Cora Engelbrecht

One of the people who spoke with me is a young man who works in a hospital about four hours north of Tehran.

This hospital worker was stationed in two different emergency wards during the peak of the regime's lethal crackdown on nationwide demonstrations in January.

In the weeks since, he has sent me evidence he collected of hundreds of casualties, many of them trauma injuries, from these emergency wards where he was stationed.

Can you hear me?

How are you feeling?

This is an activist who lives in Tehran.

She's in her 20s.

She was actually in prison during the Women Live Freedom protests in 2022.

Over the past few weeks, she's been attending a lot of funerals commemorating people who were killed in January.

For years, she told me she would have never dreamed of supporting foreign intervention.

But now, faced over and over again with the undeniable brutality of the violence from the past months, she's shifted her view.

She can't help but want some kind of action from the United States, which would eliminate the regime.

Yes.

This woman is an activist in her mid-30s, and she told me she's participated in every political uprising, starting with the Green Movement in 2009.

She was in her teens then, so her whole adult life she's been protesting the current regime.

She said that the 12-day war in June with the United States and Israel was still fresh in her mind and had actually made her more cautious about joining the demonstrations in late December.

Like many I spoke with, she expressed some distrust and skepticism for the royalist movement that has surged around the former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

He's the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, and he hasn't been in the country since 1978.

When you say that Tehran was more affected than other cities, what are you referring to?

Are you referring to the 12-day war?