Iran International
A 34-year-old protester shot in the Iranian city of Qazvin on January 8 has undergone five major operations and months of largely secret medical care as doctors work to save and reconstruct his badly damaged leg.
“The bullet severely destroyed the bone in his right lower leg, and the lower part of his leg was almost attached to his body only by tissue and skin,” the protester’s brother told Iran International.
The protester was shot on Khayyam Street in Qazvin on the evening of January 8, according to information obtained by Iran International. The shot was fired from a Kalashnikov rifle at a distance of about 100 meters.
The shooting took place during nationwide protests that began in December 2025 amid worsening economic conditions and a sharp fall in Iran’s currency, then grew into broader opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Security forces killed tens of thousands of Iranians during the January 8-9 crackdown, making it the deadliest two-day protest massacre in history, according to documents reviewed by Iran International’s Editorial Board.
After initial attempts to stop the bleeding failed, the family sought help from an acquaintance to move him secretly to a hospital in Qazvin, his brother said.
The family has had to keep much of his treatment secret for fear he could be identified and detained, his brother said.
Iran International has documented similar cases since the January protests, in which wounded demonstrators avoided medical facilities or sought treatment in secret for fear of identification and arrest.
Sources in Mamasani, in Fars province, previously confirmed that some wounded protesters there avoided medical centers because they feared their identities could be exposed and they could face prosecution.
Secret hospital exit after seven-hour surgery
The hospital in Qazvin was among those willing to admit wounded protesters despite the risks, his brother said.
Staff placed the 34-year-old in a darkened room with several other wounded people and cut power to parts of the hospital to stop surveillance cameras from recording patients’ movements, his brother said.
He lost consciousness after severe blood loss and underwent surgery at about 3 p.m. on January 9. The operation lasted roughly seven hours.
After surgery, hospital staff warned the family that he needed to leave quickly through a rear exit, fearing security forces could arrive and detain him, according to the family.
About an hour later, relatives and hospital staff moved him out of the building, before he had fully regained consciousness, and took him to a home to recover.
Iran International has previously documented the scale and severity of injuries inflicted during the January crackdown.
A specialist in a northern Iranian city said he and his son operated on dozens of wounded people on January 9 and 10. His son removed more than 270 pellets from the eyes of about 130 protesters, the doctor said.
Severe infection complicates recovery
Deep wounds and extensive damage to the protester’s lower leg complicated his recovery after the first operation, with large amounts of fluid draining from the wound each day, his brother said.
The family changed his dressings at home with help from a doctor they knew. As the infection worsened, they contacted the surgeon who had performed the first operation. He continued treating the protester at his private practice.
The family was told that the bullet had shattered a large section of his shinbone, leaving a gap that prevented the remaining ends from joining on their own.
The surgeon referred him to a colleague in Tehran for specialist treatment.
For months, the family has taken him from Qazvin to Tehran roughly every two weeks. He has undergone more than five major operations on his leg, his brother said.
Iran International has received other accounts of doctors secretly helping protesters wounded in January. In one case, a Tehran doctor treated dozens of wounded protesters free of charge and arranged for their radiology fees to be waived, sources said.
Surgeons remove 12 centimeters of bone
Surgeons eventually had to remove about 12 centimeters of damaged bone from his lower leg and make a surgical cut in the bone near his ankle.
They then fitted an Ilizarov apparatus, an external frame of metal rings, rods and wires used to gradually move sections of bone. The technique can help repair extensive bone damage and replace missing bone.
Doctors hope to use the device to gradually close the gap between the healthy sections before performing a bone graft, according to the family.
He faces a prolonged recovery, with no immediate prospect of regaining normal mobility or returning to work.
Treatment costs strain family
Months of surgery, medication, wound care and travel between Qazvin and Tehran have put the family under growing financial pressure, his brother said.
The protester, who lives with his wife in rented accommodation, has been unable to work since the shooting.
His brother, who also rents his home, has taken on much of the responsibility for transporting him and coordinating his care.
The family is struggling to meet the continuing costs of treatment and travel, his brother said.
Afkar-e Naft, a Telegram channel which reports on issues affecting permanent oil industry employees, said the demonstrations were part of protests held every Monday.
Images published by the channel showed workers at several offshore installations holding placards calling for the removal of salary caps, full payment of wages and benefits, fairer compensation and changes to the tax system for offshore employees.
“Full payment of wages and benefits,” read one placard, while another said, “Fair pay is our right, not an extra privilege.”
Other signs called for an overhaul of the wage system for operational oil workers and the removal of what protesters described as “unfair restrictions” on salary payments.
Several workers also highlighted the conditions under which oil production has continued during the war. One placard read, “Uninterrupted production in a war zone,” while another referred to “uninterrupted production in border areas.”
The protesters are also seeking payment of outstanding compensation under Article 10 of the law governing the duties and powers of Iran’s Oil Ministry.
The so-called Article 10 back pay refers to accumulated payments employees say they are owed following implementation of provisions governing compensation and employment conditions for Oil Ministry personnel.
