Forty-eight hours in Isfahan

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02Tell Mohammed units to come, so we can hit them. This means motorcycles. This appears to be members of Iran's security forces in the city of Isfahan, calling for reinforcements. We've translated what they say. We are engaged with the protesters, but their numbers are increasing. They're asking for help to contain the demonstrations that erupted right across the nation back in January.

1:31There are now Iranians from all walks of life marching through the streets, calling for change in all corners of the country. From east to west, north to south, public anger mounting amid reports of demonstrators being shot dead. We don't know the full extent of the crackdown. The BBC and many other international news media weren't allowed to report from inside the country to cover the protests. but it's clear they were put down with unprecedented force. Body bags keep arriving, families keep searching. The death toll now reported to be in the thousands. The brutality of the regime's response precipitated the US military build-up that paved the way for the current war.

2:15But the full story of what happened in Iran on the 8th and 9th of January is yet to be told. This programme pieces together a snapshot of events in Esfahan, the country's third largest city. We thought if there's going to be millions of people on the street, that's it. The regime cannot defeat us, so we're going to win this time. Despite one of the world's longest and most severe internet shutdowns, we've managed to correspond with people who are there. You may find some of their descriptions of violence upsetting. I saw the blood on the street. It felt like they're here to kill us. Everyone has a dead person in his family.

2:55I think it's a massacre, yes. Esfahan, like other Iranian cities, has had big protests before, but witnesses say this time things were different. I saw some heavier weapons, some mounted machine gun equipment, but the first thing that I see that they are really shooting directly to people. I'm Caroline Hawley, a diplomatic correspondent at the BBC, and this is 48 Hours in Esfahan.

3:27I know myself as born and raised Iranian. I was born in Esfahan, which is a central city of Iran. Parnia is 25. Every alley and every street that you walk in, You see history, you see monuments, you see bridges that are architecturally very beautiful and goes back to like thousands of years ago. The city's home to more than two million people. They're very kind and welcoming people in Esmahan. Any excuse they would find, they would just gather on the street and try to be happy. Parniar lives abroad now, but travelled back to Esfahan in December to visit family and friends. Everything was normal, but obviously, once you enter Iran, you cannot ignore how people are suffering.

4:29People, they were really suffering for necessities, for milk. There are families that it's been years since they had meat. So just to stay alive was becoming impossible. Crippling sanctions and economic mismanagement combined to collapse the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. The cost of food and goods spiralled, pushing many ordinary Iranians into poverty. Their hopes and their dreaming of wanting to be better in life and reach great things were becoming further and further. So, yes, I could see that this is getting out of hand, this inflation. I could see that people were angrier and angrier.

5:21Anger that started being voiced openly on the streets of Tehran at the very end of 2025.

5:31Market traders here walking out of work and calling on others to join their strike. And I was just going on Instagram. It was full of videos actually showing different cities in Iran, showing in the great bazaars and the great malls. All the owners shut down their stores and they all came on the street and started protesting. So the question was, is it happening in my city as well? Is it happening in Esfahan? And it was. In Ferdowsi Street, we have this huge street full of electricity and phone shops. They import all the phones and their work is obviously based on the currency. So all of the Ferdowsi Street was shut down.

6:18They all started a march. I was like, OK, so it is happening in my city as well. It seems like it's everywhere. The whole Iran woke up. Episodes of unrest aren't uncommon in Iran, and the regime under the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by US and Israeli strikes on the 28th of February, is practised at suppressing them with violence and intimidation. The speed at which these early protests in January spread around the country drew a familiar response and global attention.

6:57At least six people have been killed in Iran as protests over the soaring cost of living continue. The authorities have been quick to crack down. Reports of protesters being killed trickling out from around the country. Then, on the 2nd of January, a verbal intervention from US President Donald Trump. On his social media platform Truth Social, he said, if Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States will come to their rescue. He added, we're locked and loaded and ready to go. What started as protests over the cost of living had quickly spiralled into fury over decades of deep grievances against the regime and hoped that it might be overthrown.

