How many Iranians did the Ayatollah Khamenei have murdered in January?
The Guardian’s Tess McClure and Deepa Parent reported on Jan. 27 that the “Iranian government has acknowledged more than 3,000 dead, and the US-based organisation HRANA Human Rights Activists News Agency, whose figures have been reliable during previous crackdowns, says it has verified more than 6,000 dead and has more than 17,000 more recorded deaths under investigation, giving a possible total of about 22,000.”
“Other estimates from doctors based outside Iran range up to 33,000 or more,” they continued.
Iran International cites “36,500 killed in 400 cities.”
As with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the exact number of fatalities in Iran last month will never be known. Estimates of those murdered for protesting in China 37 years ago range from a few hundred to more than 10,000. Totalitarian governments do as the Islamic Republic of Iran has now done: Turn off the lights, shutter the cameras, and flip the switch on the internet. Cover evil in darkness. They go together.
Thus, it has been since governments began the horrifying, intentional mass murder of civilians. We will also never know the precise number of those slaughtered by the Nazis in the Babi Yar atrocity in Kiev, though the Nazis who carried out the massacre relayed to Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin that they had killed 33,771 Jews in the two-day period of Sept. 29-30, 1941.
When, in 1982, Hafez al Assad, then dictator of Syria, ordered the ruthless suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama, up to 40,000 were butchered. The first Assad was succeeded by his son Bashar, who conducted a ferocious war against his domestic enemies from 2011 through 2024, a war that claimed at least 600,000 Syrian lives and which included many massacres.
Once again, there is no precise count, just as there is none of Pol Pot’s rampages in Cambodia in the late 1970s, which claimed 1.7 million lives. Stalin and Mao compete for the title of mass murderer of the 20th century. The higher end of the estimate of purposeful killings by “Uncle Joe” is 20 million, with Mao tallying up twice as many deaths on his abacus.
It is convenient but incorrect to attribute to Stalin the quote that “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” He didn’t say it. He lived it. And he didn’t lose sleep over doing so.
Butchers from Serbia to Rwanda, from Argentina to Nigeria, are all alike in reaching the depths of human depravity. They are all different in their styles and motives for killing.
Khamenei is somewhat unique in that he and his patron, Ayatollah Khomeini, began as theological fanatics before branching out into mass murder. Such villains are relatively rare among the mass murderers of the modern era who run toward atheism.
History is full of such fanatics of every sect, as well as none at all. What is jarring about Khamenei and his inner circle is that there is no limiting principle to the death toll they would inflict on their own people or the world as a whole. The “end” they pursue is the arrival of Muhammad al Mahdi, “the 12th Imam,” who was born in 869 A.D. in Iraq and has been in a state of occultation (hiding) by divine will, for centuries, waiting to return. It is a complex belief system, but advancing the return of the 12th Imam is justification enough for endless, indeed global, mayhem.
And there is the problem facing President Donald Trump. Fanatics without even the basic human impulse to survive are the most dangerous of all villains. There is no limit to what pain they will inflict or how high they will stack the dead. “Bond villains” are amusing in their many schemes to gain power, but they had goals in this life, not the next.
It was always a fool’s errand to believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran could be a good-faith participant in negotiations over weapons of mass destruction. It was worse than foolish to ever entertain the notion that the ayatollahs atop the regime could be trusted with nuclear weapons. The unparalleled naïveté of Team Obama carried over to the Biden years but was made even more dangerous because the ayatollah had gained so much ground toward his goal of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles on which to deliver them.
Their rampage in January has ended any debate about whether the world could trust the ayatollahs with nuclear weapons, just as it should end any debate about whether these killers should be in possession of an arsenal of ballistic missiles. If Trump brings down this evil regime, historians will eventually salute him for doing so. Trump has already delivered massive blows to the crazed ayatollahs. He already has a successful second term because he acted to destroy the regime’s first lurch toward “breakout.”
Now, he should finish the job and, in the process, free the people of Iran to return to modernity.
