Journalist at Iran International
Rows of black body bags became one of the defining images of Iran’s deadly January 2026 crackdown, as families searched among covered bodies and thousands of photographs for relatives killed or missing during the unrest.
Eight months later, images of the killings and crackdown remain vivid for survivors and the wider public. Iranians describing life after January have spoken of recurring nightmares, crying at night and difficulty returning to ordinary life. Some survivors have attempted suicide.
For many, life is now divided into before and after January.
Body bags have also acquired a place in Iran’s collective memory that they did not have before. Previously associated largely with films, natural disasters and major emergencies, they appeared repeatedly in footage documenting the aftermath of the January killings.
Images from earlier waves of unrest – the 2009 protests, November 2019 and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement – often showed the bodies of those killed: lying in streets, on hospital beds or wrapped in burial shrouds.
In January 2026, the dead were frequently hidden behind black bags and zippers. Faces disappeared from view and rows of bags remained.
The distinction matters. An object intended to preserve bodies for transportation and identification became one of the most recognizable images of the crackdown.
Amnesty International counted at least 205 separate body bags in verified images from the Kahrizak morgue, south of Tehran. Human Rights Watch identified at least 400 bodies or body bags in three verified videos.
Eurovision News Spotlight, a verification project run by the European Broadcasting Union, also identified the green markings of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on some of the body bags.
The trauma behind the bags
Part of the disturbing power of such images comes from what the bags conceal.
An exposed body, however difficult to see, retains a face and visible identity. Hundreds of nearly identical bags can instead reduce individuals to units: one package beside another, one number beside another, with the total continuing to rise.
For relatives searching for somebody missing, however, those bags have to be opened. Each zipper brings the possibility of encountering the body of a parent, child, sibling or friend.
This can be understood as a particular trauma associated with body bags: the combination of mass death, the temporary erasure of individual identity, the anxiety of identifying the dead and the repeated return of the same visual image.
There is also the question of dignity. Each bag contains a person whose family may be searching for them, yet footage showed bodies left in rows on the ground as relatives tried to identify them.
Such scenes are not unique to Iran.
After Egyptian security forces opened fire on protesters around Cairo’s Rabaa Square in the summer of 2013, the El-Iman mosque became a temporary morgue. Bodies were placed in tightly packed rows under white sheets. Volunteers wrote victims’ names on the coverings; some carried names and addresses, while others remained unidentified.
Families also searched morgues in Damascus after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, opening bags, photographing faces and comparing them with images of missing relatives and acquaintances.
Those bags represented an archive of years of enforced disappearances, torture and deaths in custody.
Iran’s January 2026 images were different in one important respect. The bags appeared during the days and nights of the crackdown itself, within the existing system of hospitals, forensic facilities and cemeteries.
In much of the footage, rows of black bags are visible without names or identifying information that can be seen on their surfaces.
The victims’ faces are concealed, but the sheer number of bags makes the scale of death visible.
The bags also did not arrive at morgues by themselves. Behind the images was a system responsible for collecting, transporting, recording and storing bodies.
What happened after the shooting
Mass killing does not end when shooting stops. Bodies have to be moved. That requires ambulances or other vehicles, body bags and labels, morgues or refrigerated containers and lists recording the dead. Decisions also have to be made about where bodies are stored, when they can be identified and under what conditions they are returned to families.
Reports following the killings on January 8 and 9 described shortages of body bags and bodies accumulating in hospitals and morgues.
That raises another question: where did the additional bags come from, and how prepared were authorities for handling large numbers of bodies?
Two procurement notices for body bags appeared around the time of the killings in Alborz province, one of the main centers of the protests and subsequent crackdown.
The Imam Hossein medical center in Alborz sought quotations on January 4, after the protests had begun, for 200 adult body bags and eight bags for children.
Shariati Hospital in Karaj had separately registered a request for 200 adult body bags on December 18, with the procurement notice published two days later.
