After weeks of protests the regime’s crackdown has kicked in and as Herald Foreign Editor David Pratt writes, those hoping for a shift for the better may be very disappointed.

Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I found myself in the Iranian capital Tehran. Like many journalists seeking to cover the impending war, I had made a convoluted detour in order to gain entry over the border from Iran into Iraq as the doors began to close just before the US military’s initial high intensity bombing campaign of Baghdad that would become dubbed “shock and awe.”

These were incredibly tense times and any foreigner entering Iran was viewed with considerable suspicion by the Iranian authorities. On more than one occasion I was questioned by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and pretty much constantly kept under surveillance. My few days in Tehran did not stop me however from visiting the city’s Grand Bazaar where the hospitality I encountered among the citizens I met there, stood in marked contrast to the official watchfulness I was under.

It’s often been said that there are two versions of Iran, the Orwellian one of a despotic regime, and the other, where people welcome overseas visitors to their homes and once behind closed doors open up with a hospitality and candour that can be unexpectedly disarming.

It’s these two competing Iranian identities that over the decades have time and again clashed as they have done once again these past weeks, forty seven years on from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Indeed, it was in that same Grand Bazaar that I visited back in 2003 that earlier this month merchants first rolled down their shop shutters in protest, and Iranian security forces began tear gassing demonstrators whose street mobilisation went on the engulf the country. A shrinking economy, rapidly rising food prices, joblessness and worsening poverty, on top of political and religious oppression had once again lit the fuse of rebellion, and the subsequent images that trickled out of this tightly controlled country showed one gripped by chaos. For those of us outside of Iran looking on, it meant that little in the way of reliable information escaped the regime’s internet curbs, while misinformation filled the gap leaving what exactly has happen in this nation of 90 million people, as yet still not fully clear.

Iranian Democratic Opposition Leader Reza Pahlavi speaks during a news conference at the National Press Club on January 16, 2026 in Washington, DC (Image: Getty Images)

That most likely thousands of protesters have been killed at the hands of a brutal volunteer militia known as the “Baji” and their IRGC overseers is now reported by a number of human right organisations.

Bahar Saba, senior Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), was cited by a number of outlets as saying that the ongoing internet shutdown, militarised climate and the harassment and persecution of families of those killed meant the true scale of atrocities remained unknown Some regional observers have even suggested that the crackdown could prove Iran’s equivalent of China’s Tiananmen Square moment when hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy protesters were killed in Beijing by the communist authorities there. According to the latest........

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