The protests come as Iran’s economy faces mounting pressure from the regional war and a US maritime blockade that was reimposed in mid-July. Satellite imagery reviewed by Iran International shows a sharp decline in visible vessel activity at Shahid Rajaee and Imam Khomeini, two of the country’s most important commercial ports, since the blockade resumed.
The impact has been particularly severe on Iran’s oil trade, a crucial source of government revenue and foreign currency. Kpler tanker-tracking data reviewed by Iran International showed Iranian crude loadings averaging about 287,000 barrels per day in August through Aug. 21, compared with roughly 2 million barrels per day before the war — a fall of about 85%.
Washington has simultaneously intensified its financial campaign against Tehran. On Aug. 24, the US Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast, dubbed an “Economic D-Day,” saying it aimed to sever Iran’s remaining financial and commercial connections and increase the risks for foreign banks and companies doing business with Tehran. The campaign has since targeted financial channels in countries including the United Arab Emirates and Türkiye.
The pressure has coincided with a steep deterioration in household purchasing power. Iran’s rial has fallen to a record low of about 2.2 million to the US dollar this month, compared with roughly 958,000 a year earlier.
Official figures for July showed average annual inflation at around 62%, year-on-year inflation at 82% and food inflation at 134%, adding to the pressure on wages and living standards.
Sequences of Copernicus satellite images comparing the months before the war with the period under the blockade show a striking change at both ports.
At Shahid Rajaee near Bandar Abbas, pre-war images show vessels occupying multiple berths and denser use of the container terminal, while later images show far fewer ships and large sections of the port appearing largely inactive.
Copernicus satellite images from January 2, 2026 and September 4, 2026 show Shahid Rajaee Port near Bandar Abbas before the war and during the US blockade, with far fewer vessels visible at its berths in the later image.
Shahid Rajaee is Iran’s most important export port and, after Imam Khomeini Port, its second-largest gateway for imports. It is also the country’s largest container port, handling nearly 80% of Iran’s container loading and unloading, according to official figures.
A similar pattern is visible at Imam Khomeini Port in southwestern Iran, the country’s largest import gateway, where satellite imagery shows markedly reduced vessel presence and terminal activity compared with the period before the conflict.
Copernicus satellite images from February 25, 2026 and September 5, 2026 show Imam Khomeini Port in southwestern Iran before the war and during the US blockade, with a marked decline in visible vessel and terminal activity.
The images provide a visual measure of the disruption at ports that are critical to Iran’s economy. Shahid Rajaee handles more than 55% of Iran’s imports and exports and an estimated 85% to 90% of its container trade, according to Iranian port data.
Imam Khomeini Port plays a particularly important role in imports of food and other basic commodities. Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization said the port handled more than 48 million tons of cargo in the year ending March 2025, including 19.2 million tons of imported goods.
The satellite evidence reinforces other indications that the blockade is increasingly biting. Video published from Shahid Rajaee in late August showed no ships docked and little apparent loading or unloading activity.
Iran International reported in July that activity at the port had been reduced to a minimum, with thousands of containers stranded and about half of its workforce laid off.
Iranian officials have also increasingly acknowledged the economic impact. President Masoud Pezeshkian said in late August that blocked routes were preventing goods, including gasoline, from entering the country.
Reuters reported this week that Iranian trade had fallen by as much as 35% amid the blockade and intensified sanctions, while gasoline supplies had tightened sharply.
The effect has been even more pronounced on Iran’s oil trade. Iranian crude loadings fell from around 2 million barrels per day before the war to roughly 220,000–255,000 bpd in August, according to shipping data cited by Reuters.
Washington says the blockade can be sustained indefinitely. As of Aug. 23, US Central Command said its forces had redirected 70 commercial vessels attempting to breach it, while three had been disabled and two boarded.
Iran’s foreign trade has contracted sharply since the conflict with the United States began, with non-oil exports and imports falling by around a quarter or more, according to customs data released after months of delay.
Iran exported about $15 billion worth of non-oil goods, including natural gas and LPG, through August 16, nearly five months into the Iranian calendar year that began on March 21. That was nearly 30% below the figure reported for the first five months of the previous year.
Imports fell to about $17 billion over the same near-five-month period, about a quarter below the full five-month figure reported a year earlier.
The figures show a sharp deterioration in Iran’s trade during a conflict that has disrupted key industries and shipping routes, adding to an economy already struggling under years of sanctions, declining oil revenues and chronic shortages of foreign currency.
The format barely varies. A person holds up what they bought and names what it cost. Four eggs and a single sausage, 5 million rials, about $2.30. A soda and a packet of crisps, 3.5 million rials. Three small bags of shopping, 75 million rials, roughly $34, which is close to half a month at Iran's minimum wage of about $75. Then the line, in one version or another: I am very happy, because if I were not, they would execute me. And then they dance.
One man films his phone showing a bank balance of 2 million rials, under a dollar, and dances through the list of what it will not cover: the bounced cheques, the unpaid shop rent, the apartment rent, his wife's clothes.
A veiled woman holds up a few tomatoes, onions and potatoes and explains that she can no longer buy by the kilo, only a handful at a time, "but I am happy, because otherwise they call me a rioter or a traitor." She thanks the authorities and signs off warmly. Another woman does the same with six eggs and a tin of tuna.
