The siege of Shaykh Tabarsi did not end in a final assault that overwhelmed the defenders by force. By May 1849, both sides were exhausted, the besieging commanders offered the remaining Babis a sworn guarantee of safe passage if they laid down their arms and left the fort, and Quddus, weighing the offer against a starving and depleted garrison, accepted it on his followers' behalf. The promise was broken almost immediately: as the Babis emerged from the fort, most were killed, and the survivors who were not killed outright were taken captive and, in several documented cases, executed afterward in nearby towns.
That betrayal, rather than the siege's military details, is what the episode is chiefly remembered for in later Babi and Baha'i historiography, treated as an early and defining instance of a pattern the movement would face repeatedly in its first decade: persecution conducted not only through open violence but through broken assurances extended specifically to induce surrender. The martyrs of Tabarsi occupy a place in Babi and Baha'i collective memory comparable to founding persecution narratives in other new religious movements, a foundational story of betrayal and sacrifice that later generations invoke to explain why the movement's early history reads as it does, and why so many of its formative sites, this fort among them, no longer survive as anything but a documented location and a name.