I have never done this before in my 20+ years on Daily Kos, so I do this with intention and purpose. The attached dispatch sent out of Iran has been stripped of identifying information. It is authentic. If they said it happened, I believe it. I will co-sign for this and stand behind everything the author says. I would trust them with my life. They are beyond reproach. 8ackgr0und N015e
Dispatch of the last few days from inside Iran.
I am inside Iran.
I write this from a connection so weak it feels like breathing through a cracked wall. I am an IT expert, and it still took me three days to build a slow, unstable link. Most of my friends have nothing. No messages. Not even calls during the night. Absolutely no internet connection at all.
This is only a fraction of what happened across these nights. Even if an all seeing AI tried to translate every second into words, the result would be hundreds of pages, at least 300, because the whole country was fighting in the dark at the same time.
This is my diary of January 8 through January 10. It is built from what I witnessed and what trusted friends and family relayed to me through offline means and brief signal windows during the blackout. I am not guessing. I am recording [emphasis added by 8ackgr0und N015e]
Thursday, January 8, 2026
The call was for 8 pm. People started chanting before 4 pm.
By 6 pm the digital blackout began to clamp down. Connections dropped, returned, dropped again. I kept mine alive by switching through layered VPN methods. Most people could not. One by one, the city went silent online while getting louder in the streets.
By 8 pm, Tehran and Karaj were packed wall to wall. Protests do not look like that. This was the streets being taken back. We have not seen numbers or nerve like this in 2009, 2022, or November 2019.
From 8 pm to 11 pm, the streets were fire. Clashes with regime forces. People defending each other. Around 9 pm, in some areas, they moved to live rounds. People were shot.
Tehran, Haft Hoz, Narmak, Tehranpars
A friend in Narmak described a crowd that still sounds unreal. Elderly women and men. Youth. Children. Every kind of Iranian. It was not one group. It was the country in one place.
At about 7:10 pm, they saw roughly ten to twenty uniformed forces near the metro. Later, the uniforms faded. The plainclothes multiplied inside the crowd.
Before the main gathering fully peaked, my friends tried to use the restroom. They entered through the parking entrance of a commercial complex. The moment they stepped inside, the chant hit the building. Long live the Shah. Immediate. Then tear gas was released inside the mall. Panic. People rushing for any exit.
They took an elevator down to reach the restrooms. Suddenly people ran in telling them to get out now because the doors were going to be shut and they would be trapped and jailed inside. They ran out and hit a flood of people in the street. They stayed with the chant and moved toward the larger crowd. Tear gas kept landing in the middle of people. Over and over. In one hour alone, more than twenty to thirty canisters were fired.
One detail matters. The friend reporting this was near the back end of the crowd, and the crowd stretched for about a kilometer. From where they stood, it did not make sense for the gas to be coming from the direction of the Haft Hoz police station. Some canisters seemed to come from within the crowd or from above, from rooftops or higher points. That kind of attack makes you doubt everyone around you. [emph added 8ackgr0und N015e]
Over roughly four hours, that friend says they stopped seeing uniformed forces entirely. What they saw instead was plainclothes agents everywhere, breaking groups apart with speed and ease.
People fought back the way unarmed crowds can. They pulled down signs. They smashed surveillance cameras. They kept moving. The crowd did not shrink. It grew.
By around 10:30 to 11 pm, regime forces started dispersing the crowd again and again at intersections. The mass broke into smaller clusters. People got scared. Many started to leave.
But from the front came a different report. People were saying groups were moving toward the Haft Hoz police station to storm it. Then came shootings. My friend reported people were hit, including someone shot right next to their friend.
Near the metro, they reported people setting a police car on fire. At an intersection, they reported people burning street fixtures, including bus stop infrastructure.
Another detail matters because it shows how the regime uses rumors as a weapon. People kept warning that Basij and plainclothes were waiting at squares and corners. My friends could not move toward their car because they feared they would be grabbed. Later, they realized many warnings were part of the fog itself. In some places, there was nobody there.
[emph added 8ackgr0und N015e]
Tehran, other districts reported to me that night
Yousef Abad had a major regime base in the neighborhood. People still held position all night under fire. At least three deaths were reported to me from that area.