7:46People were heard openly chanting for the return of the Shah or the King.

7:54Days later, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah deposed back in 1979, posted a video from exile calling the ongoing resistance inspiring and urging protesters to rally their efforts around two key dates. Today, I'm sharing my first call to action with you. This Thursday and Friday, January 8th and 9th, starting exactly at 8pm. I call on you to begin chanting at this time, whether in the streets or even from your homes. It is critical to keep these demonstrations disciplined and as large as possible. Parnia says Pahlavi's words encouraged her to join protests on the streets of Esfahan in the days to come.

8:42So on 7th, I started posting saying, oh, I'm going on a walk on 8th and 9th. Let me know if you want to join me. Because you cannot be directly posting saying, oh, I'm going to the protests tomorrow. And everybody was asking me, where are you going? Where do you want to go? Should we go together? And I was like, oh, my God, everybody's going to be out. We thought, if there's going to be millions of people on the street, that's it. The regime cannot defeat us, and America is going to come and help us. We thought, OK, when a president of America is saying help is underway, then help is underway.

9:26We thought, we're going to be supported this time. Aware of the brutal way protests have been dealt with in the past, Parnia got ready to go out on the 8th of January. So I just dressed up all black, big scarf so that I could cover my face. And sharp 8pm, as soon as I stepped out of my house, I saw a lot of people. Everybody was wearing black. You could hear chantings from all the houses.

10:00I started chanting actually from the alley. I said, down with Khamenei, and everybody, like an echo from their houses, replied to me, saying, down with Khamenei. It was actually a very weird feeling. Stress, but combined with hope and happiness, even. She joined a group on foot, crossing a bridge over the Zayun Deirud River, guided towards the loud chanting of a crowd they could hear in the distance. Finally ending up on Hakim Nezami Street, an avenue normally lined with people meeting up in cafes.

10:39When I got there, I was shocked. I tried to see, OK, where does this crowd end? And I couldn't see the end. There was a lot of us. It was dark. It was very cold. And I could see very young people from like seven, eight years old to older age, like 70 or 80. And there was an old woman on the wheelchair. She was going towards the crowd. She was saying, Javid Shah, Javid Shah, like long live the king. It felt like people were getting their frustration out by the chantings that they would say. That's when I heard the motorbanks. It was all horror from even just hearing them. She reckons 30 motorbikes turned up, each with someone driving and another on the back, armed.

11:35These kind of motorbikes with these kind of forces and these uniforms and guns, they're only for suppressing people. She says the bikers formed a line in front of Fallezy Bridge, facing the crowd of protesters. I think I was 15 to 20 steps from the guards. I saw that nobody moves and they kept chanting. They kept saying down with harmony. They were even louder. And back in the years when the forces, the RGC forces, they would come, they would shout like, go home, get lost. But this time, silence. and then they started with shooting a very huge tear gas. Everything went cloudy and then I was hearing screaming, gunfire.

12:35I thought maybe it's just a sound, you know, to scare us, to go home and I saw people one by one falling down and I saw the blood on the street. That's when I realised, no, they're actually shooting people.

12:56Also in Esfahan on the 8th of January was Sohail. It was nine o 'clock that I started to go out of house. I thought that the streets are safe. Actually, I was with my car driving with my family. We wanted to see what's happening in the streets. It was from curiosity. He ended up on Bozogmer Street, a wide boulevard, but says he didn't get very far. I see ordinary people, I see normal people stopping the car, making a traffic jam. The streets were blocked and they told us to come out of the car and sell this to Khamenei and Javid Shah. With his children sat in the back, he says he did a U-turn, but ran into more traffic.

