Central Asia Watch

The last time Ottawa resident Mahnoosh Naseri spoke to her father, he had decided to take to the streets of Tehran to protest the Iranian regime.

It was Jan. 7 and Iranians fed up with the corruption, economic mismanagement and repressive religious rules of the regime were rallying like never before.

Two days later, her father left his apartment to join the demonstrators and never came home. It took his family four days to find him. He had been shot dead.

“He didn’t care anymore about his safety. What he cared about was the future of Iranian children,” Naseri told Global News in an interview.

Almost a month after Iranians mounted their biggest challenge to the Islamic regime that has ruled them for a half century, the shocking death toll is becoming more clear.

The protests began in late December and were growing by the day on Jan. 8, when Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed Shah, called for mass demonstrations.

Millions marched in major cities, reassured by U.S. President Donald Trump, who had vowed that if Iran killed protesters, he would “come to their rescue.”

The uprising was the largest since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and fighters loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei responded with predictable violence. Activists say tens of thousands may have been killed.

To cover up the carnage, the regime cut off internet access, but as the bodies have piled up, families like Naseri’s have been finding out just how bad it was.

“This has touched a lot of people in the community,” said Ali Ehsassi, an Iranian-Canadian and the Member of Parliament for the Willowdale riding in Toronto.

Ehsassi said he had been hearing from community members whose friends and relatives had been detained or killed, and that Jan. 8 and 9 were “particularly bloody.”

While he did not know the Canadian government’s casualty estimates, the regime’s own figures mean it ranks as one of the bloodiest confrontations of its type in modern history.

“I have no doubt that the number of people who have died is very, very high, even by the standards of the Iranian regime,” the MP said in an interview.

In recent interviews, Global News spoke to Iranian-Canadians about the fate of those close to them who participated in the anti-regime events of Jan. 8 and 9.

“Slowly we learned the truth, and the truth was a massacre had taken place,” said Azam Jangravi, a tech industry professional in Toronto.

Among the casualties were 10 family members, Jangravi said, including one who was shot in the chest at a demonstration in Iran’s third-largest city, Esfahan.

The relative did not die at first but was afraid to seek medical help because the security forces were trolling hospitals to arrest protesters, she said.

After hiding in a house for two days, he succumbed to his injuries, said Jangravi, who fled Iran after she was convicted of showing her hair in public.

Another Iranian-Canadian, Pieman Azimi, said his nephew, a 20-year-old mechanic, had been gunned down during the demonstration.

His family searched police stations and hospitals for a day until finding him among the sea of bodies, said Azimi, who lives in Ottawa.

Another Ottawa resident described the shooting of a friend, who survived a bullet to the waist. Later, the friend told her how the suppression tactics had escalated.

“The first two days, they were shooting with paintballs,” said Nona Dourandish. “And then they decided to bring in military powers and their special units.”

The authorities used drones to monitor the city, and when a crowd gathered to chant anti-regime slogans, gunmen were quickly on the scene, she said, relaying her friend’s account.

“He said basically they were shooting people in their face, in their chest, so they would not get up. So they would not survive,” Dourandish said.

Naseri was close to her father, Hossein. “I can’t believe that my dad is gone,” she said. Harder still to believe was that he was among so many killed that day.

When Naseri was growing up in Tehran, she said she was repeatedly taken into custody for violating the regime’s strict dress code for women.

Her infractions included not covering all her hair with a headscarf and wearing shirts and pants that were deemed too short or too tight, she said.

Following the regime’s brutal crackdown against women’s rights advocates in 2022, she joined her brother in Ottawa in September 2023.

A 73-year-old retired Tehran accountant, her father visited her in Ottawa last summer. He spent three months in the capital, attending her wedding and her brother’s graduation ceremony.

“I’m so glad that I had the chance to show him some cities in Canada. He really loved the nature here, the museums and the freedom,” Naseri said.

Although he disliked the Islamic government, Hossein had previously refrained from taking part in protests, fearing that it could impact his two children.

But early last month, Naseri spoke to him on WhatsApp, and he had decided that it was time to go out to support the demonstrations.

“He told me, ‘I know you are safe. You are there. There is no danger for you two. And right now I feel free to go and, like others, ask for what we want,’” she said.

Hossein left home at about 7 p.m. on Jan. 9, she said.

Videos and eyewitness testimony amassed by Amnesty International show that, on that night, security forces positioned themselves on rooftops and opened fire.

The “deadly crackdown” was carried out primarily by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian police, the human rights organization said.

Thousands died, making last month “the deadliest period of repression by the Iranian authorities in decades of Amnesty’s research,” according to the group.

Naseri began to worry when she didn’t hear from her father. She sent a message to a friend who had internet access. A week later, her aunt called.

The family had searched through bodies until finding Hossein. He had been shot in the main artery in his leg, his daughter said.

Communicating with her family has been a challenge, amid fears that international calls are being monitored. Naseri still knows very little about what happened, but she believes her father could have been saved had made it to a hospital.

She blames the Revolutionary Guard, whose mission is to defend the Islamic government from both internal and external threats. “The IRGC has long experience killing protesters.”

The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an anti-regime militant group, announced Hossein’s death, calling him one of the “martyrs of the heroic nationwide uprising.”

Canada joined Australia and the European Union on Jan. 9 in condemning “the killing of protestors, the use of violence, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation tactics by the Iranian regime against its own people.”

But Deputy Conservative leader MP Melissa Lantsman said the federal government had to do more than issue statements.

“Canada must exploit the regime’s fragility,” she said in a statement to Global News that called on the government to set up a registry for those engaged in foreign interference.

She also urged Ottawa to expel members of Iran’s regime who have arrived in Canada, and to “work with allies to keep information flowing freely to the brave Iranian people.”

“Anything would be a step above nothing.”

Liberal MP Ehasassi said the government was working on a collective response together with allies, and that Canada had already listed the IRGC as a terrorist group.

But Ehsassi said Canada has been “well ahead” of other countries in adopting measures against Iran, including banning senior regime members from the country.

Last week, the European Union followed suit, sanctioning the Revolutionary Guard, saying that “Repression cannot go unanswered.”

“Our officials in various departments are in touch with each other, deciding what there is that we can possibly do,” Ehsassi said. “Obviously, I would like to see us do a lot more. I think the Iranian-Canadian community would like to see that,” he said.

“And I have every confidence that there are going to be a suite of measures.”

The U.S. has been moving military assets to the Middle East, and on Monday, Trump warned Iran of “bad things,” but he has so far refrained from an attack and Khamanei said an American strike would trigger a regional war.

Naseri thinks the era of an Iran run by extremist mullahs has come to an end. “This protest shows that the people of Iran, they don’t accept this regime anymore.”

“They don’t want it.”

Stewart.Bell@globalnews