By Suzanne Bowdey

“I saw scenes that would have brought any other human being to their knees.” —General practitioner, Tehran

When the missiles started raining down on Iran Saturday, there was a sense of urgency for people to get to safety, yes, but there was also another overriding emotion for many: relief. The show of force by the U.S. and Israel was the violent answer to countless prayers offered up since January, when leaders massacred thousands of innocents to stop the wave of anti-regime protests gripping the country. Most of the nation had started to worry that the bloodbath would go unpunished by the world. They were wrong. 

No one will ever know the true depth of suffering the country endured under the cover of Iran’s communications blackout, but the testimonies that have started to emerge from the brave men and women on the ground are starting to put the horrifying pieces of those weeks together — pieces, some say, of “one of the worst mass killings in contemporary world history.” 

Worried that no one would believe the nightmare unfolding across Iran’s provinces earlier this year, a medical worker in Rasht risked his life to smuggle information out of the country and to The New York Times. After working four days in the trauma center, he went home and “instead of sleeping, he began compiling 11 gigabytes of X-rays, CT scans, and medical records, later sending them to us on an encrypted messaging app,” Roxana Saberi and Fatemeh write in their sobering piece. “They want to sweep it under the rug,” he cautioned them. 

When the regime cut off the internet, covering their crimes in a blanket of darkness, most of the world had no idea the true scale of evil that had been unleashed on the Iranian people in the bloody crackdown that followed, the Times notes. “But the doctors and nurses did.” 

In a powerful collection of eye-witness accounts from hospitals and emergency rooms across 14 cities, a common theme of horror emerges — one that makes this past weekend’s attacks feel like the justice Iran has been waiting for. 

One by one, the doctors talked about the “extreme distress, including nightmares, flashbacks, grief, anger, and anxiety” they’d experienced from the grisly scenes they can’t unsee. Some confess they’ve become suicidal. “As a doctor,” one said, “I could not come to terms with the fact that so many warlike injuries were inflicted on my own people on the streets of my own city.”

The same pain echoed across the medical landscape. “Our hospital is a small facility,” a general practitioner from Isfahan described. “We had never had trauma patients before. We were not prepared to handle this number of injured people. Handle them? Even the cleaning staff could not collect the blood from the hospital floor — it was that much. I was walking through blood. I still smell blood in my nose.”

The inability to keep up with the savagery was a common theme. “The hospital corridors were full of bloodied people. All the hallways and walls were covered in blood,” a medical worker from Shiraz remembers. “I saw exposure of the brain and abdominal organs, amputation and dismemberment, multiple knife and machete blows, pellet wounds, and bullet entry and exit sites.” The number of injured was so high, others pointed out, that they tried calling every doctor and nurse they knew to come help, but it was no use. “About 15 minutes later, the phones were cut off. There were almost no orderlies or assistants, no IV fluids, no IV starter packs, and no IV poles. No one expected this volume, and it took a long time until supplies were made available,” a trauma doctor lamented. 

The sheer number of patients — “from a nine-year-old child to a 70-year-old man” — a nurse from the Tehran province said, was overwhelming. “A single eye surgeon might perform 10 major surgeries like this in their entire career,” an ophthalmologist told the reporters, “but we performed thousands of surgeries of this kind. Another issue was the severity of the injuries — mostly intended to blind. We had many cases involving both eyes.” One man was beaten so severely that his eyes had come out of their sockets.

An ER doctor grieved the number of patients who died just because the phones were cut off. “We had no access to surgical or anesthesia support.” And they continued to be shocked by the waves of gruesome injuries flooding their hallways. “A shotgun is for hunting animals — it has logic in that context. It is not an anti-riot weapon. And even if it were, it would be for shooting at the legs, not the face and head,” an ophthalmologist insisted. “I saw shots to the head and neck, shots from behind, shots to the genitals, injuries from being shot from about one meter away, and severe stab wound injuries,” one nurse from Tehran recounted. “Many people had their arms or legs amputated, many suffered spinal cord injuries or paralysis, many also went blind.”

These were the kinds of wounds that one surgical worker said they would have expected to witness “in a face-to-face war with a foreign enemy — not during domestic protests.” The memories that replay in their minds are of the hundreds of children who died agonizing deaths. “A breastfeeding mother was holding her baby when security forces opened fire on their car,” a doctor from South Tehran told Saberi and Jamalpour. “They arrived at the hospital in that same vehicle, riddled with bullets. The bullet passed through the baby’s hand and into the mother’s chest.”

There was a pattern, others shudder, of children being shot in the head — a fact that Tehran’s hospital workers confirmed. “The number of children killed by sniper fire or heavy machine gun fire was high,” a doctor in the province said sorrowfully. “These scenes replay in front of my mind maybe eight or nine times a day, and I see them all, both when I’m awake and when I sleep,” a Rasht staffer admits. 

“I feel like it was a nightmare or a dream,” one ER doctor agonized. “The worst scene was keeping the bodies in one room. Hours later, their mobile phones would ring, and we would cry outside the room.”

But it wasn’t as if the hospitals and trauma centers were safe. “Many of the doctors and nurses told us they went to great lengths to prevent the Iranian authorities from identifying their patients as protesters — for example, by falsifying their medical records, erasing security camera footage or treating them in private homes. They were worried their patients could be abducted or even killed,” the reporters explained. “Doing so put the medical workers themselves in danger. Many reported that they or their co-workers had been threatened, interrogated or summoned to appear before the authorities. Several said they had colleagues who had been detained.”

Some got threatening texts from anonymous numbers they didn’t recognize. In Shiraz, medical staff said later, “Several plainclothes agents in the emergency department were threatening to kill the injured and the doctors.” One was arrested after talking to the Times, his family informed the outlet. 

It was very clear that “security forces were trying to identify the wounded,” an anonymous source in Rasht said. “For those who had a bank card or any form of identification, they would take a photo of it and write down the information in the notebook. For those who had no ID, they would photograph their faces with a professional camera, likely to use later to arrest them.” Eventually, people just vanished. “I witnessed bodies disappearing at the hospital,” one general practitioner reported.

Together, all of these doctors and nurses broke their silence and risked their lives to plead for one thing — help. “They are asking the world not to look away.” 

Fortunately for Iran, the Trump administration did not. Finally, the haunting images and stories these people carry with them from these terror-filled weeks and years are being avenged. This is the reckoning the country’s tyrants deserve, the witnesses of Iran’s brutality argue. “I don’t want them to get away with this. I want them to be punished. I don’t want all the blood to go unanswered,” one ER doctor argued passionately. A nurse agreed. “Every night, I fall asleep hoping for the freedom of Iran.” It was and is, she insisted, “the hope of those killed, wounded, or detained.” 

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand. This article was originally published here.