Iran International
An Iranian protester shot in the leg during January’s demonstrations remains unable to walk after 23 operations, with further treatment ahead, medical bills mounting and concerns for his safety persisting months after the shooting.
“Despite all these surgeries, I am still confined to my home,” the protester, whose identity and place of residence are being withheld for security reasons, told Iran International. “I am married, and during this time we have faced many problems paying for my treatment.”
His family eventually sold their car to help cover his medical bills, the protester said. Doctors have told him that regaining the ability to walk could take at least another year.
The account reflects the prolonged physical and financial consequences facing some people wounded during the protests, with Iran International receiving multiple accounts of injured demonstrators struggling to obtain treatment and pay medical expenses months later.
23 operations and more treatment ahead
The gunshot caused extensive damage to the protester’s leg, requiring doctors to perform muscle and skin grafts during a series of operations.
“About a month has passed since the skin graft, and the Ilizarov device that was fitted to my leg at the beginning of treatment is due to be put back on for about three months,” the protester said.
An Ilizarov apparatus is an external bone-fixation system using metal rings, rods and wires to gradually reposition sections of bone. It can be used to treat severe damage or the loss of part of a bone.
Doctors also attached a vacuum-assisted device to the wound for several months to promote new tissue growth, the protester said.
Infection, nerve damage and numbness later forced doctors to remove some of the repaired tissue and perform a muscle graft about six months after the shooting, according to the protester.
“I asked people who were able to help, but in the end, with great difficulty and even by selling our car, we tried to cover the costs,” he said.
Security fears complicate hospital treatment
Fear of arrest or identification at hospitals has complicated treatment for some protesters wounded during demonstrations, prompting some to seek medical care covertly or at home.
“After one of the surgeries, because there were many security officers in the emergency department, the doctor helped me leave the hospital,” the protester said.
Hospital staff recorded the cause of his injuries as a traffic accident, and his doctor later helped take him to Tehran to continue undergoing surgery, the protester said.
“I really do not know how to thank the medical staff,” he added. “They cooperated extensively and tried to make sure nothing else happened to me.”
Protester recounts January 8 shooting
Security forces initially fired pellets toward demonstrators before a live round struck his leg at close range on the evening of January 8, the protester said.
“My whole body is covered with pellet marks. The bullet hit my leg from close range,” he said. “When I was shot, they dragged me along the ground while I was in a very bad condition. I will never forget that night.”
Security personnel insulted him and tried to remove his clothing after he was wounded, according to his account.
“I held tightly onto my trousers, and they struck my hands with their boots,” he said. “My entire body was bruised, and I even thought my ribs were broken.”
The officers then put him on a motorcycle, the protester said.
“One of them said, ‘Don’t hit him here, take him farther up,’” he said. “I thought they meant they were going to finish me off. I passed out from fear.”
The protester said he regained consciousness alone in a dark alley, where an elderly couple found him and helped him reach a hospital.
“At first, I thought I was dead,” he said. “Then an elderly woman and man found me. They were like angels to me and helped me get to the hospital.”
The protester said he had joined the demonstrations knowing that doing so could put his life at risk.
“That night, I went out like many others, and I knew I might lose my life, but for me it was about Iran,” he said.
Six months after the shooting, the protester remains unable to walk, with further procedures ahead and no certainty over when he will regain mobility.
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.
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.
