.png?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=0%2C100%2C0%2C100&ssl=1 "Iran targets doctors and lawyers for helping protesters")
In the days after Iran’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protesters, Amir*, a doctor in a private clinic outside Tehran, came face-to-face with one of the Islamic regime’s spies.
According to Amir, the man had entered the clinic during a night shift posing as a patient. Once the time of his appointment came, the man began interrogating the doctor.
He asked whether Amir had been working on the nights of 8 and 9 January – the most deadly 48 hours of the protests, when security forces began firing lethal rounds on protesters under the cover of an internet blackout.
“I dodged the questions as much as I could,” Amir says. “I think he was there to scare me more than to gather information because I think they have the information.”
Although he did not disclose this to his interrogator, Amir wasn’t supposed to be working on that now infamous 8 January: a bloodstained date that will likely be etched into the Iranian national psyche for generations.
A network of doctors inside Iran estimates the national death toll could exceed 30,000 people. This far outstrips the regime’s figure of 3,117 dead reported on Iranian state TV.
At around 9pm that Thursday night, Amir tells how he heard that regime forces were firing on protesters with live ammunition. He headed straight to his clinic to support his colleagues, one doctor and five nurses.
Over the course of that deadly weekend, Amir watched 30 people die in his clinic and patched up “between 120 to 150 gunshot wounds,” he says, losing track of the exact number in a muddle of blood and bullet holes.
Amir works in a small general practitioner’s clinic and does not have suitable equipment to treat the type of injuries more often seen on the front line of a warzone.
“There’s nothing I can do for a punctured lung or a gunshot that has broken the forehead,” he says. He and his colleagues were seeing multiple shots to the neck, abdomen and hands.
His patients that weekend ranged from a 12-year-old boy shot in the testicles to a 77-year-old man hit in the chest.
While this was happening, the clinic was also under attack by security forces. “They shot tear gas at us. They shot at the doorway of the clinic repeatedly both nights,” he says.
Outside the clinic, Amir saw the bodies of two people who had been shot. They may have been alive, but the medical staff were unable to help for fear of being hit by snipers or gunmen. This scene continues to haunt Amir.
Based on conversations with colleagues at other hospitals, he estimates that 400 to 500 people were killed in his city alone over the two deadliest nights of the protests.
