Eight months later, images of the killings and crackdown remain vivid for survivors and the wider public. Iranians describing life after January have spoken of recurring nightmares, crying at night and difficulty returning to ordinary life. Some survivors have attempted suicide.
For many, life is now divided into before and after January.
Body bags have also acquired a place in Iran’s collective memory that they did not have before. Previously associated largely with films, natural disasters and major emergencies, they appeared repeatedly in footage documenting the aftermath of the January killings.
Images from earlier waves of unrest – the 2009 protests, November 2019 and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement – often showed the bodies of those killed: lying in streets, on hospital beds or wrapped in burial shrouds.
In January 2026, the dead were frequently hidden behind black bags and zippers. Faces disappeared from view and rows of bags remained.
The distinction matters. An object intended to preserve bodies for transportation and identification became one of the most recognizable images of the crackdown.
Amnesty International counted at least 205 separate body bags in verified images from the Kahrizak morgue, south of Tehran. Human Rights Watch identified at least 400 bodies or body bags in three verified videos.
Eurovision News Spotlight, a verification project run by the European Broadcasting Union, also identified the green markings of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on some of the body bags.
The trauma behind the bags
Part of the disturbing power of such images comes from what the bags conceal.
An exposed body, however difficult to see, retains a face and visible identity. Hundreds of nearly identical bags can instead reduce individuals to units: one package beside another, one number beside another, with the total continuing to rise.
For relatives searching for somebody missing, however, those bags have to be opened. Each zipper brings the possibility of encountering the body of a parent, child, sibling or friend.
This can be understood as a particular trauma associated with body bags: the combination of mass death, the temporary erasure of individual identity, the anxiety of identifying the dead and the repeated return of the same visual image.
There is also the question of dignity. Each bag contains a person whose family may be searching for them, yet footage showed bodies left in rows on the ground as relatives tried to identify them.
Such scenes are not unique to Iran.
After Egyptian security forces opened fire on protesters around Cairo’s Rabaa Square in the summer of 2013, the El-Iman mosque became a temporary morgue. Bodies were placed in tightly packed rows under white sheets. Volunteers wrote victims’ names on the coverings; some carried names and addresses, while others remained unidentified.
Families also searched morgues in Damascus after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, opening bags, photographing faces and comparing them with images of missing relatives and acquaintances.
Those bags represented an archive of years of enforced disappearances, torture and deaths in custody.
Iran’s January 2026 images were different in one important respect. The bags appeared during the days and nights of the crackdown itself, within the existing system of hospitals, forensic facilities and cemeteries.
In much of the footage, rows of black bags are visible without names or identifying information that can be seen on their surfaces.
The victims’ faces are concealed, but the sheer number of bags makes the scale of death visible.
The bags also did not arrive at morgues by themselves. Behind the images was a system responsible for collecting, transporting, recording and storing bodies.
What happened after the shooting
Mass killing does not end when shooting stops. Bodies have to be moved. That requires ambulances or other vehicles, body bags and labels, morgues or refrigerated containers and lists recording the dead. Decisions also have to be made about where bodies are stored, when they can be identified and under what conditions they are returned to families.
Reports following the killings on January 8 and 9 described shortages of body bags and bodies accumulating in hospitals and morgues.
That raises another question: where did the additional bags come from, and how prepared were authorities for handling large numbers of bodies?
Two procurement notices for body bags appeared around the time of the killings in Alborz province, one of the main centers of the protests and subsequent crackdown.
The Imam Hossein medical center in Alborz sought quotations on January 4, after the protests had begun, for 200 adult body bags and eight bags for children.
Shariati Hospital in Karaj had separately registered a request for 200 adult body bags on December 18, with the procurement notice published two days later.
The timing, particularly of the Imam Hossein request, warrants scrutiny. But the records alone do not demonstrate that authorities anticipated mass killings, nor do they establish that these particular bags were subsequently used to carry protesters’ bodies.
Several links in the procurement chain are also missing, including final contracts, delivery receipts, shipment numbers and warehouse release documents.
Body bags are routine supplies for hospitals, cemeteries and emergency services. Purchasing them is therefore not in itself evidence of preparation for a crackdown.
Reports of shortages in cities including Arak, Khorramabad and Gorgan, however, suggest that ordinary stocks were rapidly exhausted. If so, additional supplies would have had to be distributed, potentially following further purchases.
That leaves a narrower but important question: what level of fatalities was the system for handling bodies equipped to manage, and did January’s death toll overwhelm that capacity?
Turning numbers back into names
In hospitals, forensic facilities and disaster operations, body bags serve practical purposes: separating and transporting the dead and protecting workers from contact with blood and bodily fluids.
Joint guidance from the World Health Organization and International Committee of the Red Cross says each body should be placed separately in a bag, with the location and time it was found recorded. Personal belongings should remain with the body and each person should receive a unique identification number.
That number is not intended to erase a name. Its purpose is to help establish an identity and ultimately return the body to relatives.
For some Iranian families in January, the process appeared to work in reverse: they searched through bags and thousands of photographs in an effort to turn a number back into the name of somebody they knew.
The father of Iman Asadi spent five days searching police stations, prisons and hospitals before finding his son’s photograph among thousands of images of unidentified people.
In that collection, Iman was No. 11838.
A number intended to assist identification had become, at least temporarily, the marker of a person without a name.
Another father, Esmail Shokri, was filmed walking among body bags at the Kahrizak forensic facility in a 12-minute video, calling out for his son.
“Sepehr ... Sepehr, my son ... where are you?” Shokri called.
Every bag could have contained Sepehr. To his family, he had a face, a history and a name. From the outside, each closed black bag looked much like the next.
That is what distinguishes some of the most enduring images of January 2026 from those of earlier Iranian crackdowns. Previously, the victim’s body often occupied the center of the frame. This time, for many Iranians, the body bag stood between the dead and the public looking at them.
