For more than a fortnight, new names and faces have been added to the roll call of Iranians who have been killed fighting for their freedom.
Scrolling through the online lists, which are being compiled by human rights advocates scouring horrific videos, photos and eyewitness testimonies trickling out of Iran despite the regime's internet blackout, there was a striking feature.
The number of young Iranians confirmed as having been shot dead in the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters by the Islamic Republic's security forces continued to rise, seemingly daily.
One organisation, Hengaw, has documented those killed. Among them was a promising football player, aged 17, and two female students at Tehran University aged 19 and 21.
A 22-year-old Kurdish man was also killed. His family had been told they would have to pay more than $35,000 to take custody of his body.
A 39-year-old former bodybuilder was shot, so too a 40-year-old mother of two.
The massive crowds rising up against the hard-line mullahs and their supporters in the Iranian regime, while representing people from across the spectrum, had been bolstered by the country's younger generations.
The vast majority of Iran's 92 million people have no lived memory of the revolution which installed Islamic rule, and they were born well after the monarchy, which fell in 1979 — their futures stymied by a government acting in its own interests and an economy buckling under global sanctions.
"It is a younger population that is connected online, sees what the world looks like, and understands that their freedoms are being restricted in the country," Gissou Nia, an American Iranian human rights lawyer and director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council told the ABC.
"Many of them are unable to get employment, they're really struggling to construct a life when they cannot function under the freefalling currency, the massive inflation, and in the poor economic situation in the country."
Many of the protesters have invoked the name of the son of the former shah, exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi while marching through the streets.
"It's really just a wholesale rejection of the system," Ms Nia said.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, agreed.
"We are definitely witnessing a pathway towards a breaking point in Iran, and the creation of doubt within the security echelons as well as within the Iranian elites," he said.
'Perfect storm' of problems
While the broader global population may have only cottoned on to the recent unrest in Iran in the dying days of 2025 — when video of rare public dissent in Tehran's Grand Bazaar started circulating on social media — it has been percolating for much longer.
Some analysts have described the current situation as something of a "perfect storm" for the regime.
There has been anger at the corruption and economic mismanagement it had allowed to permeate through the country, fuelling the cost-of-living crisis which has left many Iranians struggling to purchase basic groceries.
That has been on top of recent dangerous environmental developments, including thick pollution choking Iranian cities, and water shortages which have been so serious the country's president had even floated a potential evacuation of Tehran if the taps ran dry.
All of that is layered over underlying frustration and fear of the oppressive social ideology the regime has enforced on the population for decades, which has fuelled previous protests.
They included the Women, Life, Freedom movement launched in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran's morality police, which had arrested her for not wearing an appropriate hijab or head covering.
"All of the young people and millennials, too, actually grew up in a world in which they've only ever known the Islamic Republic and the kind of repression that this regime has meted out from its inception onwards, and they're fed up," Kylie Moore-Gilbert told the ABC.
The Australian academic spent more than two years languishing in an Iranian jail, before Australian officials secured her release in a complicated multi-country prisoner exchange.
"This young generation is not on board with the revolutionary Islamist ideology of the regime," she said.
"And they've shown that again and again by taking to the streets in increasing frequency of protests just in the past decade alone."
'Most of them were shot in the head on purpose'
The Iranians who have taken to the streets have quickly learned the regime's ruthless security forces do not discriminate on age and gender, when trying to suppress the uprising.
British-based Iranian doctor Shahram Kordasti has been in contact with fellow medicos on the ground in Iran.
The testimonies he heard were shocking, painting a picture of a medical system under immense strain given the deluge of patients seeking treatment for serious injuries.
"They think that most of them were shot in the head on purpose, and therefore there were a lot of eye injuries, a lot death unfortunately," he told the ABC.
"If you have one or two cases [of head or eye injuries], by itself, it's difficult, but at least you don't have that many and you can somehow manage.
"But when you have in terms of numbers, when you have hundreds of them, even a specialist hospital will struggle to even give the primary care.
"They had people from security forces in the hospital, so people were very scared and they were arrested in the hospital, and also on a few occasions they fired tear gas into the hospital to get the wounded people out and arrest them."
Professor Kordasti said that was before the regime imposed the internet blackout across the country, as it ratcheted up its efforts to regain control of the streets.
The situation since, based on the limited information emerging from Iran, sounded incredibly dire.
