American “armada” of warships, as confirmed by US President Donald Trump in flight from the presidential ship Air Force One, returning from Davos, Switzerland. He said the US was moving a “just in case” armada from the Pacific to the Middle East, while expressing hope it would not need to use it while repeating warnings to Tehran not to kill protesters and restart its nuclear program.
US officials said the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers were approaching the Middle East. It is also considering sending additional air defense systems to the region, critical to protecting US bases in the region from a potential Iranian strike.
At the same time, the death toll from the violent crackdown on recent protests against the theocratic regime has reached 5,002 – among them 43 children – according to the humanitarian organization Human Rights Activists News Agency, which expresses fears of many more dead. In its announcement yesterday, another humanitarian organization, the Center For Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), states that the number of dead is 14,000 and that those arrested, as part of the wave of repression, reach 27,000.
The number of dead and arrested cannot be reliably ascertained because Iran remains cut off from the world as authorities continue to restrict citizens’ access to the internet – the most extensive internet blackout in Iran’s history, which began on January 8. However, videos, the authenticity of which has been verified by authoritative international media, such as the American newspaper The New York Times and the French Monde, document the gloom that prevails in Iran where the authorities do not even respect the citizens’ desire to bury their dead as they see fit.
The testimonies
The testimonies of doctors in Iran, which Monde cites, are nightmarish. “In the emergency room, on the night of January 8th when I was in charge, we were all walking in boots, because the floor was full of blood.” This is what a doctor from northern Iran said in an audio message – verified by Monde – to his relatives on January 15, thanks to a “miraculous” Internet connection, which lasted only a few minutes. “That night, in our hospital, which is a small structure, we counted seven lifeless bodies. Among them, a 16-year-old boy who had been shot and we had to remove a kidney. In another wounded man, we had to amputate the leg, from the knee down.”
“This time, nothing is like the previous protests against the regime,” Saeed (a pseudonym), an Iranian surgeon in Tehran who left the country a few days ago, also tells Monde. “In the emergency room, inseparability prevailed. To care for that many people, we needed 30 times more beds and staff. In such cases the protocols change. Those injured who can still shout are not emergencies. We give priority to those who no longer even have the strength to speak.”
Said went from casualty to casualty, checking their pulses. “Under the blankets, two or three were already dead. One had a broken neck, probably from a rifle shot at close range. Another suffered a large jaw injury. His pulse was barely perceptible. He looked at me, and then he died. He was 21 years old.”
In the early hours of Friday, January 9, the bodies were taken to the morgue. “Everything was ordered to be cleared. As if nothing had happened,” says Said. His nurses pointed out the presence of a man in plainclothes, a member of the secret service, who had come to gather information about the injured protesters.
Said left Tehran and went to another hospital, in Isfahan, the third largest city in Iran, with a population of 2.3 million. And there the image he saw was the same. “I saw wounds from HKG3 type rifles, from bullets that had entered behind the knees of the protesters or in their soles. Those who had shot them aimed not to let them escape.” He also found wounds from “DShK machine guns, a weapon that even from a distance of 500 meters, cuts a man in two. It is a weapon used against armored personnel, not against unarmed and defenseless citizens.”
According to testimony collected by Monde, in order to save wounded protesters, many Iranian doctors entered medical records with the notation “liver surgery” as secret service agents demanded X-rays of wounded people showing bullet wounds from hospitals.
