Until 2026, daily life for many Tehranis consisted of patiently suppressing their anger at the heavy traffic and smog and receiving regular admonitions from the state. Then, in early January of this year, that anger erupted, suddenly and overwhelmingly, like a volcano.
Crowds poured into the streets, calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. Security forces and allied militias responded with gunfire on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9. Witnesses described units bolstered by armed proxies brought in from neighboring countries.
Kayhan Life spoke to four Tehran residents who said they were on the streets and survived. They described live gunfire, pellet guns, and tear gas used at close range, even near hospitals and metro stations.
Residents described ordinary neighborhoods transformed into battle lines and crowds swelling with startling speed, as if they were bursting out of the pavement. It felt as if Tehran had come under attack from a foreign enemy force.
People shared hurried voice notes, brief messages that made it through weak connections, and stories were passed from neighbor to neighbor at great personal risk.
A middle-aged woman who lived near Zartosht Street, a central Tehran thoroughfare not far from government buildings and commercial offices, said she and her children had tried to do something that felt almost safe but politically urgent before the worst violence erupted.
On Jan. 7, she, her son, and her daughter carried 20 flags and 800 A4-sized color photographs of the crown prince to Tajrish, a busy district in north Tehran near the foothills, known for its bazaars and affluent streets. They handed them out to passersby “for those who maybe don’t watch television,” she said.
What she witnessed in the nights that followed, she said, shattered any lingering sense that normal rules were still respected in Tehran’s streets.
“The things I saw on those three nights, I had only seen in films about World War I and World War II,” she said. “This time I saw them in real life.”
On Jan. 9, she said, she stopped on Ayatollah Kashani Boulevard, a wide artery in west Tehran lined with apartment blocks and neighborhood shops, and pulled into a small local clinic because she needed a restroom. She ran inside — and then froze.
“From the first step, there was blood,” she said. “A trail of blood all the way into the clinic.”
She said the clinic’s manager refused to let her use the restroom, telling her it was broken. Yet, she said, the blood that smeared the floor and marked the entryway seemed to tell a different story.
“The blood on the ground testified to how many killed and wounded had been taken through those corridors,” she said.
The woman, a retired teacher, spoke in a tired voice, as if her horror kept coming back, in waves.
“No matter how you read it, pain is pain,” she said. “Seeing and hearing these disasters was going beyond what I could tolerate.”
She said she went to Vanak Square on Jan. 8, a major junction in north-central Tehran where wide avenues converge amid offices and shopping streets. The security presence was heavy, she said, and the response immediate.
“They fired so many bullets and used so much tear gas, there was no limit,” she said. “People were shouting, ‘Long live the Shah.’”
On Jan. 9, she said, she drove around the city, expecting perhaps that the worst of the violence would be contained to a few hotspots. Instead, she felt it everywhere.
“Even hospitals weren’t spared,” she said. She described tear gas thrown into the courtyard of Day Hospital, a medical facility in Tehran. She said her own building, facing Valiasr Street — once known as Pahlavi Street before the 1979 revolution — had been hit by gunfire.
“The bullet marks are still on the glass at the entrance,” she said. “My voice only recently came back. For several days, because of the tear gas, I couldn’t speak.”
She said she did not carry her phone, believing security forces were tracking devices and identifying demonstrators. Still, she later sent Kayhan London a video from the Tavanir and Nezami Ganjavi area, an office-and-residential district in north-central Tehran. She described a crowd that swelled beyond what locals expected.
“The crowd wasn’t even predictable for people who lived there,” she said. Residents from nearby neighborhoods — including Gandhi and a pocket locals refer to as “Brazil,” an upscale area — arrived by side streets and back routes, she said, pressing toward Vanak.
But on Jan. 9, before the crowds could fully organize, motorcyclists fanned out to the intersections — a tactic long associated with Iran’s Basij and riot-control units.
“They came to every intersection and alley,” she said. “They shot at people and used tear gas.”
Afterwards, she and several neighbors drove through different parts of the city, trying to understand the scale of the unrest, and to find friends.
“Every neighborhood was crowded,” she said. “The killing was unprecedented.”
