When Iran turns off the internet, it is never to restore order.
It is to erase the record.
As of Friday, January 9, 2026, the country is effectively offline. Independent network monitors show connectivity at roughly five percent of normal levels. International phone lines are largely dead. Tehran’s main airport is closed. Air defense systems have been activated across multiple regions.
This is not crisis management. This is preparation.
Darkness Is Not Neutral , It Is a Weapon
Iran has learned this lesson the hard way before. In November 2019, the regime imposed a nationwide blackout that lasted six days. During those six days, the world saw almost nothing. When the lights came back on, it became clear that roughly 1,500 people had been killed.
What makes this moment more dangerous is not memory , it is scale and speed.
The current blackout is broader, affecting all 31 provinces. And unlike 2019, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Ground Forces are already on the streets less than two weeks into the unrest. This time, the military did not wait.
That alone tells you the regime believes it is fighting for survival.
The Rial Broke the Spell
Every uprising has a trigger. This one was not ideology. It was arithmetic.
When the rial collapsed past 1.4 million to the U.S. dollar, something snapped that propaganda could not repair. Prices stopped meaning anything. Wages became fiction. Savings vanished.
The moment the Grand Bazaar shut down, the regime lost its last illusion of stability. Bazaar merchants are not romantics. They are survivalists. When they close their shops, it is because the future has become more dangerous than resistance.
That alliance merchants and students moving together , is the nightmare scenario Tehran has spent decades trying to prevent.
This Is Not Random Violence. It Is Evidence Removal.
The most chilling reports are not coming from the streets. They are coming from hospitals.
In Ilam, Lorestan, Kermanshah, and Tehran, security forces have been filmed entering emergency wards. The wounded are dragged from beds. The dead are taken before they can be logged. Families are warned into silence or forced into nighttime burials.
This is not crowd control.
This is a calculated liquidation.
By removing bodies before they become records, the regime keeps the death toll artificially low.
A person who never reaches a morgue never becomes a statistic. They remain “missing.”
As of today, at least 45 deaths have been independently verified.
More than 2,200 people are listed as arrested or missing.
That ratio is the story.
In Iran, “detained” often means “disappeared.” And history shows that when the missing list grows this fast during a blackout, many of those names are already dead.
The Military Is Doing the Shooting Now
Police hesitate. Paramilitaries fracture. Armies obey. That is why the deployment of IRGC Ground Forces matters more than any speech. Reports from western provinces describe live ammunition, snipers, and the widespread use of shotguns loaded with metal pellets.
These are not tools for dispersal; they are hunting tools. Metal pellets are designed to shred internal organs and blind protesters, creating a generation of "marked" survivors and ensuring that many of those hit never make it to a hospital, they simply bleed out in the shadows of the blackout.
Once a state hands domestic order to a military using this level of "hunting" ammunition, it has accepted mass casualties not as a mistake, but as a deliberate objective.
Trump, the World, and the Regime’s Fear
External pressure has only hardened Tehran’s response.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s warnings blunt and unusually explicit have reinforced the regime’s belief that this uprising is not just domestic dissent but a prelude to foreign intervention.
That belief does not restrain violence; it accelerates it.
The United Nations has expressed concern. Europe has asked for internet access. None of it changes the calculation on the ground, where the regime believes time is measured in hours, not statements.
When a government closes airports, activates air defenses, and cuts the internet at once, it is not de-escalating. It is sealing the room.
What the Darkness Is For
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote:
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”
Iran is now doing both.
The blackout is not meant to last forever. It only needs to last long enough. Long enough to break coordination. Long enough to empty the streets. Long enough to make the missing untraceable.
The regime is not turning off the lights to hide what it is doing.
It is turning them off so it can work in the dark.
And when the internet finally comes back because it always does, the 2,200 who are missing will not be waiting in jail cells.
They will be the silent foundations of a new set of mass graves.
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