Iran Today

Kill, Withhold, Coerce, Broadcast

by Iran Prism 10 min read

The Ambulance

Two nurses in western Tehran watched a security agent climb into the back of an ambulance on January 8, 2026. Inside was a semi-conscious young man with gunshot wounds. The agent fired two consecutive shots. The nurses documented what they saw. AP verified their account.1

The young man had been shot in the street, loaded into an ambulance, and executed inside it — inside the vehicle designed to save his life.

This is the first stage of the pipeline. Everything that follows is the regime’s attempt to convert that killing into something politically useful.

Stage 1: Kill

The targeting patterns are documented. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch independently verified that security forces fired live ammunition at protesters’ heads and torsos — the targeting profile of a force aiming to kill, not disperse.2

In Gorgan, snipers stationed on a hospital rooftop shot at approaching patients. In Karaj, DShK heavy machine guns — Soviet-era crew-served weapons designed for anti-aircraft use — were mounted on military vehicles and fired into crowds. In Mashhad, on the night of January 9, 150 bodies of young protesters were delivered to a single hospital and then transported to Behesht-e Rezvan Cemetery.3

The foreign forces were part of the killing. By January 15, approximately 8,000 foreign fighters — roughly 5,000 Iraqi militia, 2,000 Afghan Fatemiyoun, and smaller Pakistani and Lebanese contingents — had deployed against Iranian civilians. In Kurdish regions, witnesses reported security forces who did not speak Persian. In Karaj, Arabic-speaking forces were documented taking selfies with bodies.4

Former IRGC member Roni Insaz explained the logic to the Jerusalem Post: “It’s very difficult for Iranian forces to kill Iranians… loyal militias from Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have participated.”5

Some protesters did use Molotov cocktails and set fire to government buildings — the regime’s characterization of an armed insurrection is false, but the honest record includes a minority of protesters who fought back with improvised weapons. Against them, the regime deployed DShK anti-aircraft guns, rooftop snipers, and foreign militias. The six Tehran hospitals that recorded 217 deaths on January 8 tell the proportionality of the response.

But each number contains a specific person — the man in the ambulance, the patients shot from rooftops, the 150 young bodies delivered to Mashhad in a single night.

Stage 2: Withhold

The killing creates a commodity: the body. And the regime understood, decades ago, that a withheld body is leverage.

Tehran’s Kahrizak Morgue became the central processing facility. A witness described it to Human Rights Watch: “When we got close to the halls, we saw bodies piled on top of bodies… between 1,500 to 2,000 bodies were held there.” Videos from January 10 — verified by Mnemonic digital forensics — showed hundreds of body bags in multiple sheds and outdoor areas, with refrigerated trucks delivering more.6

In Mashhad, mass burials were conducted without notifying families. Amnesty International documented the practice.7

Human rights lawyer Mousa Barzin described the escalation to CNN: “In some cities we received reports that if families refused, the authorities buried the bodies themselves in undisclosed locations. Days later, they would inform the families that the burial had taken place.”8

The withholding serves two functions. It gives the regime time to construct its narrative. And it gives the regime something to trade.

Stage 3: Coerce

The trade takes two forms: money or memory.

The bullet fee. Documented amounts range from 700 million to 6 billion Iranian rials — roughly $480 to $8,000. In an economy where the minimum wage is approximately $110 per month, the upper range represents over six years of earnings. The practice dates to at least the 1988 prison massacres. In 2009, the family of Kaveh Alipour, nineteen, was charged $3,000. By 2026, the scale was industrial.9

The declaration. Families who cannot pay — or who are offered the alternative — are asked to sign a statement declaring the deceased was a loyal Basij member killed by terrorists or foreign agents. Some are asked to record video testimony attributing the death to foreign enemies.

Imagine your child has been killed. The people who killed him now hold the body. They offer you a choice: pay a sum you will never earn, or go on television and say your child supported his own killers. That is not a hypothetical. It is the documented experience of hundreds of Iranian families in January 2026.

The case files document the variations.

