By Margherita Stancati and Benoit Faucon

A new wave of popular anger is rising in Iran, as people enraged by last month's mass killings of protesters vent their antipathy for the regime despite the risks of a continuing crackdown.

Mourning families are shouting antiregime slogans at funerals and memorials. Students are refusing to sing patriotic songs at school. Medical workers are publicly condemning the arrests of colleagues who treated people injured in the protests. And groups of local activists are openly calling for the fall of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The shows of defiance -- sometimes loud and risky, other times quiet and personal -- come as Iranians reckon with the full extent of January's violence and the government that ordered it. And they are cropping up even as the regime has carried out waves of arrests targeting protesters and their sympathizers, from relatives to medical workers to civil-rights activists.

"People are full of fear but also resentment," a woman from the city of Kermanshah said via text message. "We're all staring at the sky, hoping Trump will bomb us, just to destroy Khamenei and his regime. We're willing to die one by one, but we don't want our children to suffer our pain and torture."

The simmering dissent comes as President Trump is building up U.S. forces off Iran's coast for possible military action against the regime after warning it not to kill protesters. The U.S. and Iran have arranged to meet Friday in Oman to see if a diplomatic solution can be found

In Iran, funerals and memorial services have become occasions for Iranians to vent their anger, with crowds of mourners across the country shouting "Death to Khamenei!" University students in the cities of Mashhad, Tabriz and Shiraz held memorial events this week for fellow students who were killed during the recent unrest that turned into protests.

"A student who dies won't accept humiliation," a group of medical students chanted in Mashhad, according to a video verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Medical students in Shiraz held a sit-in for several days this week, chanting slogans in support of protesters who had been killed and doctors who were arrested for treating the injured, according to videos published on Telegram by the Free Union of Iranian Workers, a group of independent Iranian trade unions, and verified by Storyful.

"The imprisoned student must be released! The honorable doctor must be released!" they shouted.

High-school students are also engaging in collective acts of protest. A 17-year-old in Tehran told the Journal that students at their school are refusing to sing the national anthem in the morning.

When security forces were planning to search the school, the teacher warned her students in advance and advised anyone with injuries to stay at home to avoid arrest. The teacher also asked everyone to delete videos and photos with political content from their phones, the student said.

"The peaceful protest of people with ordinary demands was turned into dust and blood," said a public statement from the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers' Trade Associations, a labor union that is often critical of the government. "The grief has turned into a deep hatred in our hearts and bones."

A prominent Iranian actress, Elnaz Shakerdoost, announced she was quitting following the crackdown. "I will never again play a role in a land that smells of blood," she said on her Instagram account this week.

Well-known Iranian dissidents inside the country are openly calling for the end of the regime. Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, a prominent dissident who has been under house arrest in Tehran for years, said the scale of the killing shows the Islamic Republic cannot be reformed and must be replaced.

"When you were wearing the uniform of war against your own people, you were striking your own roots with an ax," Mousavi said. "Put down your gun and step down from power so that the nation itself can lead this land to freedom and prosperity."

The comments marked Mousavi's sharpest rebuke of the Islamic Republic to date. A former reformist politician, Mousavi emerged as a national opposition figure after the 2009 presidential election, which he claimed was rigged, triggering mass protests and eventually his arrest. His criticism has gradually intensified in recent years, with calls for a referendum on a constitutional assembly.

A group of 17 civil-society activists based in Iran published an open letter in which they described the mass killings as a government-led crime against humanity and said Khamenei was to blame.

"The main responsibility for this horrific situation lies with the person at the top and the repressive structure of the ruling Islamic Republic," the letter said.

After the letter was published, three of its signatories -- Vida Rabbani, Abdollah Momeni and Mehdi Mahmoudian -- were arrested, according to the Narges Foundation, which signed the letter on behalf of the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi.

Anyone speaking out against the government now is taking enormous risks, residents and rights activists said. Around 7,000 people have been confirmed killed since the demonstrations began in late December, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based rights group. More than 50,000 people have been arrested over the same period, it said.

Iranian authorities have acknowledged around 3,000 dead and the arrest of several hundred, describing them as rioters or terrorists, according to state media.

Many of the detained people were rounded up during the protests themselves, but others were arrested in their homes or while seeking medical treatment in the aftermath of the crackdown, said rights groups and local residents.

"After killing thousands of civilians, the Islamic Republic is now going house to house to punish those who dared to protest and crush any potential flicker of further resistance," said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran.

Armed men in plainclothes have raided hospitals across the country looking for the injured and taking them away, according to rights groups and a witness. The witness, a medical doctor contacted by the Journal, said he saw security forces taking injured protesters from his hospital in Tehran.

One woman was detained after she was shot with a pellet gun and went to a hospital in Tehran for treatment, a close friend said. She had been on her way home Jan. 8 and got caught in the crossfire, the friend said. Security forces saw her injuries and concluded she was a protester, the friend said.

Security forces have also detained doctors and nurses who treated injured protesters in hospitals, clinics or in makeshift medical centers, according to a witness, residents and rights groups.

Mohammad Raeeszadeh, the head of the Medical Council of Iran, the main regulatory body for the field, said in an interview with the semiofficial ISNA news agency that 17 medical workers were detained in the aftermath of the Jan. 8-9 crackdown. He said their cases were under investigation, and that they weren't merely accused of treating protesters.

Kiana Kasiri, who is part of a loose network of Iranian doctors abroad, said her group has documented the detention of more than 30 medical workers accused of treating protesters. Some of the workers were released on bail, she said.

Ali Reza Golchini, a cancer surgeon based in the city of Qazvin, near Tehran, posted a message on his Instagram account on Jan. 7 offering to treat injured protesters -- just as he had during the women's rights protests of 2022. Golchini was beaten and taken from his home by authorities, according to his cousin Neema Gulchini.

"We are very concerned," he said.

The arrest of medical workers has provoked outrage among Iranians and prompted the Medical Council to demand security for people working in healthcare.

"Healthcare workers -- based on their professional oath, their legal obligations and basic ethical standards -- have a duty to provide the necessary medical care to all patients in all circumstances, regardless of social, political, or security conditions," the council said Wednesday.

The teachers' group said that the killings and the continuing repression, together with the country's worsening economic problems, are bound to fuel more popular unrest.

"There will be no other option but to take to the streets and protest all-out against this deplorable situation and create solidarity and unity to end this daily oppression and tyranny," it said on its website.

The backlash is prompting Iran's rulers to back off in some high-profile instances to ease the pressure on the regime. At the end of January, authorities released on bail Erfan Soltani, a prominent protester whose family had feared he would be executed.

Over the weekend, the government also announced it would officially start issuing motorcycle licenses to women, the latest in a series of moves aimed at trying to win support by relaxing social rules.

The small concessions are unlikely to make much difference now. Merchants at Tehran's Grand Bazaar -- where the protests first flared up in late December -- called on shopkeepers nationwide to take to the streets again on Feb. 17-18, days that mark the end of the traditional 40-day mourning period for killings that occurred Jan. 8-9.

"We invite the noble people of Iran across the country to simultaneously, in their cities, keep the memory of the dead alive and continue the national uprising," a trade association of bazaar workers said on its Telegram channel. The goal, the statement said, was to "avenge the greatest street massacre in contemporary history."

Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 05, 2026 23:00 ET (04:00 GMT)

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