The messages from Iran arrive in bursts. And then they disappear. “Put this news out. The internet is cut and nobody knows yet.” “The bottoms of our pants were getting soaked in blood.” “People were carrying bodies from the street and the surrounding alleys and dumping them in front of us.” “We even had a newborn who had been shot.” “A 7-year-old girl died in my arms.” “One hundred people died in our hospital.” “If I don’t stop talking, they said they’ll send me to my grave.” Iran is trying to cover up a brutal massacre. In January, after the value of Iran’s currency crashed, Iranians took to the streets, calling for the fall of the Islamic Republic. [DEMONSTRATORS CHANTING] The authorities responded with a communications blackout, bullets —— [GUNSHOTS] and blood. [SHRIEKING] For days, the world didn’t know what was happening. But inside the country, underground networks of doctors began their own form of protest. They collected evidence to share with the world. We received hundreds of images, scans and X-rays of state atrocities. This is what the Iranian regime doesn’t want you to see. “Authorities shut down the internet and telephone lines late on Thursday.” I woke up at 5 a.m. and I saw there was a message that I’d received from inside Iran from a doctor I knew. He had somehow gotten access to the internet. He basically gave me a list of hospitals. “Milad, around 70 people. Imam Hossein, 70 people. Ibn Sina, 23 people. Labbafi Nejad, seven people. Fayaz Bakhsh, 15. Shahriar, 32.” I knew immediately what this meant. The regime was killing its own people. “I saw five young people fall. At first, I thought they might be wounded, but then I saw their brains burst onto the ground.” “I wrote on their abdomens with a red marker, ‘Unknown 1,’ ‘Unknown 2.’” “We kept their bodies in one room. Hours later, their cellphones were still ringing. We stood outside their room, crying.” The doctors and nurses in Iran were observing and treating these injured patients who were coming in. And they realized they were in a very unique position to witness the mass violence and to record it. Hi. [CHUCKLES] I collected around 500 documents, 300 of which are confirmed to be gunshots. One of them showed a mother who had been shot in the abdomen and the leg while she was trying to shield her son. Another showed a nurse who had been shot by security forces as she was leaving her shift at a hospital. The pellets from the shotgun left her blind in one eye. The thing that you have to realize with these pellets is that they were shot from very, very close range. [GUNFIRE] These weren’t just measures to scatter out the population. They were also being actively used with the intention to kill. [GUNFIRE] We also received dozens of images showing teenagers and children riddled with pellets or live ammunition. During those critical days, there were a lot of scenarios when plainclothes agents would burst into the emergency ward, all armed with AK-47s, threatening the staff and the patients. [WOMAN SHOUTING] [GUNFIRE] [WOMAN SHRIEKING] So we came up with this idea of misdiagnosing the patients on purpose, so that they would be at least harder to track. For example, if a patient comes with a gunshot to the abdomen, the chief complaint in the system would just be set as abdominal pain. This scan shows the brain of a man injured in the crackdown. Doctors labeled his record as a traffic accident to prevent him from being identified as a protester. We would accompany patients to and from imaging centers and wards for their own safety because we heard of patients being abducted while they were admitted. And in the few cases, we would let the patients from the back door when no plainclothes agents were following us. While doctors were trying to save lives, they also had to worry about their own. Doctors were arrested for treating protesters at homes, private practices and sometimes even dermatology clinics. They’d face very serious crimes, including waging war against God, which can carry the death penalty. “He had been performing surgeries on protesters at home. The security forces raided the house while the doctor was in the middle of operating. They arrested both.” The regime has been trying to silence protesters twice, first by killing them in the streets —— [CLAMORING] and second, by trying to erase evidence of the massacre. “They put bodies into black bags and threw them into unknown locations.” These doctors are risking their lives to get these images out. I mean, honestly speaking, this could be easily framed as espionage. And the only punishment for espionage these days is execution. But I can’t worry about the consequences at the moment if I believe in what I’m doing. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MAN SHOUTING] [GUNSHOT] By saving these images, doctors are sending a message that this happened and it can never be erased. [MAN SHOUTING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC FADES]
