8 and 9 January: Two Days at the Centre of the Archive

There is a point in the timeline where everything changes.

The protests had begun on 28 December with shop closures and demonstrations in Tehran as the rial collapsed and prices rose.

Within days, they had spread beyond the bazaar.

Students joined.

Protests appeared in cities across the country.

Security forces opened fire.

People were arrested.

Deaths were being reported.

Then came 8 January 2026 — 18 Dey 1404.

The protests reached their peak.

And Iran went dark.

8 January: the blackout

As demonstrations spread across the country on 8 January, Iran's connection to the global internet was almost entirely cut.

This matters when trying to understand what happened next.

People inside Iran could no longer document events for the outside world in anything like the normal way.

Videos could not simply be uploaded.

Families could not easily contact relatives abroad.

Journalists and rights organisations lost access to many of the ordinary channels through which information travels.

The violence did not disappear when the internet did.

The evidence was delayed.

Much of it emerged afterwards.

Videos were carried out.

Witnesses spoke.

Families identified the dead.

Human-rights organisations reconstructed events.

Names that had initially existed only inside families, hospitals, morgues and local communities slowly entered the public record.

Today, The Iran Massacre has 2,964 named people recorded as killed on 8 January.

That is not an estimate.

It is 2,964 individual records currently connected to that date.

Behind 2,964 is not one event

It is tempting to look at a number that large and imagine a single massacre at a single location.

That is not what the archive shows.

The records stretch across Iran.

The wider evidence describes lethal force in multiple cities and provinces.

Later investigations by human-rights organisations and the UN fact-finding mission documented widespread use of lethal force. Human Rights Watch examined testimony and videos from Tehran showing direct fire.

But even that description can become too abstract.

Because 2,964 is made from individual lives.

A student.

A worker returning home.

A parent.

A teenager.

Someone standing in a protest.

Someone passing through a street where a protest was taking place.

Some have photographs and detailed accounts.

For others, we currently have little more than a name, a place, a date and the source that recorded them.

The absence of a detailed story does not make the person less real.

It tells us how much of the story is still missing.

Then came 9 January

The blackout continued.

So did the protests.

So did the killing.

Evidence that emerged later described large numbers of people killed and injured in Tehran, Mashhad, Karaj, Isfahan, Rasht and other cities.

The Iran Massacre currently records 1,890 named people killed on 9 January — 19 Dey 1404.

Again, this is not a claim that exactly 1,890 people died that day.

It means we currently have 1,890 people, identified by name, whose records place their deaths on that date.

More names may still be found.

Some dates may change as better evidence arrives.

Some records may eventually be merged if they are found to describe the same person.

The number is a live archive count.

Not a final toll.

4,854 names across two days

Taken together, the archive currently connects 4,854 named deaths to 8 and 9 January.

That means roughly two-thirds of the 7,299 names presented in the archive's current public story are associated with those two dates.

That concentration is one reason 18 and 19 Dey sit at the centre of this project.

But there is another reason.

These were also the days when documenting what was happening became exceptionally difficult.

At almost exactly the moment the violence reached its most severe phase, the country was cut off from the global internet.

The event and the attempt to obscure the event cannot be separated when considering the evidence that survived.

10 January: Kahrizak

The next day, some of the first images began showing what the numbers meant.

Videos from the Kahrizak forensic centre were published.

Amnesty International later examined the imagery and counted at least 205 distinct body bags visible at the site.

Other footage showed families searching for their dead.

For many families, the question was no longer simply:

Where is my son?

Where is my daughter?

Where is my husband?

It became:

Which morgue?

Which hospital?

Which body?

And for researchers trying to reconstruct the killings months later, those images became part of an evidence trail created under extraordinary circumstances.

Some people died later

Even assigning a death to 8 or 9 January is not always straightforward.

The archive currently records seven people who were injured on those two days but died in the days that followed.

That distinction matters.

If someone was shot on 8 January and died in hospital several days later, which date tells the story?

The date of the shooting?

Or the date of death?

A database needs fields and dates.

A human story does not always fit neatly inside them.

That is why the archive keeps the underlying information rather than treating every number as self-explanatory.

Children are part of this record

The current public story records 461 children and teenagers among the people documented by name.

That figure cuts through the language of statistics.

These were not simply clashes between armed institutions and political opponents.

The documented dead include young people whose lives should have stretched decades beyond January 2026.

Recording their age matters.

Recording their photograph matters.

Recording their name matters.

Because words such as casualties, fatalities and death toll can make people disappear inside a category.

A name brings them back into view.

Why the numbers changed

Anyone who has followed this archive from its early days may have seen different totals for 8 and 9 January.

That is expected.

The archive changes when the evidence changes.

New names are added.

Duplicate records are found.

Dates are corrected.

Families provide information.

Different spellings are matched.

Sources that appeared to describe two people may turn out to describe one.

Or records initially thought to describe one person may need to be separated.

A historical archive that never changes while new evidence is arriving would be more worrying than one that transparently corrects itself.

The important thing is to explain what the number means.

Today, it means:

2,964 named people recorded as killed on 8 January.

1,890 named people recorded as killed on 9 January.

Not a prediction.

Not an extrapolation.

Not an estimate of the unknown.

Names currently supported by records in the archive.

There are competing totals

Different organisations and authorities have published different figures for the crackdown.

On 17 January, Ali Khamenei