Iranian health professionals and eyewitnesses described harrowing scenes to the pro-reform media outlet IranWire, given the wave of protests that has already left the country.
On Friday (9), in Shiraz, medical teams treated a woman who had been shot in the head. Connected to a respirator, it was possible to see bloodstains on the side of her head. “I have never seen scenes like this in my life,” says one of the medical team members in a video shared with IranWire. “These shameless people shot her in the head and neck. Do you have any idea how many patients we have so far?”, he reported.
A doctor in Nixapur said security forces shot at protesters from the top of buildings on Friday (9).
“They are shooting from rooftops and terraces. They are not in the street, where people can see and run away,” she says in an audio message to IranWire. “They even shoot at ordinary pedestrians.”
The doctor said that a family of six people who were passing by were shot, as was the nurse of an elderly woman who was returning home. “How many more will die here?” she asked.
Another medical source confirmed that at least six people were killed following a protest in , on Thursday (8). All of them were shot in the head and neck, according to recordings sent.
A day later, protests in the same area were also met with violent repression, with security forces shooting at protesters from the top of a building, according to the medical source. Protesters set fire to a bank and tried to take over a base belonging to the Basij paramilitary force, the source said, adding that an 11-year-old boy was shot and “will probably lose a testicle.”
After security forces opened fire on people in Najafabad on Thursday (8), the injured were taken to a hospital, according to a local medical source.
“People rushed to the hospital to get the bodies of their children, and buried them in the same clothes,” said a member of the medical team. In Iranian Muslim culture, the bodies of the dead are typically washed and covered with a white cotton cloth before .
Mohammad Lesanpezeshki, a Chicago doctor trained in Tehran, told CNN that his friends working in Iranian hospitals are overwhelmed as more and more protesters are injured in the government crackdown. Before the internet shutdown cut off contact, his friends told him what they saw.
“An orthopedic surgeon said there were several bodies in his emergency room, at least 30 people who had been shot in the limbs,” Lesanpezeshki said.
The friend told Lesanpezeshki that the hospital where he worked at had run out of blood for transfusions and called another doctor at a nearby facility to see if they had any available.
The doctor at the other hospital was “crying on the phone because they don’t have any blood supply,” Lesanpezeshki said.
His friends also told him that the Farabi Ophthalmological Hospital in Tehran recorded a sudden increase in the number of patients with projectiles lodged in their eyes, around 200 to 300 cases. Lesanpeseshki’s friends worked as doctors during the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran in , and saw similar eye injuries, although fewer in number.
Prior to Thursday, other medical sources told IranWire that at least 500 people came to hospitals in Tehran with eye injuries.
