Imagine streets stained with rivers of blood, the air thick with the relentless crackle of gunfire. This is the nightmare I, a surgeon in Iran, lived through during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests. What started as a cry for change ended in a massacre, and I was on the front lines, stitching together the shattered bodies of a nation.
By January 8th, the protests that ignited in late December had engulfed Iran, with reports of at least 45 deaths at the hands of security forces. But here’s where it gets truly chilling: over the next three days, the regime unleashed a wave of violence so severe, it’s now estimated to have claimed over 5,000 lives.
When I arrived at the hospital in Tehran that Thursday night, the city’s usual hum had been replaced by an eerie silence. Just hours earlier, doctors and patients were sending me photos on WhatsApp—pellet wounds to backs, hands, heads. Painful, yes, but treatable. Wounds that hinted at violence with limits. Then, at 8 p.m., everything went dark. The internet, phones, messages—all vanished.
Within minutes, the gunfire began. From 8:10 p.m. onward, the streets echoed with shots, screams, and explosions. I was summoned to the hospital, and what I found was a scene from a war zone.
The patients flooding in were no longer pellet victims. They had been shot with live ammunition—war bullets designed to tear through flesh, entering one side and exiting the other. As a surgeon specializing in torso injuries, I was confronted with wounds to the chest, abdomen, and pelvis—injuries that decide life or death in minutes. No room for error, no time to waste. Many shots were fired at close range, causing catastrophic damage.
The hospital quickly became a mass casualty zone. We were overwhelmed—not enough surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, operating rooms, or blood products. Patients arrived faster than we could treat them. Stretchers lined the halls, and operating rooms turned over relentlessly.
In a hospital that typically handles two emergency surgeries a night, we performed 18 between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. By morning, some patients were still on the operating table. There was no pause, no moment to breathe. I’ve worked through earthquakes and mass accidents, but nothing prepared me for this. Even in disasters, you might see 20 or 30 injured patients over hours. That night, and the next, it was hundreds—gunshot wounds, severe trauma, one after another.
The exhaustion was all-consuming—physical, yes, but more so mental. As surgeons, we save lives. That night, we were saving people shot by their own government. The contradiction is unbearable. You keep operating because you have no choice, but part of you is breaking.
Amid the chaos, I heard weapons that have no place on city streets—DShK machine guns, mounted on pickup trucks. This wasn’t policing; it was something far more sinister.
As the night wore on, counting the dead became impossible. The volume of casualties far exceeded our capacity. People were afraid to come to the hospital, knowing what awaited them. Once the situation is deemed ‘under control,’ hospitals receive demands for patient information from security forces. Refusal means consequences. This system predates the protests, but the fear was palpable.
Many injured people stayed away, calling me instead. My phone rang constantly, even during brief moments of signal. They spoke in code, terrified of being monitored. The calls weren’t just about young protesters—they were about a 16-year-old child, a man in his 70s, people simply caught in the wrong place. You didn’t need to be demonstrating to be shot; you only needed to be there.
By Friday morning, I was still in the operating room, with some patients from the night before still under surgery. Later, I traveled to a city in central Iran. The journey, normally 10 minutes, took nearly two hours. The city looked wounded—metro stations burned, glass shattered.
The situation was the same everywhere. Colleagues described catastrophic nights, with surgeons operating continuously. Even private hospitals, rarely seeing gunshot victims, were overwhelmed.
I don’t have official numbers—no one does yet. But I know hospital capacity. When a small hospital that sees one death in 24 hours receives eight bodies in one night, when medium hospitals receive 20, you understand the scale. In a city of 2 million, I estimate over 1,000 killed in a single night; across Iran, perhaps more than 20,000. These are estimates, not statistics, but they’re based on what I’ve seen.
In one street, I saw nearly a liter of blood pooled in a gutter, with a trail stretching meters. Someone who loses that much blood doesn’t survive long enough to reach a hospital.
The violence escalated with each passing hour. Thursday night brought individual shots; Friday night, automatic fire. This wasn’t policing—it felt like wartime rules applied to civilians.
Families kept calling, terrified not just of their injuries, but of seeking care. The hospital, a place of safety, had become a place of fear.
The scale of what happened cannot be fully captured: the destruction, the injuries, the silence imposed by blackouts, the exhaustion of medical staff. Something fundamental had broken.
My words fall short of describing the horror. But this much is clear: what happened was far worse than anything the public has been told. And most of it unfolded in the dark.
But here’s the controversial part: Was this a crackdown, or a massacre disguised as law enforcement? And if it was the latter, what does that say about the regime’s willingness to use extreme force against its own people? I’ll leave you with this question: How can we ensure such atrocities never happen again? Let’s discuss in the comments.**
