Each of these people was a single life inside the figure of more than forty thousand killed across the two-night strikes and the wider Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. The state preferred them counted; here they are recognised.
Content warning. The photographs below show victims of state killings, public executions and mass graves. They are documentary images from BBC, Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons, Iran Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, included so the dead are not abstractions.
Body bags from Iran's January 2026 crackdown — leaked photographs published by BBC News and central to the dispute over Iran's death toll. Photograph: BBC (editorial fair use).
Mohsen Shekari, 23 — the first protester executed by the Islamic Republic during the Woman Life Freedom uprising. Hanged on 8 December 2022 after a closed-door trial on charges of “moharebeh” (waging war against God) for allegedly wounding a Basij member with a knife at a Tehran roadblock. Photograph: family handout via BBC News.Majidreza Rahnavard, 23 — publicly hanged from a construction crane in Mashhad on 12 December 2022, four days after Shekari. The regime broadcast the image of his body in the street as warning. Photograph via BBC News.Hadis Najafi, 22 — killed in Karaj on 21 September 2022, shot multiple times during a Mahsa Amini protest. A video of her tying back her hair before stepping toward the riot line became a banner image of the uprising. Photograph: family, via Wikipedia (fair use).Nika Shakarami, 16 — disappeared after burning her headscarf at a Tehran protest on 20 September 2022. Her body was returned to her family ten days later; a 2023 BBC investigation concluded she was sexually assaulted and killed in custody by security agents. Photograph: family, via Wikipedia (fair use).Kian Pirfalak, 9 — shot dead in his father’s car in Izeh on 16 November 2022. The state blamed “terrorists”; his mother stood at his funeral and told the country, in front of the cameras, that the regime had killed her son. Photograph: family, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).Saqqez, 17 September 2022 — women pull off their headscarves over the coffin of Mahsa Jina Amini, the gesture that lit the uprising. Photograph: BBC News.Public hanging from a mobile construction crane in Iran (2006, photographer in the crowd) — the same method used against Majidreza Rahnavard in 2022 and against scores of others during the post-2025 wave of mass executions documented by Iran Human Rights and Amnesty International. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY).Khavaran cemetery, southeast Tehran — relatives of those killed in the 1988 prison massacres gather every year by the unmarked mass graves where their dead were dumped, despite repeated state attempts to bulldoze the site. Photograph: BBC Persian archive.Khavaran, again — the ground that holds at least several thousand of the estimated five thousand political prisoners executed in summer 1988 on Khomeini’s fatwa. Ebrahim Raisi — Iran’s president from 2021 until his death in a 2024 helicopter crash — sat on the “death commission” that sent them here. Photograph: Human Rights Watch.
The streets, the prisons, the diaspora
From Tehran 2009 to Berlin 2022.
What the cameras saw — the visual archive the diaspora has refused to let disappear.
Berlin Tiergarten, 22 October 2022 — the largest Iranian solidarity rally in Europe to date, around 80,000 attendees. Photo: Leonhard Lenz, Wikimedia (CC0).Narges Mohammadi — 2023 Nobel Peace laureate, currently in Evin Prison. Portrait via Wikimedia Commons.Amjad Amini — Mahsa's father, who refused the state's narrative of his daughter's death. Photograph via family, in BBC News.Tehran, June 2009 — the Green Movement's silent march. Where is my vote? Photo via Wikimedia Commons.Neda Agha-Soltan, painted in Nazareth — the icon the regime could not erase. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.Bloody November, 2019 — at least 304 protesters killed in less than a week, internet shut down. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.Tehran, 2009 — millions in the street. The world watched, then turned away. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.Toomaj Salehi — rapper, sentenced to death and back; voice of a generation. Portrait via Wikimedia Commons.Evin Prison, Tehran — the institutional centre of forty-seven years of repression. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.Gasht-e Ershad — the morality-police vehicle Mahsa Amini was forced into. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.February 1979 — Khomeini returns to Tehran. Within ten days, the executions began. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.Tehran, February 1979 — mass demonstration during the days that followed Khomeini's return. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
