh said. “The jeweler’s son. The sign-maker’s husband — he had a toddler and a newborn. They killed a young man who had been married for only five days.”
The jeweler’s son, she added, had been shot through the windshield while sitting in his car. A shopkeeper who locked himself inside his store was shot through the shutter. A family passing through the square in their car was shot at, too.
“It was indiscriminate,” she said.
Accounts from the city’s hospitals added another layer of horror.
A friend’s niece, a medical intern, told Sudabeh that some wounded protesters had been brought in alive but “finished off” with close-range shots.
“She saw things that left her unable to speak for days,” Sudabeh said.
In one case, a woman already hospitalized in a cardiac ICU learned from inside her ward that her son had been killed.
“She collapsed,” Sudabeh said. “The staff didn’t know how to tell her.”
In the days that followed, grief turned into anger. Residents broke the windows of the local Azadegan Mosque and set fire to several bank buildings. Many people believed these banks had been used as elevated firing positions during the crackdown.
“These were not political actions,” Sudabeh said. “They were acts of shock. Of mourning. Of fury.”
Mesbah, once known for its loyalty to the state, now had rows of memorial posters for those who died. Next to many names appeared one word: Javidnam — eternally remembered.
“We are talking about a place that had never protested,” she said. “A place filled with religious families and security personnel. A place that was supposed to be safe for them. And now this.”
The uprising did more than expose a night of violence. It changed the neighborhood’s identity, one bloodstained street at a time.
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