Another man dances while captions scroll over him: the dollar at 200,000 tomans, no electricity, deep in debt, and a signed undertaking to the authorities not to engage in politics. The threat varies with the week's official vocabulary: some dancers say they would otherwise be branded a mercenary, a traitor, or a Mossad agent.
It reads, at first, as one more instance of a familiar thing, humor as a pressure valve under repression. That reading is not wrong, but it is not what is new here, and it misses what the videos are actually doing.
The Islamic Republic has a specific charge for describing the country's problems: siah-namai, "painting things black." It is used against journalists, economists and ordinary complainers to mean the deliberate darkening of a reality that is, officials insist, fine. The dance videos answer it precisely. They paint things white, so luridly that the whiteness itself becomes the accusation.
A man delighted by four eggs is not praising the government. He is holding its own demand up to the light.
To see why this is a break rather than a joke, it helps to recall Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the shopkeeper in communist Czechoslovakia who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window. He does not believe it. What the sign really says, Havel wrote, is: I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace. The system did not need people to believe. It needed each of them to see everyone else pretending, so that pretending felt like the only choice. Its one requirement was silence about what the pretending was for.
The Iranian dancer is Havel's greengrocer saying the quiet part aloud while still holding up the sign. The compliance is performed, the smile is wide, the gratitude is offered. And in the same breath the coercion behind it is named: I am doing this because the alternative is a noose.
Coerced performance works only while the coercion stays deniable. Havel's greengrocer kept the system standing by leaving the reason unsaid. The dancer says the reason into the camera, and the sign in the window stops working.
Follow that to its end and the videos are doing something sharper than mockery. They are exposing a problem the state has made for itself.
When a government criminalizes complaint, it also empties praise of meaning. If unhappiness can be prosecuted, a happy citizen and a frightened one become impossible to tell apart.
The dancers are demonstrating this to the state's face: you can no longer know whether we are content, because you have made discontent a crime, and so our contentment tells you nothing.
This is the deeper significance of a format built entirely from the state's own words. Every accusation the dancers voice, siah-namai, rioter, mercenary, Mossad agent, traitor, is lifted from official language. The videos are assembled from nothing but the vocabulary the government uses to police speech, and turned into an instrument of it.
Linguists distinguish the message from the metamessage: what a statement says, and what it conveys about the relationship between the people speaking. Every one of these videos carries the same metamessage. I cannot tell you the truth, you know I cannot, and I know that you know.
The gap between "I am delighted" and "I am forbidden to say otherwise" is the entire content. Iranians read it without effort. The state pretends to read only the surface.
The videos are the latest move in a shift that has been accelerating, and each stage has done something different to the relationship between a sign and its meaning.
During the January protests, demonstrators in the western town of Abdanan scattered rice into the air, pouring away a staple that had grown scarce and dear. The gesture refused the frame the state wanted to impose on the unrest.
By throwing away the very thing they could barely afford, protesters were saying the anger was never really about the price of rice. The economy had triggered something larger: a rejection of the whole arrangement.
Then came the funerals. After the January massacre, families burying the dead replaced the state's mourning language, the Quranic recitation, the lamentation, the word shahid, "martyr," with another vocabulary entirely: wedding music, folk dance, verses from the Shahnameh, and a new word for their dead, javid-nam, "whose name will endure."
That was an act of authorship. The grief was real, and out of it people built a rival ritual language, deliberately cleansed of the religious symbolism the state relies on.
The price videos are the third move, and they are not the same as the funeral dances, even though both use the body and both use music. The funeral dance builds; it replaces the state's grammar with a sincere one of its own. The price video hollows; it takes the state's grammar and performs it as a corpse. One is about the dead and constructs a new language. The other is about the living and empties an existing one. A society that first refused the state's frame, and then authored its own, is now wearing the state's words as a mask.
It is worth remembering how far this has travelled. Dance is not merely frowned upon in Iran; it is effectively illegal, and the word itself is so freighted that the state, when staging its own approved versions, avoids it and reaches instead for the bloodless euphemism harakat-e mozoun, "rhythmic movements," a coinage that was itself widely mocked when it appeared.
During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, teenage girls were detained and pushed into filmed confessions for dancing in a Tehran neighborhood. The same act now circulates in its hundreds, filmed openly by people using their own names and faces, among them veiled women from households where dancing would once have been unthinkable on its own terms, never mind the law's. That is its own measure of how fast the ground is moving.
The trigger, as ever, is money. The rial has been setting records, passing 2,200,000 to the dollar, and on August 31 the judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called protesters "mercenaries" and promised a firmer hand. But the videos are not really about eggs, any more than the rice was about rice.
They are about a population that has run out of permitted ways to say no, and has started saying yes in a way that unmistakably means it.
The phenomenon has acquired a name, taken from the line the dancers keep repeating: "If I'm not happy, they'll execute me." It is a joke a foreign viewer can laugh at and an Iranian cannot, quite. The Islamic Republic built a machine designed to hear only yes. It is now discovering that yes is what no has learned to sound like.
