‘Blood on the streets’: Iranian who fled Karaj tells of brutal crackdown on protesters

Sulaimaniya, Iraq (CNN) — Farzat never meant to be a taxi driver.

While he was studying law in Tehran, he dabbled in politics. That’s when his troubles began, he told CNN.

He was arrested and jailed four times over the last nine years, he said, and most recently was facing a charge of “contact with a hostile state.” He denied the charge, which carries a seven-year prison sentence.

Because of his “criminal” record, the university expelled him, he explained.

So, a taxi driver he became, plying the busy streets of Karaj, a city near Tehran and lately the site of intense anti-government protests.

“I saw regime forces firing at the people with live bullets,” he recalled. “The bullets were mainly fired at the belly and downward to the genitals. … I saw blood on the streets and three dead bodies in a drive of 15 minutes.” The most intense firing was on January 8 and 9, he said.

Farzat is not his real name. CNN met him in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya on Friday, just days after smugglers brought him over the towering, snow-capped mountains to Iraq. He spoke on the condition that CNN not show his face and use only the pseudonym he provided for fear of retribution.

Soft-spoken and in his mid-30s, Farzat is from Iran’s Kurdish minority, which makes up about 10% of the population. He hails from eastern Iran but lived for years in the Tehran area.

With Iran almost 10 days into a near-total internet and telecommunications blackout — and international journalists not granted access to the country — the accounts of people like Farzat are critical in trying to understand events in Iran.

He said he participated in the wave of protests that shook Iran in 2022 following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the religious police. The government crackdown then was brutal, he recalled, but pales in comparison to the latest unrest.

The security forces “initially used rubber bullets in 2022. This time they went directly to shooting at protesters with live bullets,” he said. “In one small street (in Karaj), the security forces killed at least six protesters, as well as a young woman who was shot and killed as she chanted from her balcony.”

According to an eyewitness account reported by Amnesty International, one hospital in Karaj received more than 80 bodies on the night of January 8.

Nearly 3,000 people have been killed across the country since the start of Iran’s crackdown on dissent, according to US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). CNN cannot independently confirm those figures.

Compared to 2022, the depth of rage and frustration is of a different order, Farzat said. “The protesters were so angry they destroyed all symbols and signs of the regime,” he recounted. Even mosques were among their targets, he said.

He shrugged off US President Donald Trump’s vow that “help is on its way,” skeptical of the promises of a superpower with a checkered past for many Iranians.

“At the last moment, Trump raised the hopes of the people,” he said. “But behind the scenes he could be making a deal with the regime, claiming the ‘Islamic Republic told me executions have been suspended and all is good.’”

Nonetheless, Farzat believes the current government is living on borrowed time. Iranians have had enough, he said. “Society will not commit suicide by accepting the poverty and the disastrous life the regime has imposed upon it. The people are way beyond that,” he said.

The harsh reality of life today in Iran guarantees that the protests will soon reignite. “The people at best can make about $200 a month, and that’s not even enough for four days, said Farzat. “People will come back to the streets. Bullets from the regime cannot stop that.”

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