It has been a trying period for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Over the past two years, its regional proxy allies have been severely weakened by Israeli military action.
This was followed by a 12-day bombing campaign against Iran conducted by the United States and Israel in June.
The regime suffered another major blow last month when large-scale street protests, triggered by economic collapse, quickly escalated into calls for the government’s overthrow. For a brief moment, protesters appeared to gain momentum.
Then came the state’s brutal crackdown.
How close the regime believed it was to falling remains difficult to determine, particularly as Iran remains largely cut off from the outside world.
One traditional way to gauge a regime’s vulnerability is by examining the ferocity of its response to unrest. Grim though it may be, one of the clearest measures of that response is the number of deaths.
Determining the death toll is not merely a way to assess the scale of threat faced by a regime.
It is also essential for justice for victims and accountability for perpetrators. Yet such calculations are notoriously difficult.
Exaggerated and understated casualty figures have been features of armed conflicts throughout history.
In conventional wars, combatants tend to minimise their own losses while inflating those of the enemy to bolster morale and project success.
During internal uprisings, however, the pattern is often reversed.
Governments understate casualties to avoid appearing indiscriminate in killing citizens, while dissidents inflate figures to provoke outrage. Iran’s regime has, at different points, occupied both sides of this divide.
During the 1978-79 revolution that overthrew the shah and established Iran’s Islamic government, one of the earliest outbreaks of violence occurred in the north-western city of Tabriz in February 1978.
After forces suppressed the unrest, the shah’s government initially reported six deaths, while opposition groups claimed hundreds.
Such dramatic disparities became common during the revolution, with opposition claims often five to twenty times higher than official figures.
Observers frequently responded with what is known as the “false dilemma”, assuming the true figure must lie somewhere between the two.
In Iran’s case, this tendency largely favoured the opposition, convincing many that the conflict was far bloodier and the shah’s forces far more brutal than later evidence suggested.
After the revolution, a commission appointed by the new Islamic government calculated the death toll at 2,781.
By then, however, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was routinely asserting that as many as 60,000 “shahids”, or martyrs, had died.
Today, the Iranian regime finds itself defending its own casualty figures.
The latest unrest began with the collapse of the Iranian rial and spiralling inflation, prompting shopkeepers in Tehran to protest on Dec. 28.
Within days, demonstrations spread across the country, drawing thousands and eventually millions.
By Jan. 21, with order partially restored, the state announced that 3,117 people had died, including several hundred members of the security forces.
That figure differs sharply from estimates by international media organisations and rights groups.
Relying on video fragments and clandestine communications from inside Iran, the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates more than 6,800 deaths.
Time magazine, citing two unidentified senior Health Ministry officials, has reported figures as high as 30,000.
The regime’s history of violent suppression offers some context.
forces killed several dozen demonstrators. During the suppression of the Women, Life, Freedom movement beginning in 2022, many estimates placed the death toll at around 550.
In Rasht, a city with about 766,000 residents, the Human Rights Activists News Agency has documented at least 392 deaths.
If such losses occurred in Rasht, it raises questions about the likely toll in Tehran, the epicentre of the protests. Civilians across Iran have reported mass graves, overflowing morgues and individuals disappearing without a trace.
Also, estimates suggest as many as 300,000 people were wounded.
These figures may still fail to capture the full scale of violence. All of these point to a stark conclusion about how threatened the regime may have felt.
Whatever the final casualty count proves to be, the government may have carried out one of the deadliest state-sanctioned crackdowns on unarmed civilians in nearly half a century to ensure its survival.
Anderson is the author of 'King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation'
The New York Times