13:40It was something like one hour or maybe more that we were blocked in the streets. We were seeing people, group of protesters running along Moshtag Street. I saw police was chasing them. I heard repeated shooting. They were shooting just uncontrollably. Further down the street, he says he saw something he'd never witnessed being used in protests before. High calibre weapons. Near Bozogmeher Square, I saw some heavier weapons, some mounted machine gun equipment, much bigger than machine gun. I have seen these machines, they are on the aircraft. They were on the back of the truck. He watched regime forces fire tracer rounds through the night sky, rounds that leave trails of light marking where the bullets go.

14:30And I see that they are shooting to the Bozogmer Street, not to the level of human head, but a little bit higher, maybe one or two meters higher than people's head. The crowd was visible. I don't want to judge anything, but it was obvious that the bullets, it will certainly shoot someone's head. But the first time that I see that they are really shooting, and it was a very big crowd of policemen in the street, first time I saw that they are shooting directly to people. A few kilometres away, on the other side of the river, 25-year-old Parnia was surrounded by tear gas and the sound of gunfire on Hakim Nezami Street.

15:15I could just see bodies falling down. I couldn't even see where they were hurt, where they were shot. Everything was in clouds and smoky. And they were shooting back to back. It was so loud and so scary because you think, is it hitting me? Has it hit me? It was like a war zone. It felt like they're here to kill us. We just wanted to get out of it. And we started running. I just looked back and I could see that they started getting onto their bikes to come and chase us because we were kind of a big crowd running the same way. Parnia and a friend she was with turned down an alleyway. Deeper were like, hide, hide, they're coming.

16:05And that was a time when a woman opened her house and she said, come in, come in. I didn't even look back. I just got in and the door was shut and I was so shocked. and we literally saw the motorbikes passing the house. We were all in darkness because we couldn't turn any light on. I looked around and I saw, first I saw shadows. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she described seeing more than a dozen other people taking refuge in the house. I saw that everybody is bleeding. I saw a hand full of pellets, the fingertip. was not there anymore. I saw them that they're actually hurting, but they couldn't actually make a sound that they were hurt because they could hear us.

16:59The forces, the RGC forces, imagine if they would find us, all of us in that house, they would break the door and kill us on the spot. So the lady in the house, she was providing us with fresh water, with fresh towels, for people who were hurt. She put pressure on the wounds. She just helped us. Parnia says she tried to message loved ones to let them know she was okay. But suddenly, like everyone else, she found her phone wasn't working. At 9.30, everything went down. No signals, no bars, no communications. You couldn't call, text message. Internet was a joke at that point. And that's when I lost the connection to my mom.

17:50I don't want to imagine what she went through. She could hear all the gunfires. She could hear all the screamings. But she couldn't reach us. Roughly an hour later, Sahail was still stuck in traffic. It was something like 10.30. I was in Khadju roundabout. And it was the door of the television area. Iran television, Iran government on television is placed there. The state-run broadcasting station in Esfahan is surrounded by a wall and a courtyard.

18:46His back of the head hit the wall and he fell back on the street and he was laying down. After shooting, I see many people are running away to the other side of the road. Maybe it takes two minutes from the shooting that I reached him. I see he's to the left side and the wall was full of blood. And also the ground was full of blood. and he was wearing a grey and yellow caption overcoat. Actually, he was dead. It was the first time I saw a human being that is being died in the street by shooting. It was very shocking for us. I'm really sorry for that person who is dead, but I wanted to show you to BBC that someone is dead here.

19:33But police were on the car and they said, stop filming, stop filming. so I couldn't take pictures.

19:44This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:18You're listening to the documentary on the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Hawley. In this episode, we're hearing about how mass protests in the Iranian city of Esfahan were brutally suppressed by regime forces. Posted on social media, we find this. A five-minute recording of what appears to be radio communications between regime forces across Isfahan on the night of the 8th, which we've translated. Call back. There are 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 people. If we step back even one step, the crowd will crush us. We don't know how it was recorded or by who, but it's consistent with the sound of other walkie-talkie conversations between Iranian forces that have been sent to the BBC.

