Crimson Winter: Recording Fifty Days of Nationwide Protests in Iran from December to February 2025-2026

HRANA News Agency – "The Crimson Winter: A Report on the First Fifty Days Following the Start of Nationwide Protests in Iran (December 28, 2025 – February 15, 2026)" was published today. This report was prepared by the Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA) and documents the first fifty days following the onset of the protests starting from December 28.

This approximately 1,350-page report is the result of a coordinated, multi-departmental effort among various units of the Human Rights Activists, including the HRANA News Agency, the Judiciary Initiative, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Documentation Initiative, and the organization's Statistics Unit. This work records and preserves a structured narrative of the initial phase of the nationwide protests in December and February in Iran and the government's response.

The report's findings are based on over 143,330 HRANA reports from dedicated and open sources, collected, verified, and analyzed over the 50-day period.

Find the full version of the report at the original source.

Why This Report and Why Now?

Widespread protest cycles typically generate two parallel trends:
1. An unprecedented volume of documentation.
2. A coordinated effort by government authorities to restrict communications, shape narratives, and intimidate sources.

In such circumstances, the primary danger is not merely the undercounting of human rights violations, but the loss of the ability to verify identities, locations, dates, and patterns at a time when evidence can still be recovered and secured.

This report is grounded in a rigorous human rights methodology that focuses on recording "minimum verifiable cases" rather than publishing maximum estimates. Findings are presented only where overlapping and confirmed evidence exists, even though the true scope of violations likely exceeds what could be verified in real time.

This publication is designed both as a public record and as an archival infrastructure for legal analysis and future accountability processes.

Report Contents

This report examines the first fifty days of the protests, focusing on central accountability questions:

1. How did the protests form and how did they expand geographically?
2. How and through what structures did government forces respond?
3. What forms of harm and violations occurred?
4. How did communication outages affect the access, quality, and verification of information?
5. In an environment of heavy surveillance and restricted access, how was content authenticated and matched?
6. How was the risk of manipulated, fake, or AI-generated content identified and managed?
7. How can the documented patterns be analyzed from a legal perspective?
8. How can records—especially the identities of victims and detainees—be preserved without increasing risk?

Various sections of the report address protest trends and their geography, university protests, slogans, the structure and tools of repression, patterns of violations (including killings, injuries, detentions, forced confessions, pressure on families, and violations of medical neutrality), legal analysis, international reactions, and the mobilization of the Human Rights Activists' documentation mechanisms.

At the core of this report are two main axes:

• 1 – The verified recording of those killed, including children.
• 2 – The documented recording of detainees, including minors, students, and mass arrests.

Key Findings

Geographic Scope

▫️Total protest locations: 682
▫️Total unique cities: 203
▫️Total unique provinces: 31

The geographic distribution indicates that both the protests and the government's response were nationwide in nature.

Student Protests

▫️Documented university protests: 55
▫️Universities involved in protests: 36

Universities became central civic spaces at the heart of the protest movement and consequently in the government response.

Casualties: Dimensions and Composition

During the first fifty days covered by this report, consolidated documentation has recorded the following:

▫️Killed protesters: 6,488
▫️Killed children (counted separately and not included among protesters): 236
▫️Killed civilians (non-protesters): 76
▫️Killed military and government forces: 207
▫️Total casualties: 7,007

Additionally, 11,744 cases remain under review and are not included in the final confirmed statistics.

Separately, eight civilian deaths resulting from clashes between citizens in public places have also been documented.

The categorization has been intentionally broken down. Distinguishing between protesters, children, non-protesting civilians, and government or pro-government forces prevents analytical mixing and allows for more precise legal and statistical interpretation.

These figures represent the minimum verifiable cases in conditions where comprehensive access was not possible.

Injuries

▫️Injured military and security personnel: 4,884
▫️Injured civilians: 25,846

These statistics demonstrate the scope of violence beyond confirmed fatalities and outline the overall dimensions of harm.

Detentions

▫️Total detentions: 53,777 cases
▫️Detained children, adolescents, and students: 555
▫️Detained university students: 147

Detention statistics include cases where individuals' identities were specifically recorded as well as confirmed mass detentions; in many instances, publishing names was either not possible or posed risks.

Forced Confessions

▫️Documented forced confessions: 369

The report analyzes forced confessions as a systematic tool for intimidation and narrative control in an environment of intense surveillance and media restriction.

Summonses

▫️Documented summonses: 11,053

Summonses served as a parallel mechanism for exerting legal pressure, extending the scope of government control beyond formal detention.

List of the Deceased: Methodology and Protection

Appendix "A" contains the list of the deceased. Decisions regarding the publication of information are made based on a protection-oriented approach; meaning that the public interest of publishing information is weighed against the risk of retaliation against families, witnesses, and reporters to strike the necessary balance.

Where names have been published, the following information has been included to the extent possible:

▫️Age
▫️Location of incident
▫️Documentation indicators used in verification
▫️Sources

In cases where a third party was cited as the primary source, HRANA independently verified the information through its own reporting network.

Where publishing information could create unacceptable risk, these cases are included in the confirmed statistics and maintained in secure documentation systems for accountability purposes.

This list is the result of a structured, multi-step verification process designed to maintain an accurate public record while preventing increased risk to individuals inside the country.

Legal Assessment and Significance for Accountability

This report includes a preliminary legal assessment identifying documented patterns as potential violations of international human rights law and, where thresholds are met, examines them within the framework of international criminal law.

Patterns of lethal force usage, mass detentions, forced confessions, and other violations have been analyzed within the framework of legal standards concerning:

▫️Right to life
▫️Fair trial
▫️Freedom of expression and assembly
▫️Prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment

By relying on verified names, dates, locations, and patterns, this report links documentation to concrete pathways of accountability.