Hundreds of Protesters in Iran Blinded by Metal Pellets and Rubber Bullets

Security forces have been firing ammunition that has ruptured the eyes of antigovernment demonstrators in the past two months. “Everything went dark,” one said.

Hundreds of Protesters in Iran Blinded by Metal Pellets and Rubber Bullets

New York Times -Nov19th 2022

By Cora Engelbrecht

Nov. 19, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

The protester was speeding toward a demonstration in Tehran on his motorbike when an Iranian security officer standing 10 feet away raised his gun and shot a rubber bullet into his left eye.

“We locked eyes and then everything went dark,” said the protester, who goes by the nickname Saman. He cupped his hand to his mutilated eye, afraid that it would drop from its socket, as he drove himself to a hospital where doctors refused to treat him, he said. He was finally admitted to the government-run Farabi Eye Hospital, where he was operated on nearly 24 hours after he had been shot.

Saman, 30, spoke by telephone from a location outside Iran where he fled last month. The New York Times is withholding his name and location as a security precaution.

The officer who aimed at his face, he said, had recognized him as one of the frontline activists who had gone night after night to Valiasr Square in Tehran, Iran’s capital, to face off against security forces, hurling back the tear gas canisters they fired into the crowd.

“He knew my face, and I knew his,” he said.

The impact of the shot, fired at such close range, left him blind in that eye. He provided medical documents and photographs of CT scans of his eye, which The Times asked two ophthalmologists to review. They confirmed that it had been irreparably damaged.

Saman is one of hundreds of victims to have suffered severe eye injuries inflicted by Iranian security forces since mid-September, according to doctors and medical facilities. That month, antigovernment protests swept across the country, prompting a violent crackdown. More than 300 Iranians have been killed, according to rights groups. Thousands have been injured.

Among the most irreversible effects of the government’s efforts to crush the uprising has been the blinding of people taking part in them. Across Iran, scores of protesters have gone to hospitals with eyes ruptured by the metal pellets and rubber bullets that security forces fire to disperse crowds.

The reports of mass eye injuries echo those in recent years from other places, including Indian-administered Kashmir and Chile, where street protests have been met with security forces firing pellet guns.