The day before Yasaman Kabiri lost contact with her family for a week in January, she encouraged her cousin and sister to go out and protest in the streets of Iran. A movement was sweeping the country, the fourth major protest movement against the Islamic Republic regime in a decade.  “I told them, ‘You have to go. You need to fight for your freedom to go,’” said Kabiri, a Ph.D. student at SUNY Upstate. “And that was the last conversation I had with them for a week.” On Jan. 8, Kabiri lost contact. The state had shut down access to the internet, stifling the flow of information about its bloody crackdown on Iranian citizens. Horrific visions of the country slowly leaked out through illegal satellite networks, but Kabiri and others in the Iranian diaspora had no way of knowing if their family and friends were safe or even alive. The internet is still returning in Iran. As information has started to surge out of the country, the state and independent researchers have announced death tolls in the thousands. Kabiri is a member of the Iranian community in Syracuse. She is one of three university students who spoke to Central Current about their views on the crackdown on protests about the economy carried out by the Iranian state.  “Just by turning off the internet … we know that they will kill lots of people in the streets,” said Mehrnoosh Nemati, a Ph.D. student in nanobiotechnology at Syracuse University. “Whenever they just black out the internet, this happens.”  The protests that began at the Tehran Grand Bazaar on Dec. 28, the economic heart of Iran’s capital, are the largest in a series of demonstrations over economic conditions and police brutality that have erupted in the past two decades. Thousands of protesters have been killed, thousands others injured — with differing accounts of the carnage provided by independent researchers and the state. Death toll estimates range from at least 6,000 to well over 30,000.  “Just imagine the Syracuse dome is full of people, and all of them were just killed,” said Nemati.  Protests flared up after a dismal economic paradigm that peaked in the past year with the fall of the rial, the country’s currency. By December the rial had fallen to 1.5 million per 1 U.S. dollar, while food prices had increased by more than 70% over the previous year.  Uncertainty during the protests has spread across a community of about 200 university students who have at one point or another called Syracuse their home, according to Nemati.  They responded by calling politicians, protesting outside Destiny Mall, and sharing information about Iran on social media.  But even as students and sympathetic advocates gathered, taking a stand in solidarity with the people of Iran, the videos coming out of Iran evoked anguish among those with families in the country.  The videos showed bodies lying in the streets, some still connected to hospital equipment like breathing tubes.  Soldiers lit fire to a market, killing people who tried to flee. They stacked bodies in rows in warehouses near cemeteries. They shot people in hospitals and pharmacies, and arrested more than 40,000 people.  Kabiri watched the videos. She tried to convince herself that they weren’t real — that the regime had produced the footage to strike fear into would-be protesters. Her screen time increased from one hour per day to nine, she said.  For some of the students, seeing the carnage from across the world felt personal.  One day, Nemati was working in her lab when she saw a video. It was a warehouse full of bodies, and families were looking through them to find their loved ones’ so they could hug them one last time.  “It’s like I was losing my family,” Nemati said. She had not heard from her own family in days, and did not know if they were okay. She cried.  During the blackout, through a fog of uncertainty, Kabiri blamed herself for encouraging her relatives to protest.  After eight days without contact, her sister was able to call her. She had been trying every day, and suddenly the call went through. It was an expensive, international call, and Kabiri couldn’t call back. “We couldn’t say anything. We just cried. I think we just cried for two minutes, and it was disconnected again,” said Kabiri. She waited for her sister to call back, and when she got the call, Kabiri asked if her family was OK. Everybody’s OK, her sister told her.  Later, she learned the cousin she had encouraged to protest had been shot. He is alive. Afraid to go to the hospital, he was treated at home.  “Like every Iranian, losing someone close,” said Kabiri, her voice cracking. “My cousin was shot. And all of my friends, all of the people I know, they’ve lost somebody. And hospitals, they overflow with gunshot victims, hundreds of eye injuries from pellets.” ‘No one expected that these things were going to happen at this scale’ For Iranians, mass protests are not new. Kabiri, who is 27, said she’d seen four or five mass protest movements in her life.  Mehdi Nejatbakhsh, one of the students who spoke to Central Current, lived through the state’s crackdown on protesters from his university dorm more than a decade ago.  He was an undergrad at the University of Tehran during the Green Movement, which engulfed the country in protests as voters doubted the legitimacy of the 2009 presidential election. Protesters held that the election results yielded a fraudulent victory of the incumbent president.  They poured onto the streets, dressed in green and calling for reform.  Nejatbakhsh lived in university dorms at the time. When the police raided the dorms, they arrested around a hundred students, including his roommate.  Nejatbakhsh escaped out the back, running across the highway to another neighborhood.  He left the country soon after, first getting a Master’s degree in Wisconsin and then a sociology Ph.D. at Syracuse University. Through news reports and accounts from family and friends, Nejatbakhsh watched as protests — and the crackdowns against them — escalated in the years between.  “No one expected that these things were going to happen at this scale,” Nejatbakhsh said of the 2026 protests. Protests against the Iranian regime have grown in size and scale in the 21st century, and the crackdowns have grown with them. The crackdown against the Green Movement saw dozens killed, and thousands imprisoned.  Then there were demonstrations in 2017 as food prices rose and again in 2019 when gasoline prices were raised. Both ended in government crackdown.  Demonstrations against acts of police brutality also came to the fore in the years between the Green Movement and Iran’s current moment.  In 2022, twenty-two year old Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police, a special force with a particular focus on enforcing dress codes on women, after they imprisoned her for improper hijab. Her death sparked the months-long Women, Life, Freedom movement. Hundreds were killed, and over 20,000 were arrested. Others were blinded.  The morality police were temporarily withdrawn from the streets after the protests.  Kabiri, who was a pharmacist in Iran at the time, lived through this protest alongside her friends who are doctors and pharmacists spread across the country. She protested during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, burning her hijab.  In Shiraz, where she lived, they were not as brutal as today, she said. Every time, they get worse, Kabiri said.  As Nejatbakhsh worried about his friends and family in Iran, he also reflected on his present and future in the U.S. After two weeks without talking to his family, Nejatbakhsh got a 5 a.m. video call from his father. His father said he had heard that the internet was back, and he wanted to see if it worked. They talked about how they had been.  “The other thing is that my family are also concerned about my situation here in the U.S.,” said Nejatbakhsh, referring to the US refusal to allow Iranian visa holders to enter the country. “I don’t want to give them this hint that I’m not doing good here. So I try to pretend that I’m doing good, and they probably did the same for me.”  Nejatbakhsh is graduating this semester. He is applying for jobs, but the U.S. visa halt is putting more pressure on him, he said.  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to my life in six months,” he said. His friend’s green card processes have stopped, and everything seems to be in limbo. He doesn’t know if he’ll stay in the U.S. or go somewhere like Canada or Europe. “Definitely I don’t want to go back to Iran,” he said. The post ‘It’s like I was losing my family:’ Iranian students in Syracuse suffer through state violence back home appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less