The field in front of Tehran's Kahrizak Forensic Institute seems to be loaded with dead bodies. Amid widespread protests and a communications blackout, images of the site are only available in videos physically smuggled out of Iran or uploaded to the Internet via Starlink satellites.

"I would guess there are thousands dead, at any case," an eyewitness who recently visited Iran told DW.

The man described going to Kahrizak with a friend to identify and retrieve his friend's wife's body.

"On the previous evening, you could hear automatic gunfire in the part of the city I was visiting. My friend and his wife were at a protest. The wife was shot," he told DW.

It is impossible to know how many people have been killed in the Iranian protests, which started over two weeks ago. The internet has been down for days, and any communication with the outside world is severely limited.

An Iranian official told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday that some 2,000 people were dead. However, the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights organization reported a death toll of at least 3,379 people on Wednesday. Activists believe that the actual number of protesters killed across Iran is much higher.

The Iranian authorities also detained over 10,000 people in the latest wave of protests. Government critics are worried that many of the detainees could be put on show trials and sentenced to death.

Regime decries protesters as 'criminals'

Meanwhile, pro-regime media in Iran regularly label the protesters as "terrorists" and foreign agents. This week, Iranian Justice Minister Amin Hossein Rahimi referred to people arrested between January 8 and 11 as "criminals."

Iranian authorities don't rely only on the police to suppress the protests. The Basij — a volunteer paramilitary faction controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — was established specifically to deal with street protests. The IRGC itself is directly controlled by the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with the main goal of protecting the Islamic Revolution and its achievements.

Basij militants attend religious indoctrination programs to ensure their commitment to the idea of morality preached by the regime. They have a reputation for being especially loyal to the political system and also provide Iran's hardliners with a stable voter base.

Is there any hope of reform in Iran?

"We have tried everything to achieve change in this system," religious scholar and journalist Mohammad Javad Akbarin told DW. Akbarin, who now lives in France, previously worked for 15 pro-reform papers in Iran and was arrested multiple times when he still lived in his home country.

He does not see any possibility of reforming the Iranian regime. Together with Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and four other prominent government critics, he has demanded a US intervention in Iran.

"The protesters are stuck behind closed doors and under a digital blackout, without a realistic way of escaping this situation," he said. "As soon as the internet comes back online, we will see horrible images."

Trump says killing in Iran 'stopped'

The fact that protesters are willing to defy massive repression and still take to the streets shows the depth of popular discontent. At the same time, Iran's power structure is not showing visible cracks and fast, wide-reaching changes appear unlikely.

On Wednesday January 14, Donald Trump announced that "the killing in Iran is stopping, it's stopped." Trump cited "very important sources on the other side" and said there was "no plan for executions."

The comments came only a day after Trump urged Iranians to "keep protesting" and take over Iranian institutions, assuring them that "help is on its way."

Whether Trump is willing to actually help the protesters, and what kind of help he would be willing to provide, is anyone's guess.

Amnesty calls on UN Security Council to act

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on the UN and its members to coordinate a response and prevent further bloodshed. This call also included an appeal to the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court.

The US has called an emergency session of the Security Council on Thursday to discuss the deadly unrest in Iran. But any resolution or decision condemning Tehran is likely to be vetoed by China and Russia.

"We have seen this in similar cases, including Syria and Bashar Assad, despite hundreds of thousands of deaths," says lawyer Payam Akhavan.

The international law expert served as an adviser to the prosecutors working for international courts dealing with war crimes in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

"Under such circumstances, the focus should be on systematically gathering evidence and documents for future trials," he told DW. "The actual legal process can realistically only happen in a future democratic Iran."

The deadly repression meted out against protesters makes the prospects of democracy taking hold in Iran seem faint. But if Iran's recent history is anything to go by, brutally suppressing one uprising is not an effective way of averting the next one.

This article was originally written in German.