Sadeghiyeh was worse. A friend reported at least eight shot dead. More than two hundred people went home with severe injuries. At least half were described as serious enough to need hospital care. Even with that, the crowd held until regime forces backed down. Then people held the area through the night.
Ekbatan took repeated waves and shootings. Regime forces still failed to disperse the crowd. They withdrew.
Karaj, where the night turned sharper
Mehrshahr saw direct fire into the front rows once forces realized they could not break the crowd. The intent was to kill and injure the first line so the rest would scatter. Deaths and injuries were reported.
Golshahr escalated step by step. First warning shots. Then grenades and heavy tear gas. When that failed, live fire. People still held the streets and did not go home until around 2 am.
Gohardasht had one detail that says everything about how they treat civilians. A car that was only honking was hit by direct rifle fire, described as AK47.
That was Thursday. Through it all, the blackout kept thickening. I stayed connected through layered workarounds. Most of my contacts went dark. The rest reached me through offline relays and tiny signal windows. Every update felt like a note passed through a prison wall.
Friday, January 9, 2026
Tehranpars again. The second night was not smaller. It was more violent and more tactical.
My friends reported around twenty to thirty motorbike units arriving. They hit crowds with gunfire and grenades like it was routine. The pattern repeated. People scattered. People regrouped. People returned.
One moment sticks out. During a hard charge, a friend looked right and saw guns aimed directly at them. The shooters fired above heads into doors, walls, and buildings. It was not harmless. Debris and fragments hit people in the head and body.
They took refuge inside a home because continuing to run meant being caught. In their words, it felt like a shoot to kill posture, not crowd control.
What stayed consistent across all three nights
The regime climbed the same ladder everywhere. Warning shots. Tear gas. Grenades. Live fire.
Motorbike strike units were used for fast intimidation and dispersal. Plainclothes agents operated inside crowds, creating fear, confusion, and sudden fragmentation. In at least one place, the front rows were targeted directly to force retreat.
And still people held ground. They regrouped. They came back. Again and again.
Lion and Sun flags were visible in the open. Drafsh Kaviani flags were visible too. The street was not only angry. It was declaring identity.
The chants were not random. They were directional. They said what we reject and what we are moving toward.
[Top line is an English transliteration of the Farsi chant.
Bottom line is an English translation. BN]
Iran shode amade, farman bede Shahzadeh
Iran is ready, give the order, Prince
In akharin nabarde, Pahlavi barmigarde
This is the final battle, Pahlavi returns
Javid Shah
Long live the Shah
Jomhouri Eslami nemikhaym
We do not want the Islamic Republic
Marg bar dictator
Death to the dictator
Marg bar Khamenei
Death to Khamenei
Khamenei ghatel e, hokoomatesh batel e
Khamenei is a killer, his rule is illegitimate
Emsal saal, khune Seyed Ali sarangoone
This year is the year Seyed Ali’s house falls
Zooze bekesh Mooshali, dare miad Pahlavi
Howl, Rat Ali, Pahlavi is coming
And another line I kept hearing in different forms, the simplest one
Do not be afraid, we are together
The blackout became its own battlefield. Internet blackout everywhere. Phone lines cut during call out hours. No normal text messages for ordinary people. Rare access only through Starlink or complicated, slow workarounds. This is how they try to shoot in the dark, isolate neighborhoods from each other, and keep the world blind.
But even blind, the nation moves.
This does not feel like scattered protest. It feels like repeated attempts to take and hold streets, with people returning after each dispersal and staying late into the night in multiple districts.
And something else keeps showing through the cracks. Stress inside their forces. Fear. Confusion. Less willingness to fight for the terrorist Islamic Regime occupying Iran in many places. You can feel it in how fast they reach for bullets, and how often they still fail to fully clear the streets.
Final note
Iran will be free because we are willing to pay whatever it costs.
We are not going home, because going home is just a slower death, more decay, more silence.
We are putting our lives on the line for a tomorrow that belongs to all of us.
One nation. One flag. One leader. Together, we are the revolution. And we are coming for them.