The timing, particularly of the Imam Hossein request, warrants scrutiny. But the records alone do not demonstrate that authorities anticipated mass killings, nor do they establish that these particular bags were subsequently used to carry protesters’ bodies.
Several links in the procurement chain are also missing, including final contracts, delivery receipts, shipment numbers and warehouse release documents.
Body bags are routine supplies for hospitals, cemeteries and emergency services. Purchasing them is therefore not in itself evidence of preparation for a crackdown.
Reports of shortages in cities including Arak, Khorramabad and Gorgan, however, suggest that ordinary stocks were rapidly exhausted. If so, additional supplies would have had to be distributed, potentially following further purchases.
That leaves a narrower but important question: what level of fatalities was the system for handling bodies equipped to manage, and did January’s death toll overwhelm that capacity?
Turning numbers back into names
In hospitals, forensic facilities and disaster operations, body bags serve practical purposes: separating and transporting the dead and protecting workers from contact with blood and bodily fluids.
Joint guidance from the World Health Organization and International Committee of the Red Cross says each body should be placed separately in a bag, with the location and time it was found recorded. Personal belongings should remain with the body and each person should receive a unique identification number.
That number is not intended to erase a name. Its purpose is to help establish an identity and ultimately return the body to relatives.
For some Iranian families in January, the process appeared to work in reverse: they searched through bags and thousands of photographs in an effort to turn a number back into the name of somebody they knew.
The father of Iman Asadi spent five days searching police stations, prisons and hospitals before finding his son’s photograph among thousands of images of unidentified people.
In that collection, Iman was No. 11838.
A number intended to assist identification had become, at least temporarily, the marker of a person without a name.
Another father, Esmail Shokri, was filmed walking among body bags at the Kahrizak forensic facility in a 12-minute video, calling out for his son.
“Sepehr ... Sepehr, my son ... where are you?” Shokri called.
Every bag could have contained Sepehr. To his family, he had a face, a history and a name. From the outside, each closed black bag looked much like the next.
That is what distinguishes some of the most enduring images of January 2026 from those of earlier Iranian crackdowns. Previously, the victim’s body often occupied the center of the frame. This time, for many Iranians, the body bag stood between the dead and the public looking at them.
In the early hours of July 9, cruise missiles hit the Aq Tekeh Khan railway bridge near Aqqala in Golestan province, in Iran's far north-east. The Revolutionary Guards' regional corps and state media attributed the strike to US forces. Damage was limited, as it has been at other bridges hit in the war, and trains were running again within days. Washington has not commented, which is common for many strikes in this conflict.
The bridge sits on the Gorgan–Incheh Borun line, one of two railways connecting Iran's network to Central Asia through Turkmenistan. Iranian outlets described the strike as an attack on the corridor linking Iran to China through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, a reading that spread widely.
What the line actually carries
Iran's official statistics are opaque and frequently incomplete, and under nearly five decades of sanctions the state has had every incentive to blur figures that touch on trade, let alone anything with a military dimension. But even taken at face value, the numbers do not support the corridor claim.
Iran has two main rail gateways to Central Asia: Sarakhs, in the north-east, and Incheh Borun. Shortly before the war, in early 2026, the head of the Khorasan railway said 75 percent of all rail transit into and out of the country passed through Sarakhs, which handled 1.27 million tons in the ten months to late January. The Incheh Borun line's entire nominal capacity is around 500,000 tons a year, and how much of that is actually used is unknown.
Rail was never central to Iranian trade in any case. Before the war, the bulk moved by sea and road, with high-value, low-weight goods going by air.
Nor does the line point at China. Opened during Hassan Rouhani's first term as the Iranian section of a 930-kilometre Kazakhstan–Turkmenistan–Iran railway, completed in 2014 at a cost of about $1.4 billion, it was designed to link Russia and the Caspian region to warm-water ports through Iran, connecting northward toward Astrakhan and the Russian network.