Two friends were being pursued, she said. In her residential complex, two people were shot — one in the eye, one in the knee. Among relatives and acquaintances, she said, dozens were wounded or missing.
“Security forces were still in the streets,” she said. “They randomly stopped people, especially young people, and searched them. But people were recovering themselves. We didn’t forget, and we didn’t forgive.”
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In Moniriyeh, a bustling, working-class district in south-central Tehran known for its small shops and constant traffic, a shoe worker said he managed to connect to the internet only briefly — just long enough to send his account.
“I was in Moniriyeh Square on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9,” he said. “Three young men with me were wounded in the leg and the head. They fell to the ground.”
He described a night of chaos so intense that memory came in flashes.
“It was a terrifying night,” he said. “Thank God I had the strength. I lifted the bodies of those young men and got out of that slaughter.”
He later learned that his closest friend — who was also his neighbor — was dead. The man had two small children, one six months old and another four years old.
“He went to a pharmacy to buy a simple baby formula,” the shoe worker said. “The milk was in his hand when they shot him.”
His plea was direct, and it carried the fatigue of a place cut off from the world.
“No one is well,” he said. “No one knows what we went through. Write whatever you can about this crime.”
If the south and center spoke of relentless gunfire, west Tehran spoke of crowds.
A young mother who lived off Sattar Khan Street, a broad boulevard in west-central Tehran lined with apartment blocks and shopping corridors, said that early on Jan. 8, she heard nothing outside and thought the night would be quiet.
She said she went with her cousin to the corner and found trash bins dragged into the road, scattered like barricade material.
“It was like a war had started,” she said.
She climbed onto a motorcycle with her cousin and rode toward Enghelab Square, a central landmark near Tehran University that has long served as a political barometer. She continued west toward Azadi Square, the monumental gateway crowned by an iconic arch that has framed state rallies and, in moments of upheaval, mass protests.
Along the route between the two squares, she said, movement slowed to a halt. Streets were locked up. The crowd thickened.
“Our hearts sank,” she said. “We felt guilty — like we couldn’t just leave and go home.”
She said that in less than half an hour, people poured into the streets in response to a call issued by the crown prince — Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah, who has become a rallying symbol for some anti-government demonstrators. The crowd, she said, surged from Sattar Khan and the surrounding areas, moving toward Valiasr.
Block by block, she said, the city filled out.
By the time she reached Enghelab Square, she said, the roads were blocked. Barriers from the city’s bus lanes — metal dividers meant to guide traffic — were ripped up and turned into makeshift fortifications.
“There wasn’t a single special-lane fence left,” she said. “Everything became a barricade.”
She said she had never seen anger like it — and had not expected the turnout.
“The scale shocked us,” she said.
That night, she said, tear gas hit her twice. At one point, she turned onto a side street and saw plainclothes officers standing beside several cars, watching people flow past.
“They saw us because we weren’t in the crowd,” she said. “I don’t know — maybe they were identifying people.”
As she rode past, she said she heard one of them bark an order to shoot. Her cousin began swerving, trying to avoid gunfire.
“They started firing in bursts,” she said. “And we passed by Basij guys with hunting shotguns.”
She described four nights when Sattar Khan and the larger Sadeghieh area, still often called Aryashahr, became a loud corridor of protest.
Some businesses helped. Shopkeepers hauled out stored cardboard to equip people. Pharmacies passed out cartons of masks. Small groceries tossed water bottles toward the crowd. A restaurant owner urged workers to go outside.
On Jan. 9, she said, the crowd in Sattar Khan was larger than the night before — a “flood” moving toward Sadeghieh. Then, she said, gunfire erupted from above.
From the Yadegar-e Emam overpass, an elevated highway bridge that cuts across west Tehran, she said security forces opened sustained fire.
“They started spraying bullets from the bridge,” she said. “They surrounded people from both sides.”
And yet she did not see the stampede that such a tactic might be expected to cause.
“No one ran,” she said. “Everyone stayed where they were.”
One image, she said, lodged in her memory with the permanence of trauma: a young man shot in the face at point-blank range with a shotgun.
“It was from about one meter away,” she said. “Right when his brother had gone to get the car.”
