Six months after Iran’s January 8–9 massacre, in which opposition-linked estimates and evidence from inside Iran place the number of dead at between 35,000 and 40,000, The Jerusalem Post is publishing profiles of some of those killed, based on testimony provided by their families.
Among them was Ahmad Heidarian, a 23-year-old mechanic from Nishapur who lived in Mashhad with his mother.
His mother told the Post that the two of them lived alone together. Ahmad worked repairing commercial vehicles and trucks, and she remembers him through the physical marks of that work: hands cut from labor and darkened by engine oil.
“My son was more innocent and pure than anything else,” she told the Post. “He worked as a mechanic; his hands were always covered in cuts and blackened with engine oil.”
But he was also young, in love, and full of plans for the future.
“My son was in love,” his mother said. “He was full of dreams and hopes. But he took all of those dreams with him to the grave.”
Heidarian shot in the head
On the evening of January 7, the night before he was killed, his mother cooked for him. She made chicken with barberry rice and washed his clothes.
“I had no idea that the following evening my child would be lying on the bare asphalt of the street, dying,” she told the Post.
On January 8, Ahmad went outside. His mother said he was killed by a deliberate gunshot to the head.
“They effectively executed my child,” she told the Post.
For 10 days, she did not know where he was. It was only on January 18, she said, that she found his blood-soaked body at Behesht-e Reza Cemetery in Mashhad, where he was later buried.
Six months is years of suffering
Six months later, his mother said time has not moved normally. What the calendar marks as half a year has felt to her like years of suffering.
“You speak of six months, but to me those six months have felt like six years of torment,” she said. “Every night I lie awake until dawn. This is no longer a life.”
Ahmad’s mother said justice, for her, is inseparable from the fall of the regime and accountability for those who killed Iran’s young people.
“Justice will come only on the day when the murderers of our children are executed one by one - on the day this regime is overthrown and destroyed,” she said.
For his mother, Ahmad was her son, the young mechanic she fed, clothed, and lived beside; the 23-year-old whose hands bore the marks of honest work and the young man in love whose dreams ended on the asphalt.
“His name was Ahmad Heidarian,” she said. “I am his mother.”