21:17They name streets in Esfahan where they say they're tackling demonstrations. In one exchange, a voice says he wants to send reinforcements to the TV and radio station that Suhail drove past.

21:41Another talks about tackling protests in the next street over from where Parnia was.

21:50Both Parnia and Sohail made it back to their homes later that evening. So you could hear gunfires and screaming till 12.01 midnight. And then you could hear sirens of ambulance till 4am. and then it was dead silent everywhere. In the morning, all the shops were closed and I saw that people from Minneapolis City, they're working to fix the barriers in the street and also I see people washing the streets. It shows that they are trying to clean the streets since 5, 6 in the morning. and the machine gun still was in the northeast of Bozogmer Square inside the firefighting station. It was two machine guns there and it was full of people from Basij and Sepah.

22:45I see also some policiers are there. Sohail says he walked back to Khadju Square to get a photo of where he saw the protester die the night before. When he got there, the body was gone. I went to see what's happened there to prove last night I saw some person is dead. It was obvious that they have tried to wash the blood, but blood is not easy to wash. They pretend to show that nothing has happened in the streets, to show that everything is normal.

23:16But inside the city's mortuary, video footage seen by the BBC suggests things were far from normal. Room after room, packed with people, echoing with a sound of bereavement. Hanging on the wall, there's a digital board, listing the identities of the dead being prepared for burial. From a still photo, we count 60 names on one page of the display. One of them is Kiarash Zafari. His friend told the BBC he was with Kiarash at a protest when he was killed. He's afraid of being identified if we use his real name, so we're calling him Ali. He wrote to us about what he says he saw. We voiced extracts of his account.

23:58Their forces were stationed at Ali Muhammad intersection. There was a Hilux pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on it. Some people in the crowd were throwing Molotov cocktails and firecrackers at the security forces. But me and Kiarash had gone empty-handed. We were just chanting. Ali wrote that Kiarash saw a security guard beating a girl.

24:52in ali's account he said he tried to stop them from taking kirush's body but for his own safety protesters in the crowd held him back in the morning i heard that my sister's friend's brother was killed that night in front of his family his parents also there was so-called supreme leader khamenei he was going to give a speech on friday morning He said there are some terrorist groups in the country now. The people who are on the streets are terrorist groups and the forces and IRGC is going to deal with them as terrorist groups. Despite what she'd been through the night before, Parnia says she wanted to join protests again that were planned for that evening.

25:41Relatives weren't keen. This time they said, please don't go. Do not go. You'll be killed. And I said, why shouldn't I go? Why should I be the one like sitting at home and expect other people to go out there and maybe get killed for my freedom? And again, we were hopeful. We were like, they cannot just mass kill us because the world is watching us. So I went out and the color of the sky this night, it was kind of orange and so cloudy. and smoky from the doorstep of my house. I wanted to get on the main street, but there were like one or two guards in front of every alley and they would see a shadow and they would shoot in the dark.

26:33We were controlled and shot at, at our doorstep. So we couldn't actually reach the main streets and get together and make a big crowd on Friday, at least where I was in Esfán. and sometimes even there was nothing, nothing was happening. They would just go around and start shooting just to horrify people. So it was like a prison. Someone who says she did reach a main street in Esfahan on Friday was a woman we're calling Tara. She feels it's too risky for us to use her real name. Tara's been corresponding with the BBC, sending voice notes and messages that we've voiced up. On the afternoon of 9th of January, I went with my friend towards Azadi Square.

27:19There's a wide central path with trees and a pedestrian walkway. People were chanting, Death to the dictator, long live the Shah, death to Khamenei. She wrote that government forces on motorbikes arrived and began shooting at small groups of people before they could gather in larger crowds. All you could hear in the city was gunfire. She said both she and her friend were hit by shotgun pellets. My friend fell to the ground. His back was covered in blood. Then I felt a burning pain. I screamed for help. People gathered around us. They put him into a car and asked the driver to take us to the hospital.