The natural, cheaper route for Chinese rail freight is Sarakhs. Chinese traffic on the Incheh Borun line is not zero, with some reports counting several dozen freight trains from China over the past year, but it is marginal, and the line matters far more to Russia and Turkmenistan, notably for minerals, than to Iranian trade with the east.
Which leaves the question. If the bridge was not hit for what it carries for Iran, one possibility is what it carries for someone else.
Where Russia and Iran meet
Turkmenistan's neutrality is written into its constitution and recognized by the United Nations, and it has taken no side in Iran's wars. It has also become, since the US naval blockade closed Iran's ports, one of the country's principal overland routes to the east. That gives a small, closed and rarely reported state an unusual position: the place where Iranian and Russian logistics physically meet.
The Islamic Republic has a long, documented history of military exchanges with Russia and China. Alongside the rail and road routes, which carry their own risks, combined routes for moving equipment are routine.
Ashgabat's airport is the nearest major airfield to Iran's north-eastern border. Iran International reviewed data on roughly 6,500 flights that landed there between the start of November 2025 and early July 2026, a window running from before the war through the ceasefires and the resumption of strikes.
The review has limits, and they should be stated first. Flight-tracking data depends on aircraft transmitting their position and on receivers within range picking it up, so gaps occur. The pre-war portion of the window is short, less than four months. And a change in what tracking systems record after a war begins may reflect changed behavior across a whole region rather than anything specific to one airport.
One category in the data carries more meaning than it might appear to. Scheduled passenger and cargo flights file public flight plans, so their origin and destination almost always appear in tracking records.
Flights that show no origin at all are therefore disproportionately state, military and private operations, which do not file in the same way. The category cannot tell a military transport from a government delegation or a private charter, and some freight operators also fall into it, but it does separate the traffic that files paperwork from the traffic that does not.
The Antonov from China
The most concrete item is a single flight. On April 13, an Antonov An-124, the largest transport aircraft in regular service, landed at Ashgabat from Urumqi in western China, paused, and left early the same day for Cairo. Nothing like it appears elsewhere in the nine months of data.
The aircraft belongs to Volga-Dnepr Airlines, which is designated by the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Ukraine and France. Britain listed it in June 2024 for "the provision of heavy airlift capacity to the Russian Armed Forces."
The EU, listing the group's owners and directors the same month, said Volga-Dnepr has been "playing a crucial role in servicing Russia's military-industrial complex and providing air transportation services for Russian military purposes," importing electronics and communications equipment for the war on Ukraine and receiving Russian government subsidies for doing so. The US designation carries a secondary sanctions risk, which applies in principle to any third party that does business with the airline, including by servicing its aircraft.
The specific aircraft carries the registration RA-82074. A Ukrainian investigation named it among Volga-Dnepr An-124s that sharply increased flights to countries friendly to Russia, including China, after the 2022 invasion, in transport the investigators linked to sanctioned goods and military products.
The website openDemocracy reported in 2023 on the company's role in carrying equipment critical to the Russian military from China. Only three of the company's An-124s are currently active.
There is an ordinary explanation available. Egypt is a major destination for commercial heavy cargo, and an An-124 routing from China through Central Asia to Cairo is consistent with legitimate project freight. Egypt is also a longstanding Russian arms customer. Volga-Dnepr has said it stopped carrying military cargo in 2018; Western governments that have examined its record disagree, and the Islamic Republic has spent more than four decades perfecting the art of moving sensitive goods under commercial cover.
The pattern around it
Around that flight, several categories of traffic rose after the war began.
Local callsigns in the 795 series, searchable under identifiers such as 795M12 and 795A01, were rare before the war and rose sharply from April: 11 in April, 7 in May and 15 in June. Most were logged with no recorded origin or as Mil Mi-8 military transport helicopters, sometimes several times in a day.
