alt Hacker NewsHow is this possible without explosives? Even with vehicle mounted machine guns it seems like a crazy high number. Did the protestors get boxed in somehow? And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.
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You might check how the Mongols managed to do it on a much vaster scale 800 years ago. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Gurganj
The museum of the city has a paper with the order that every soldier would have to kill 400 people, by sword. Of course they were already captured but there were about 1 million people in that city. The city is still perfectly leveled after 800 years. Only a couple of buildings were left standing.
Mongols were very well coordinated. Iranian crowd control has had 45 years and several insurrections to train.
Datapoints :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre 400-1500 civilian deaths by 50 British soldiers armed with bolt action rifles (tried to get machine guns on site but thankfully couldn't)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh Possibly single handedly killed an hard to estimate count of US soldier, but possibly in the hundreds (he had people supplying him ammunitions).
Crowds are just easy to thin with repeating firearms and a good supply of ammo...
There were a lot of people with machine guns.
Quite a lot of detail in the nyt article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how...
> And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.
No different from any other military operation to be honest. I'm not sure why you're incredulous about the death toll when a military is ordered to shoot to kill.
The IRGC[0] and Basij[1] are not small organizations, deliberately targeting large crowds of unarmed civilians with automatic weapons will create massive casualties in a very short period of time, no explosives needed.
> Did the protestors get boxed in somehow?
That did also happen.[2]
> And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.
The IRGC's primary purpose is to protect the regime, I'm sure they would have plans in place for suppressing protests.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/25/ira...
I don't think killing that many people requires much coordination when one side has guns (let alone machine guns) and a lot of soldiers
It's absolutely terrible but at the scale of a large country it's not logistically hard to get to that many deaths in a couple of days. Iran is a big country with population around 93 million.
The article says "36,500 killed in 400 cities". That's 91 people per city.
They executed every protestor that was arrested or in the hospital (estimated at ~28k.)
[dead]
The protesters were armed.
I would guess the actual numbers to be about 20-30% of this (which is still a lot). Consider the source.
The coordination is the thing here, that's many units being instructed to carry through in the same manner.
As for the numbers:
it's on the order of 100 deaths at each of 400 locations (clearly not uniformly distributed, some locations would have had many more deaths).As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.
It's grim stuff.
Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.
The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?