Later, she said, relatives who had been near Tohid Square received text messages warning them that they had been seen in the Sattar Khan area and would face severe consequences if they returned.
“In the first days, even Fars wouldn’t open,” she said, referring to a state-aligned news agency during the Internet shutdown. “We had no Google search. Only some random ‘dot-IR’ sites and music channels would open.”
Phone service became a rationed resource — briefly available, then cut. Text messages failed. Landlines went silent.
“You can’t understand those days from a few videos,” she said. “You wouldn’t have lasted out on the streets. The shooting was too much.”
Yet still, she said, people returned.
“People had reached the end of their tether,” she said.
When she later walked through parts of Sadeghieh and Sattar Khan, she said, blood remained visible — on pavement, on walls — as if the city itself had been stained.
In east Tehran, where residential blocks form a grid and metro stations funnel crowds into chokepoints, residents described a different kind of terror, not just in the streets but also in the aftermath.
A young woman from Narmak, a large eastern neighborhood known for Haft Hoz Square, said a 17-year-old girl — a student of her sister — was killed on Jan. 9.
School staff were warned against holding memorials or even visiting the family, she said.
“They forbade the school from any mourning ceremony,” she said.
She said the family was pressured to bury the girl quickly and without customary Islamic rites. Days later, she said, education officials called the school to say the student was a “martyr,” instructing administrators to visit the family with department officials to offer condolences.
But the father was simultaneously being coerced over how the death would be officially framed.
“They told him either you pay 800 million tomans, or you sign and say your daughter was Basiji,” she said — a reference to the volunteer militia aligned with the state.
She said teachers and school staff were under security pressure, and that in earlier protest waves, colleagues had resigned or been pushed out.
She recounted another story that she heard from a colleague: a fifth-grade boy who stepped outside his home out of curiosity and was hit by pellet rounds in the eye and limbs.
“No hospital accepted him for surgery,” she said. She said authorities had opened a case against the family and demanded money in exchange for a referral letter to a hospital.
She also described security forces using a school as a staging area.
“One corner of the yard was full of empty cigarette packs and cigarette butts left behind by the forces,” she said. “They had turned the school into a base.”
A woman living near Kerman Street, an eastern corridor leading toward Narmak, said she saw mass casualties and what she described as deliberate trapping tactics.
“I was in Narmak,” she said. “I saw real hell.”
At Alghadir Hospital, she said, “they stacked bodies on top of bodies.”
She said security forces set one exit of the Sabalan metro station on fire. At another exit, she said, they shot at people as they emerged.
“They just shot,” she said.
She described surviving only by chance.
“I am alive illegally,” she said, using a phrase meant to convey that she had slipped through a net of death. “Next to me, women and men and children — young and old — were getting shot and falling.”
On the night of Jan. 8, she said, as people were still walking before a planned gathering, pellet fire and tear gas came from two sides. She ran into a side street off Kerman, unaware at first that a pellet had passed through the back of her neck and she was bleeding.
She also spoke of courage and protection, with strangers sheltering young women and young men helping the injured escape. “I will never forget those who gave refuge,” she said.
Even now, she said, her body shook when she remembered the mix of exhilaration and fear. “I still tremble,” she said.
What stunned her most, she said, was not only the violence but the breadth of participation — people she never expected would risk their lives.
“Everyone was out,” she said. “People I never thought would come out on the street.”
She said demonstrators moved toward the armed forces, forcing retreats, refusing to scatter even when encircled.
And in her telling, the lasting consequence was not only grief, but transformation.
“All of us who experienced those scenes will never be the people we were before,” she said. “Because we were on the brink of death.”
She spoke of images that were almost impossible to hold in her mind, and of pride that brought a lump to her throat. Then she recalled an older memory: her brother, who was killed at age 15 in the Iran-Iraq war, and a question she said she had carried for years—how someone so young could face mortal danger.
Those killed in the protests in recent years, she said — from the unrest of 2017 and 2019 to the nationwide demonstrations in 2022, and now these January nights — had given her an answer.
“They grew up prematurely,” she said. “They were made of the same substance.”
