The magnitude of the repression carried out by Iran's regime is beginning to come into view based on internal leaks that contradict the official version. The information came from high-ranking officials in the Iranian Ministry of Health.
The internal version revealed that up to 30,000 people may have died in just two days, during clashes between protesters and security forces. The data was published by TIME magazine, which obtained direct testimonies from health officials who described an unprecedented situation in the country's recent history.
If it is confirmed, the figure would far exceed the count from the government's official sectors, which acknowledge just over 3,000 deaths.
The collapse of the system for handling the dead
According to the accounts collected, the scale of the violence was such that the state itself was overwhelmed in its efforts to manage the bodies. Body bags ran out in a matter of hours and ambulances proved insufficient. This forced officials to use large semi-trailer trucks for the mass transport of the dead to improvised morgues.
Officials from the Ministry of Health acknowledged that they had never faced such a high volume of deaths in such a short period of time. The gap between the internal data and the regime's public narrative exposes a systematic attempt to minimize the real scope of the repression.
In addition, the information blackout imposed by the Iranian government made the work of independent organizations more difficult. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), based in the United States, managed to confirm more than 5,400 deaths and was investigating another 17,000 cases.
However, even those numbers could underestimate the tragedy. The German-Iranian surgeon Amir Parasta, who gathered information from hospitals and first responders, stated that he had documented 30,304 deaths by the Friday following the repression. As he explained, his record doesn't include military hospitals, where bodies are usually transferred directly to morgues without passing through civilian controls.
