OVED LOBEL: There is still time for the United States to save thousands of Iranians from a nightmarish fate

It appears that the United States failed to militarily intervene in Iran in time to save the reportedly tens of thousands of Iranian protesters murdered by the regime between late December and mid-January.

There is still time, however, for the US — currently building up its forces around Iran — to try to save some of the estimated more than 40,000 arrested, and their families, from a nightmarish fate.

The death toll claims coming out of Iran are staggering, with some sources claiming anywhere from more than 20,000 to nearly 40,000 or more deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries.

The regime itself has admitted to more than 3000 deaths, including hundreds of security personnel, and released a list of 2986 names. This has been rejected by journalists, who have documented at least 6634 individuals killed in the protests so far.

Reports allege the regime is now engaged in an extensive cover-up, with mass burials and scores of bodies disappearing from forensic facilities. It also reportedly used the bodies to extort family members, demanding thousands of dollars to hand them over.

One witness to a massacre in Rasht said, “I know people who took their (dead) children not to a hospital or an official doctor because they’re afraid that (authorities) would seize their bodies and not give it back to them.”

As they did in 2022, regime security forces have also allegedly aimed at the eyes of protesters with metal pellets and rubber bullets in order to systematically blind those who aren’t killed.

A single hospital in Tehran documented more than 400 eye injuries from this campaign. Protesters were also reportedly streaming into hospitals with severe stab wounds to the chest, eyes and genitals.

Many of the wounded refused to go to hospital out of terror. One surgeon in Iran wrote that it was because “they knew what happens afterwards… hospitals receive official letters from security institutions demanding patient information — names, details, injuries. If administrators refuse, they face serious consequences.”

Instead of showing up to the hospital, he said, patients called him directly.

Now, tens of thousands of innocents, including children, likely await the most horrific punishments, including systematic rape and sexual violence, torture, maiming and death.

Iran has the world’s highest known per capita execution rate. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk recently said there had been a 50 per cent increase in executions in 2025, with at least 1500 executed.

Under the regime’s penal code, males as young as 15 and females as young as nine can be executed, and scores of children have been sentenced to death.

Capital crimes include “insulting the Prophet”, “spreading corruption on earth”, apostasy, same-sex relations, adultery, drug-related offences and financial corruption.

Short of death, the barbaric penal code also provides for crucifixion, forced amputation and blinding, flogging and stoning. Political prisoners, including foreign hostages like Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, are tortured via long-term solitary confinement.

Detained protesters are also reportedly forced to take antidepressants or antipsychotic drugs. Forced, televised confessions after physical and psychological torture are rampant.

Iranian state broadcaster Press TV was sanctioned by Australia for this practice in September 2023.

But perhaps the most chilling element of regime punishment is the long-standing and well-documented use of rape and sexual violence against men, women and children to quell protests.

CNN documented this phenomenon in November 2022, including: the rape of at least one underage boy, and likely more; and the fact that some sexual assaults at detention sites are filmed to then blackmail protesters.

In some cases, security officials reportedly threatened to rape family members, including bringing them to the prison, in order to extract confessions.

In early 2023, Amnesty International reported on the systemic torture, including sexual violence, of detainees as young as 12.

The report asserted that “state agents used rape and other sexual violence, including electric shocks to genitals, touching genitals, and rape threats as a weapon against child detainees to break their spirits, humiliate and punish them, and/or extract ‘confessions’”.

Also in early 2023, CNN again reported on the network of secret torture sites used alongside the official detention and prison system to crush the protests, with allegations of violent beatings, floggings, removal of nails, electrocutions and rape of both males and females, including with batons, on an industrial scale.

Reports are already emerging of women being raped, mutilated and burned during the current protests.

Already in 2009, during the so-called “Green Revolution”, a defecting member of the thuggish Basij paramilitary force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told Channel 4 about not only their explicit orders to crush dissent by any means necessary through indiscriminate violence, but also that they were told to round up dozens of children, who were thrown into containers and raped.

It is already too late for thousands of Iranians, but there are still tens of thousands awaiting death, forced amputation, blinding, stoning, flogging, crucifixion, violent beatings, rape and other forms of horrendous torture who can be saved by timely military intervention by the US.

Oved Lobel is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council