On July 6, three days before the bridge was struck, three such flights were logged. One caveat matters here: the same callsign sometimes appears several times within minutes, which may mean genuine repeat flights or may mean several ground receivers logging one signal, so these counts may be inflated.
Flights with no recorded origin rose from a single instance in January to 8, 6, 4, 9 and 7 in the months from February to June, with two more in the first nine days of July. Given what that category captures, this is the closest the data comes to a measure of non-commercial traffic, and it went from one a month before the war to an average of nearly seven a month after it began.
Callsigns in the RSD series, used by Russian state and military flights, together with Tupolev Tu-204 and Ilyushin Il-96 aircraft, increased noticeably in May. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports arriving from within Turkmenistan were logged twice in February and twice in May, with none in the pre-war months. Three AgustaWestland AW139 helicopters, a type used in government and military roles, landed in May and June, though similar flights also appeared in November.
None of this is evidence of military transfers through Ashgabat. There is no official statement or document to that effect, and the relative rise in irregular traffic could have explanations that have nothing to do with the bridge 100 kilometers to the south.
What the data does show is a change in the rhythm of arrivals at Turkmenistan's main airport that coincides with the intensification of the war, and that was building in the weeks before a railway line to Russia was hit.
Iran International has asked US Central Command to confirm the strike and explain the choice of target. It had not responded at the time of publication; this report will be updated if it does.
The case has been sent to a Revolutionary Court, with some of the defendants accused of “leading the unrest” or “inciting war and killing,” charges that can carry severe penalties under Iranian law.
The document lists 75 prisoners as defendants in the case, while prosecutors in Isfahan have ordered at least 26 of them to stand trial.
The case was opened after unrest and a fire at Isfahan Central Prison, also known as Dastgerd, following an air strike near the prison in March. A military base and ammunition depot behind the prison were hit, while parts of the prison grounds and accommodation areas were also damaged.
Information accompanying the document said some prisoners were killed during the incident, and others died in the fire.
Human rights groups, citing witnesses and relatives of prisoners, have said the unrest began after missiles struck a military site behind the prison and projectiles also hit parts of the prison complex. Guards and prison officials left some posts after the explosions, and inmates came out of their wards fearing the facility could collapse, according to those accounts.
The groups said some prisoners then set fire to blankets, sheets and other materials in an effort to force authorities to open doors and allow them into safer areas. Smoke spread through enclosed corridors as the fires grew.
Human rights groups have also said security forces later entered the prison and used live ammunition, pellet rounds and tear gas against inmates. According to witness accounts cited by the groups, some prisoners were shot, while others died from burns or smoke inhalation during the unrest.
Serious charges brought
Prosecutors have brought charges including "inciting people to war and killing each other with the aim of disrupting national security," deliberate arson, destruction of public facilities and taking part in an illegal prison gathering that led to a riot during wartime, according to the document.
Other accusations include destroying surveillance cameras, windows and security doors, taking part in or assisting with property damage and setting fire to the prison infirmary.
Iran International identified 17 prisoners facing such accusations. The documents indicate that 18 prisoners could face death sentences.
Five prisoners executed in separate case
The referral to the Revolutionary Court comes after five protesters held at Dastgerd were executed over the past two months in a separate case known as the "Alikhani Square" case.
Five other people sentenced in that case are at risk of imminent execution.
The latest case comes amid a rise in executions and heavy prison sentences in Iran in recent weeks as tensions with the United States have intensified.
Concerns over prison conditions
Concerns over Dastgerd have also grown over treatment of inmates and health conditions.
Political prisoner Abdolrasoul Mortazavi said in an audio message from the prison in June that some people detained during the January protests had been tortured. He also reported beatings, harsh interrogations, restrictions on contact with families and limits on outdoor exercise.
Iran International has also received reports of worsening health conditions and a meningitis outbreak at the prison in recent weeks.
A source familiar with the situation told Iran International in August that several prisoners had died from infectious diseases. Information obtained by Iran International also indicated that meningitis had spread to most prison wards and that some inmates had been taken to Al-Zahra hospital in Isfahan.
