I am so grateful for this podcast from the London Review of Books on the Iran uprising and massacres of 2026. It’s more lucid and clarifying than anything else I have heard so far. Chowra Makaremi and Amir Ahmadi Arian say important things here which I have not heard so clearly stated elsewhere.

I used the transcription feature of my podcast player to generate the below transcript from a crucial part of the conversation, where Arian addresses the challenges of documenting the numbers of Iranians who were killed by the state in the past few weeks. He notes that the official number, 3,117, has suspiciously appeared before in unrelated crises, which suggests it is fabricated.

Meanwhile, human rights groups such as HRANA have verified 6,000+ names and are investigating tens of thousands more. Those who treat the state’s official numbers as credible during a communications blackout repeat the same mistakes made with Syria. See the below transcript, which I have lightly edited for clarity.

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Adam Shatz: Amir, you wanted to talk about another set of rumors that have been at play. And these are the rumors around the number of people who've been killed. We were hearing figures of 2,000 or 3,000. Then it was 12,000 or 13,000. Now it's as high as 50,000. 3,000, then it was 12 or 13,000. Now it's as high as 50,000. And I suppose that that opacity also intensifies these patterns of fear, suspicion, etc.

Amir Ahmadi Arian: Yeah, I mean, this opacity is obviously engineered. It's the result of the communication blackout. So why did they cut off the internet? The internet shutdown is costing the country several billion dollars a day. Almost 7-8% of the Iranian economy is digital now. And in a country that is so desperate for some sort of economic growth, some sort of economic reform, this is hugely costly and risky to the government.

So the fact that they are paying this price to weaponize silence, to engineer the image of the massacre that they did, to hope for mudding the water and see what happens next, it shows that they have a lot to hide.

So what they did was they came out with a number, 3,117. Fox News Agency and other news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards put out that number: 3,117.

Then I was looking at Twitter. Some people looked up that number and found out interesting stuff. The same news agency, Fars [on] March 2020, had news about alcohol poisoning in Iran. As you know, alcohol is not allowed, so there's been an underground market for that. And there's a lot of bad alcohol, like industrial alcohol sold. And a lot of people have died over years. So then people found out that in that year, 2020, March 3,117 people have died, 2020. A few months later, another headline, 3,117 people died of coronavirus in that year.

So this is, I mean, this is a random number, right? 3,117 people died of alcohol poisoning, of coronavirus, and now of, you know, during the uprising. So you really wonder what's going on here, you know? And, you know, there are some explanations for that.

As you know, occult is a big part of the ideology of the people, you know, came out of that revolution. So there are [mystical] letterism explanations about what that number means. And there's in the Quran, if you look at Surah 31 and verse 17, there's a message there. So there's all kinds of stuff out there.

But all this to say that this number is made up, it's clearly made up.

If that [number] came up several times before in these other contexts, it means that either that the guy who's in charge of producing these numbers doesn't have a good memory or they are really trying to send a message.

[As to] the fact that this number is being taken so seriously, outside Iran in a communication blackout, there are so many people who should know better, [who are] referring to that as the reliable number of casualties, it blows my mind.

There are, all these other human rights organizations have been working on Iran for many, many years. One of the most credible ones, they have the names of more than 6,000 people. So it's perfectly verified. They have reports of 17,000 more people that are verifiable. They're working on that. So at least I think it's in the 20,000s, and it's probably more than that.

It blows my mind that in this situation, there is a communication blackout. There is no internet there. The only people who have access to the internet, high-speed internet in Iran, are the propagandists of the Islamic Republic and Mr. [Abbas] Aragchi is a foreign minister.

And the fact that those [sources] are taken at their word, that they're being covered in the media, especially in a more left-leaning media, it's very dangerous. And it reminds me of what happened in Syria.

Syrians were begging the world to see what Assad was doing to them. And people tended to turn a blind eye and say […] Assad is our strategic ally against Israel and so on. They're making the same mistake about Iran right now.