Sadegh and Ilya. Two brothers. Their family was told: pay 800 million toman (approximately $8,000) or sign a declaration that both men were Basij killed by “terrorists.” The family could not afford the fee. They signed. They received half an hour in a mosque for the funeral.10

Abolfazl Vahid Gezeljeh-Meydan, 13. His father was told to declare his son a Basij member or pay approximately $5,000. CNN documented the offer and the father’s refusal.11

Amirhesam Khodayarifard, 20. Shot in the head in Kuhdasht. State news agencies IRNA and Mehr News claimed within hours that he was a Basij member. His father refused publicly at the funeral. The crowd protected the family. As of January 5, the body had not been returned.12

Armin Jashni-Nejad, 23. Shot by police on January 9. Family told the body would be released only if they said he was killed by “thugs.” When they refused, security forces buried him at 5 AM without the family present.13

The funerals themselves were controlled. Limited to minutes. Conducted at night under security force supervision. Bans on the word “martyr.” Bans on memorial banners. Bans on social media posts. Some families were ordered to attend pro-government rallies as a condition of receiving the body.14

Stage 4: Broadcast

The coerced declarations feed the propaganda machine.

Human Rights Watch analyzed 139 forced confession videos broadcast by IRIB state television as of early February 2026. The Aban documentation group tracked over 300 across state outlets. In the first two weeks of the crackdown alone, 97 forced confessions were broadcast — compared to roughly 350 total from 2010 to 2020. The production line had scaled by a factor of ten.15

Nazila Maroofian, a former political prisoner, described the production process: “They sat me in front of the camera. ‘Say you were paid by Israel’ — cut. ‘Say you were paid by the US’ — cut. ‘Say you were instigated and now regret it’ — cut.”16

The broadcasts have a specific institutional architect. IRIB employs dedicated “interrogator-reporters” — the term is not metaphorical. Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour produces fabricated cases against dissidents at the direction of the IRGC Intelligence Organisation. An IRIB employee described the institutional culture: “Just as security, military, and intelligence forces are now widely despised for their role in the killings, IRIB employees are increasingly viewed as the Islamic Republic’s propagandists for a regime that shoots citizens in the streets and executes wounded protesters.”17

The pipeline’s most extreme product is the hospital execution — the coup de grâce. Morgue photos show bodies with execution-style head wounds while IV lines, endotracheal tubes, and cardiac monitoring electrodes were still attached. Patients were shot on treatment beds, still connected to medical equipment. Javad Tajik, head of Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery organization — the official responsible for processing the dead — publicly confirmed the practice on February 19, 2026.18

In every medical tradition, across every culture and faith, the treatment bed is sacred ground. Iran’s own bimaristan tradition — hospitals endowed as acts of religious charity for over a thousand years — held that anyone who entered seeking care was under the protection of God. What these photos document is desecration. The regime did not merely kill patients. It defiled the oldest covenant in medicine.

Stage 5: Justify

The manufactured narrative becomes the legal basis for the next round of killing.

Prosecutor General Mohammad Movahedi-Azad declared on January 10 that all protesters would be charged with moharebeh — “war against God,” a capital offense under Iranian law. “The charges against all rioters are the same,” he said. “All perpetrators in this matter are mohareb.”19

Judiciary Head Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei ordered expedited trials and said on state television: “If we want to do a job, we should do it now… If it becomes late, two months, three months later, it doesn’t have the same effect.”20

By late February 2026, at least 8,843 indictments had been issued. Twenty-six protesters had been sentenced to death, including minors: Matin Mohammadi, 17. Erfan Amiri, 17. Ehsan Hosseinipour Hesarloo, 18.21

At least 79 healthcare professionals had been detained since January 9, including twelve medical students. One surgeon was charged with moharebeh for stating his willingness to treat wounded civilians. The act of offering medical care was classified as waging war against God.22

The loop closes. The regime kills protesters, manufactures evidence that they were terrorists, uses the manufactured evidence to justify executing detained protesters, and uses the executions as proof that the crackdown targets terrorists. Each stage generates the raw material for the next.

The Resistance

The pipeline has a vulnerability: witnesses.

Doctors who risked moharebeh charges by falsifying medical records — recording gunshot wounds as “abdominal pain,” broken bones as “falling accidents,” genital gunshot wounds as “urology cases” — preserved lives that the pipeline would have claimed.23

An underground medical network formed during the crackdown. They called it the “Red Lion and Sun” — a deliberate echo of Iran’s pre-revolutionary humanitarian organization, which the Islamic Republic had dissolved. The name was an act of patriotism: these doctors were reclaiming an Iranian institution founded in 1922 — their country’s own humanitarian tradition — that the regime had erased. They operated clandestine treatment facilities in Tehran apartments and basements, smuggling medical supplies and communicating through encrypted channels. Two health workers from one such clinic were eventually seized from their homes.24