“It is quite wrong for the IRGC to be threatening journalists simply for doing their job,” Ciccone, Chair of Parliament’s Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, said. “Journalists are entitled to report on what is occurring anywhere around the world, particularly the events in Iran.”
He said journalists must be able to work “without harassment or intimidation, or violence for that matter,” adding that Iranians had a right to independent reporting about events inside the country.
“The Iranian people are looking to the rest of the world to understand what is happening,” Ciccone told Iran International. “They have a right to independent reporting, and journalists must be protected while carrying out that work.”
He said the threats also affected Iranian journalists and government opponents living abroad, including members of the diaspora in Australia.
He described such threats as part of a broader pattern of intimidation by the IRGC and said governments should respond collectively.
“It’s no surprise that these threats are coming from the IRGC,” Ciccone said. “But intimidation cannot be allowed to silence journalists or communities overseas.”
Ciccone pointed to steps already taken by Australia and said Canberra should continue working with international partners to hold Iranian authorities accountable.
“We also have to stand by the Iranian people,” he said. “The Iranian people are looking to the rest of the world for their support, and I can say that many people in Australia are with them 100%.”
He said Australia, Canada, Germany and other countries should stand with Iranians and condemn threats against journalists. He also backed diplomatic expulsions, sanctions against those linked to the IRGC and further action against the organization.
A senior official with Iran’s armed forces said in late August that journalists working for Persian-language media abroad could be placed on a list of military targets.
“Media outlets such as Iran International, BBC Persian and Radio Farda are directly connected to Mossad, the US Central Intelligence Agency and other foreign intelligence services and receive support from them,” said Abolfazl Shekarchi, a brigadier general and senior spokesman for Iran’s armed forces.
After his remarks, Canada also said its security and intelligence agencies are using a full range of tools to counter foreign interference and transnational repression.
In a response to Iran International, Public Safety Canada said authorities continuously monitor such threat s and can respond through investigations, criminal charges and disruption activities.
But the fighting is also showing why a weakened axis can remain dangerous: it does not have to win territory to impose costs on Iran’s adversaries.
Yemen’s Houthis dramatically escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, striking four southern cities with missiles and drones. The group targeted a Saudi airbase in Khamis Mushait and Saudi Aramco assets in Abha, Najran and Jazan, setting oil installations ablaze. Saudi authorities said 73 people were wounded, including women and children.
The attacks also threatened to widen the war’s economic impact beyond the Strait of Hormuz, where the US-Iran conflict has already disrupted energy flows. Brent crude briefly touched $99.46 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since July 24.
“They’re not really fighting five separate wars, they’re just using five instruments of the same coercive strategy,” Fatima Abo Alasrar, a researcher and author on Yemen and Iran and founder of The Ideology Machine, told Iran International.
The timing, Alasrar said, matters.
Iran is exerting pressure around the Strait of Hormuz while the Houthis can create another pressure point around Bab al-Mandab, forcing Iran’s adversaries to contend with threats near two of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.
“The lesson that the Houthis appear to have learned is that escalation produces leverage,” she said, even without territorial gains.
That leaves Saudi Arabia with a difficult choice: escalate in an effort to substantially weaken the Houthis and risk a wider war or seek a political exit that could reinforce the belief in both Sanaa and Tehran that military pressure can ultimately produce concessions.
Houthis called Saudi Arabia’s bluff
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemeni-American geopolitical analyst and risk adviser who heads the Washington DC-based Basha Report, said the Houthis helped bring about the renewed war by assuming Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s internationally recognized government would avoid a return to full-scale fighting.
“The Houthis were hoping to call a bluff — a Saudi and a government bluff,” al-Basha told Iran International.
Asked whether they miscalculated, he replied: “Of course, of course.”
Yet al-Basha said the Iran war has also reinforced the Houthis’ belief in the value of escalation.
