Hengaw published its 8th war casualties report on approximately 28 March: 6,900 killed, including 720 civilians, in the first month of war.1 The publication resolved five days of silence that had prompted concern about the group's operational capacity. The civilian daily death rate has risen to approximately 20 per day, double the pace of the first three weeks.
The casualty figure came in below the projected range of 7,300 to 7,800 from the previous update. The gap may reflect degraded network access inside Iran, a methodological review, or an overestimated projection rate. Hengaw's methodology has been the conflict's most consistent independent tracking, and the lower figure does not diminish its significance.
The more consequential finding received almost no international coverage. On 26 March, Hengaw documented at least 1,700 wartime arrests. More than 300 are Kurdish, detained across five border provinces: Ilam, Kermanshah, Kurdistan, West Azerbaijan, and Tehran. Seventy identities have been verified. The Kurdish concentration is not random. These are Iran's western border provinces with Iraq and Turkey, historically the regions where IRGC control is most fragile during military stress.
The pattern echoes the crackdowns that followed the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022, when Kurdistan province led the uprising. But this time the arrests happen under the cover of a shooting war, with the Supreme Leader invisible for 17 days and 93,000 civilian properties already damaged. the government that has sustained over 10,000 air strikes on its territory is simultaneously suppressing its own population. The external war and the internal one feed each other.