A citizen journalist operating under the name Vahid Online shared morgue photos and videos via Telegram and X — documentation that reached the outside world through smuggled Starlink connections despite the blackout.25

The Human Rights Activists News Agency published “The Crimson Winter” — a 1,350-page report documenting 7,007 confirmed named deaths as of February 23, 2026. The Iranian Archive, a joint project of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Mnemonic, has forensically preserved over two million digital artifacts using chain-of-custody standards developed for international criminal proceedings.26

The pipeline manufactures a story. The documentation preserves a different one. The question is which story reaches the people who need to hear it — and whether it arrives before the manufactured version has already set the frame.

This article is part of The Grief Factory. For the historical pattern, see The Same Playbook Since 1988. For the forensic test applied to Minab, see The Minab Test.

Footnotes

  1. Ambulance execution witnessed by two nurses in western Tehran, January 8, 2026. Verified by AP investigation published February 27, 2026. ↩

  2. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch independently verified targeting of heads and torsos with live ammunition during the January 2026 crackdown. ↩

  3. Gorgan hospital rooftop snipers: Iran Human Rights documentation. Karaj DShK heavy machine guns: multiple witness reports. Mashhad, 150 bodies in single night: AP and Iran Human Rights. ↩

  4. Foreign proxy deployment: ~5,000 Iraqi militia confirmed by CNN January 15, plus ~2,000 Afghan Fatemiyoun and ~500-1,000 Pakistani Zainabiyoun. Total ~8,000. Non-Persian-speaking forces in Kurdish regions. Arabic-speaking forces taking selfies with bodies in Karaj. ↩

  5. Roni Insaz, former IRGC member, interview with Jerusalem Post. ↩

  6. Kahrizak Morgue witness description to Human Rights Watch. January 10 video footage verified by Mnemonic digital forensics. ↩

  7. Mashhad mass burials without family notification documented by Amnesty International. ↩

  8. Mousa Barzin, human rights lawyer, to CNN. ↩

  9. Bullet fee range: 700M to 6B rials (~$480-$8,000). Kaveh Alipour (2009, $3,000). Documentation by CNN, UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato. ↩

  10. Sadegh and Ilya case documented by NBC News. 800M toman fee or signed declaration. Half-hour funeral in a mosque. ↩

  11. Abolfazl Vahid Gezeljeh-Meydan, age 13, documented by CNN. Father’s refusal documented. ↩

  12. Amirhesam Khodayarifard, age 20, shot in Kuhdasht, December 31, 2025. IRNA/Mehr News false Basij claim. Father’s public refusal. Body not returned as of January 5. ↩

  13. Armin Jashni-Nejad, age 23, shot January 9. Family coercion documented. Burial at 5 AM without family. ↩

  14. Funeral restrictions documented by CNN (12+ family testimonies) and Iran Human Rights: minutes-long, nighttime, bans on “martyr,” bans on banners and social media. ↩

  15. HRW: 139 forced confession videos. Aban: 300+. 97 in first two weeks vs. ~350 total 2010-2020. ↩

  16. Nazila Maroofian, former political prisoner, describing the forced confession production process. ↩

  17. Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour, IRIB “interrogator-reporter.” IRIB employee quote from The Media Line. ↩

  18. Coup de grâce: morgue photos showing execution wounds with medical equipment still attached. Javad Tajik public confirmation, February 19, 2026. Tajik is head of Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery organization. ↩

  19. Prosecutor General Movahedi-Azad, January 10, 2026, declaring all protesters charged with moharebeh. ↩

  20. Judiciary Head Mohseni-Ejei, state television statement on expedited trials. ↩

  21. 8,843 indictments, 26 death sentences including named minors. Source: Iran Human Rights documentation. ↩

  22. 79 healthcare professionals detained, including 12 medical students. Surgeon charged with moharebeh for offering to treat wounded. ↩

  23. Medical record falsification to protect patients documented by AP investigation (nine doctor interviews). ↩

  24. “Red Lion and Sun” underground medical network. Two health workers seized. Source: AP, Mnemonic verification. ↩

  25. Vahid Online citizen journalism via Telegram and X through smuggled Starlink connections. ↩

  26. HRANA “Crimson Winter”: 7,007 confirmed named deaths, 1,350 pages. Iranian Archive: 2+ million digital artifacts. UN Fact-Finding Mission: 38,000+ evidence items. ↩