"This time they had a lot of people that were basically wounded by a live round — and imagine in the hospital, it was like a war zone," he said.
"They couldn't call their colleagues because the telephones were cut off, and then the on-call doctors had difficulty to reach the hospital, and one of the colleagues was wounded on her way to the hospital."
Regime's lies lead to US, Israel
Dr Moore-Gilbert described the efforts to stop the protesters as a "blood bath".
"In previous rounds of protest we've seen many, many people killed but nothing of the scale of the past week or so in Iran," she said.
"I think 500-odd protesters were killed in the 2022 to 2023 Woman Life Freedom protests, and that happened over many, many months."
Ms Nia said it was "following the Syria playbook".
"It's following what Bashar al-Assad did in 2011 when there was a call for freedom from Syrian people and he brutally repressed those protests," she said.
"We just haven't seen something on this scale as we're seeing now.
"It's no surprise that the Islamic Republic of Iran, actually who sent pro Islamic Republic militias to Syria to enforce that violence, to help torture those who were in detention, to kill dissidents, they were very much implicated in the acts of Syria and helped inspire a lot of the repressive tactics, and they no doubt took a bit of that brutal know-how in applying what they've done in these current protests."
The Iranian regime has sought to downplay the efforts of the protesters by accusing foreign actors, particularly the United States and Israel, of fuelling the unrest.
Senior officials have gone so far as to say people taking part in the protests, planted there by foreign governments, were the ones shooting at other demonstrators.
But some analysts argue that is simply a version of a tried and tested defence put up by the Iranian authorities.
"In 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from Paris in order to establish the Islamic Republic by the Islamic Revolution, they accused Israel and the United States, the United States of being the 'Big Satan' and Israel of being the 'Little Satan,'" Dr Diker told the ABC.
"Since that moment in 1979, for decades since, they have accused Israel of being the cancer of the world, they have the accused the United States of being the arrogant power.
"Their criticisms really carry very little moral weight because they didn't need any excuse in order to kidnap 53 American hostages in 1979 and hold them for 444 days until president Ronald Regan became president."
However, Dr Diker conceded there would be considerable benefit for countries such as the US and Israel if the regime was to fall, and that recent actions, including the bombing of Iran's nuclear and military facilities during the 12-day Israel-Iran war, had played a part in getting to this point.
"There's a great benefit to Israel — it's called survivability and strength and helping create security, stability, and prosperity for the entire Middle East," he said.
Regime rattled, but not deposed
The support for the Pahlavi dynasty by protesters is not surprising to Iran watchers.
"There's a lot of nostalgia for an era that they didn't live in," Ms Nia said.
"There are videos and photos circulated online of women who do not have to be in mandatory hijab, and can be in the style of the dress as they choose, and Iran's entertainment at the time that had women singing publicly, which now, of course, a woman singing publicly, solo, is actually illegal.
"This is also promoted by diaspora media stations that promote this kind of content, so I don't think it's too shocking that there's like a hearkening for a time when there was more social freedoms, when it seemed like there was more economic prosperity and that Iran was actually part of a global community of countries and not a sort of rogue state."
But she insisted there were other leaders in Iran who could take the reins in the event of the regime falling.
"Iran has never had the space, the political space and freedom to allow that kind of political leadership to take root," Ms Nia said.
"The Nobel Peace Prize laureate from 2023, Narges Mohammadi, who is an incredible longtime human rights activist and champion — she's in prison right now in Iran, so Iran jails its best and brightest.
"Reza Pahlavi has offered to lead a transition for the country, has always emphasised that that transition will be to transition Iran to a democracy — so he is not intending to take monarchical rule, he is really looking to help the Iranian people realise their dreams of democracy."
Dr Moore-Gilbert believed there were still several moments required for the Islamic regime to fall.
"I think that the main factor to watch for is any kind splintering within the regime, either within the constituency … probably around 10 per cent of the population that's on board with the Islamic Republic, and is that core support base of the regime, or a split within the political elites or the military or IRGC," she said.
"This could be, as we've seen in other revolutions, soldiers refusing to fire on protesters or defections from prominent generals or prominent military leaders or political leaders over to the side of the protesters.
"And so far, that hasn't happened.
"As long as the support behind the security forces and the regime is cohesive, and there are no breakdowns of that, that bulk of support, I think it's going to be really, really hard for the unarmed people on the streets to take on the ones who have the monopoly on violence and all the guns."
