Roja Asadi and Sarah Namjou
BBC in Persian
"I saw it with my own eyes - they were shooting directly at the protesters and people were falling."
As he spoke, Omid's voice trembled because he feared the authorities would find him.
Speaking out behind the wall of silence between Iran and the rest of the world requires immense courage, given the risk of retaliation from the authorities.
Omid, a man in his early forties whose name we have changed for his safety, has been participating in protests in a small town in southern Iran for the past few days, due to the increasingly difficult economic situation.
He says security forces in his city opened fire with Kalashnikov-type automatic rifles on unarmed protesters.
"We are fighting with our bare hands against a brutal regime," he said.
The BBC has received similar testimonies about repression by security forces following mass protests across the country.
Authorities have shut down the internet, making reporting from Iran more difficult than ever before.
The government has banned the BBC Persian from reporting from Iran.
One of the largest anti-government protests in the entire country took place on January 8, the twelfth night of demonstrations.
It seems that many people joined the protests on January 8th and 9th after the call. Pahlavi's Reze, the son of the last Shah of Iran, overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in 1979, who lives in exile.
The next day, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared: "The Islamic Republic will not yield."
It seems that the bloodiest showdown followed precisely after this warning, as the security forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps received orders from Khamenei.
Iranian authorities have accused the United States (US) and Israel of inciting unrest and condemned "terrorist actions", state media reported.
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'Doomsday'
A young woman from Tehran said that January 9th felt like "doomsday" to her.
"Even remote neighborhoods in Tehran were packed with protesters - places you wouldn't believe," she said.
“But on Friday, January 9, the security forces just killed, killed, and killed.
"When I saw that, I felt so sick that I was completely disheartened."
"Friday was a bloody day."
He says that after those murders, people were afraid to go out into the streets and that many are now shouting slogans from the alleys and their homes.
Tehran was a battlefield - protesters and security forces were taking up positions and seeking cover in the streets, she said.
"In war, both sides have weapons," she added.
"Here people just shout slogans and then they get killed."
"This is a one-sided war."
Eyewitnesses in Fardis, a city west of Tehran, say that on January 9, members of the Basij paramilitary formation, under the auspices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, suddenly attacked protesters several hours after the police withdrew from the streets.
Members of these forces, in uniforms and on motorcycles, fired live ammunition directly at the protesters, witnesses say.
Unmarked cars entered side streets, and the people inside them shot at residents who were not participating in the protests at all, eyewitnesses said.
"Two or three people were killed in every alley," claims one witness.
Watch video: Protests in Iran - flag torn and statue toppled
Those who spoke to the BBC in Persian say it is difficult for people outside Iran to imagine the reality in the country, and that the death toll reported so far by foreign media is only a fraction of their estimates.
Foreign media outlets are not allowed to operate freely in Iran and rely mainly on Iranian human rights organizations operating outside the country.
Organization Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO), headquartered in Norway, announced on January 12 that at least 648 protesters had been killed in Iran, including nine under the age of 18.
Some local sources and eyewitnesses speak of a very large number of people killed in different cities, mentioning figures ranging from several hundred to several thousand.
The latest information is about at least 2.000 protesters killed.
Iranian media reported that 100 security forces were killed during the protests, saying that protesters, whom they called "rebels and vandals," set fire to dozens of mosques and banks in various cities.
'Unimaginable repression'
Footage verified by the BBC Persian fact-finding team shows police vehicles and some government buildings being set on fire during protests in various locations.
The testimonies and footage obtained by the BBC in Persian are mainly from larger cities such as Tehran, nearby Karaj, Rasht in the north, Mashhad in the northeast, and Shiraz in the south of Iran.
These areas have better internet access thanks to the Starlink satellite network.
Information is scarce from smaller towns, where there were many casualties at the beginning of the protests, because access to Starlink there is very limited.
But the quantity, consistency, and similarity of testimonies coming from various cities indicate the scale of the crackdown and the widespread use of deadly force.
Nurses and doctors who spoke to the BBC said they saw a large number of dead as well as injured protesters.
They stated that hospitals in many cities were overwhelmed and were unable to treat the seriously injured, especially those with head and eye injuries.
Some witnesses said they saw bodies "stacked on top of each other" and that they had not been handed over to families.
Bodies in bags
Disturbing footage posted on Sunday, January 11, on the activist-run Telegram channel Vahid Online shows a large number of bodies at the Kahrizaku Forensic Center in Tehran, where many families are either already grieving or trying to identify the bodies.
In one of the recordings, allegedly from Kahrizak, relatives look at photographs of unidentified bodies displayed on a screen.
Many bodies in black bags can be seen in the building and on the street outside, only some of which appear to have been identified.
One shot shows the interior of a warehouse where there are several bodies, while the other shows a truck from which people are removing corpses.
Watch the video: Footage of a row of black body bags
A funeral worker at a cemetery in Mashhad, Iran's second largest city, said that between 180 and 200 bodies with severe head injuries were brought in at dawn on January 9 and immediately buried.
A source in Rasht told the BBC in Persian that 70 bodies of protesters were transferred to a hospital morgue in the city on Thursday, January 8th.
The same source added that security forces demanded "money for bullets" before handing over the bodies to the families.
At the same time, a medical worker at a hospital in eastern Tehran told the BBC in Persian that around 40 bodies had been brought there on the same day, January 8.
We are not publishing the name of the hospital to protect the identity of the medical worker.
United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on January 11 that he was "shocked by reports of violence and excessive use of force by the Iranian authorities against protesters, which has led to deaths and injuries in recent days."
"I want to emphasize that, regardless of the number of casualties, the use of lethal force by security forces is concerning," Mai Sato, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, told the BBC in Persian.
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