“They feel that the best way for you to get what you want is to use force,” he said.
The confrontation follows an earlier dispute over an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation back from Tehran following the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Analysts told Iran International at the time that the flight may have been an opening move in an effort to establish an air bridge into Houthi-controlled Yemen and rebuild the group’s strategic capabilities.
“The alliance is no longer secretive or covert, it’s very public,” al-Basha said of the Iran-Houthi relationship.
Can battlefield gains change the equation?
Forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognized government have now launched counterattacks across several fronts, with officials openly declaring their intention to eventually recapture Sanaa.
But al-Basha cautioned against assuming the Houthis are close to defeat. He said losing strategically important territory, rather than simply patches of ground, could eventually push them toward negotiations.
One place to watch is Hodeidah, whose port al-Basha described as “the lung that the Houthis breathe from.” The group’s position around Hodeidah, Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea is central to its ability to threaten maritime traffic.
Alasrar, however, said territorial losses do not necessarily eliminate Houthi leverage.
“They can lose ground and still increase their regional leverage,” she said.
The Houthis have threatened further attacks against Saudi economic and military infrastructure, raising the prospect of greater disruption around Bab al-Mandab while the Iran conflict continues to put pressure on Hormuz
A ‘win-win’ for Tehran?
Danny Citrinowicz of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies sees that predicament as advantageous for Iran.
“For them it’s amazing. So it’s a win-win for them,” Citrinowicz told Iran International.
If Saudi Arabia backs down, he argues, Iran gains room to strengthen the Houthis. If Riyadh keeps fighting, instability around Bab al-Mandab creates another source of economic pressure while Iran contests Hormuz.
“It definitely worked in the Iranian favor,” he said. “The Iranians are learning from that, unfortunately.”
But it leaves Saudi Arabia with two costly options. Citrinowicz said the Houthis have “crossed the Rubicon” and are unlikely simply to retreat. As Saudi-backed forces approach areas the group considers critical, he expects Houthi attacks against the kingdom to intensify.
A moment of truth for the Mecca Defence Alliance
The escalation is also posing an early test for the Mecca Defence Alliance, the collective defense pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on August 7.
The agreement stipulates that an armed attack against any one of the three countries is to be regarded as an attack against all three.
Yet neither Turkey nor Pakistan has so far entered the fighting militarily on Saudi Arabia’s behalf.
Citrinowicz calls it “a moment of truth” for the alliance, with neither country so far entering the fighting militarily.
Will Washington hold Iran responsible?
The United States is now explicitly pointing toward Tehran.
“The Houthis in many ways are agents and proxies of the Iranians. I think behind some of this is clearly the Iranian hand,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters when asked about the attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Rubio said Washington has a strong defensive military relationship with Riyadh and is closely watching developments.
His comments revive a warning President Donald Trump issued on July 23.
Trump said then that Washington would hold Iran responsible if the Houthis resumed attacks, describing the group as a “Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran” and warning of “major military punishment” against Iran and the Houthis.
The Houthis have now resumed major attacks against Saudi Arabia. Rubio has publicly pointed to an Iranian hand, but Trump has yet to publicly repeat the threat he made in July.
That leaves a consequential question as the conflict widens: if Washington considers the Houthis an Iranian proxy, how far is it prepared to go in holding Tehran responsible for what they do?
The coming days and weeks are likely to bring advances and retreats on both sides, with territory changing hands and apparent victories proving temporary. The battlefield remains highly fluid, and both sides appear determined to keep fighting, making it too early to draw sweeping conclusions from any single development.
But even without a clear Houthi victory, Iran may stand to gain. As long as the fighting forces Saudi Arabia to expend resources, keeps pressure on Bab al-Mandab and stretches the attention of Tehran’s adversaries, the Houthis can continue to provide Iran with leverage even while under pressure themselves.
The conflict has a long way to go for now and consequences reverberate from Yemen across an already destabilized region.
