None The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of popular uprising was met with ruthless violence by the clerical regime, resulting in significant loss of life. Thousands of protesters are believed to have been killed within only a few days. Meanwhile, Iran remains largely isolated from the global internet, as authorities enforce a near-total communications blackout to conceal the scale of the nationwide protests and brutal crackdown.  At the time of writing, media are saturated with images of bloodshed, corpses, and destroyed buildings and present an exhibition of necropolitical victimhood. Human rights organizations are engaged in a race to produce casualty figures, reducing human suffering to a spectacle of statistics. Western leaders are, in turn, manoeuvring...