Videos of body bags give rare glimpse of Iran’s bloody crackdown
A man is covered in a bloody white shroud inside a body bag. Another lies nearby, his body sprawled on the tiled floor, his arms raised and blood smeared on his face.
Row upon row of other bodies surround them.
“It’s horrible. It’s the apocalypse,” said the man filming the scene in the warehouse of a forensic center near Tehran. “There are a lot of bodies.”
Iran has been largely cut off from the rest of the world for days, ever since its regime cut off the internet and severely restricted phone access after cities across the country erupted in anger over the currency’s collapse against the U.S. dollar and soaring inflation. The videos that have circulated and circulated online offer a window into the resulting crackdown in the Islamic Republic and the methods security forces employed to quell the unrest.
The images, released on social media this week and geotagged by NBC News, show more than 200 bodies piled up in a makeshift morgue outside the capital, machine gun fire on crowds and clashes in towns in Urmia, Syria. northwest of Isfahan, in the heart of the country.
At least 2,500 people were killed, according to the American news agency Human Rights Activists News Agency. Authorities have not given an official death toll.
Most counts put the number of protesters killed before Thursday’s internet shutdown at around 40, with rights groups and activists suggesting that the nights of Thursday and Friday saw repression intensify and give rise to scenes not seen in the country in decades.
Two videos from Tehran, released online on Monday, show the tactics used by security forces.
In one, a man wearing a helmet with a visor can be seen firing a machine gun at a crowd about 30 meters away, across a square. The muzzle of the machine gun ignites in the night as the man launches automatic fire.
In another, gunshots ring out near a police station as demonstrators chant “Death to Khamenei,” a reference to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s highest authority. As the crowd chants largely out of sight, heavy fire from automatic weapons can be heard for 15 uninterrupted seconds.
A group of security forces then appear on the right side of the screen and a member of the security forces aims and fires a pistol. Shortly after, a person or body is dragged to the police station, without anyone knowing who this person is. Several members of the security forces in riot gear on motorcycles then went to the police station.
About 8 kilometers south of the capital’s southern suburbs, the Kahrizak forensic center offers perhaps the clearest sign of the intensity of the repression.
Videos of the site, which has become a makeshift morgue, first circulated this weekend. Two other separate videos, which appear to have been filmed by a single person, circulated on Tuesday.
Outside the warehouse, the man filming Kahrizak’s scene approaches a woman in a white coat with a black scarf who is writing in a notebook. next to the body of a man soaked in blood. The body was partially removed from a black body bag on the ground.
A man in a black T-shirt and black pants wearing gloves holds the body sideways and positions the bloody head so the doctor has a better look at the wound.
“Was he hit in the head?” » asks the person filming. Another man nearby responds, “Yes. »
The same woman, whom a man calls doctor, approaches the back of an ambulance and asks why there is still a body in the vehicle.
“Because there was no more room on the ground,” replies a man, his voice breaking. “She’s a woman, she’s my sister.”
Nearby, a man in a blue medical coat and orange gloves examines the head of the body of a man who is stripped to white underwear and removed from a black blanket. “They hit him from behind,” one man said, as another person nearby was heard sobbing.
