Cartoon by ALIREZA PAKDEL

Inventory of the Dead: How Industrial Spaces Became Tools of State Violence

ATA MOHAMED TABRIZ

IranWire: Warehouses are usually quiet places on the edge of everyday life - spaces meant for storing goods, not people. But during the bloody January crackdown, many of these industrial buildings took on a far darker role. In what appears to have been a systematic shift, the Islamic Republic repurposed them into mass detention sites and collection points for protesters. Reports and eyewitness accounts suggest that some of these warehouses were also used to hold an overwhelming number of bodies.

This shift was not just about moving people from one place to another. It showed a broader strategy to create an “exceptional space” where a protester was stripped of citizenship and rights and reduced, in the logic of warehousing, to mere “inventory to be stored.” The authorities took advantage of the very nature of warehouses, their vast interiors, their isolation, and the lack of public visibility, to deepen a process of dehumanization. Violence unfolded openly in the streets, but its most concealed dimensions were moved into these silent industrial spaces. In doing so, the state created room for denial, delayed accountability, and a widening distance between society and the victims.

In Iranian political discourse, the term “State of Exception” is often used to describe moments when authorities set aside ordinary laws during periods of unrest and begin treating citizens as “enemies of the state.” In this context, moving bodies and detainees to industrial warehouses instead of hospitals or official morgues allows the security apparatus to sidestep legal procedures and avoid civilian oversight.

Turning warehouses into detention and storage sites blurred the line between people and goods. Nowhere was this more disturbing than in the way bodies were handled. Reports indicate that refrigerated containers from livestock and dairy companies were used, reducing what should be a sacred burial process to something resembling “inventory management.” Families were forced to “find” their loved ones among rows of nameless bodies, an ordeal described as deeply traumatic.

In recent days, a series of suspicious fires has broken out in some of these same facilities. That has led to a troubling question: were these warehouse fires an attempt to conceal the true scale of what happened?

Warehouses as Consolidation Points for Bodies

After internet access was partially restored in Iran, a wave of disturbing videos began to circulate. The footage showed the halls of the Kahrizak Medical Examiner’s Office, warehouses at Behesht-e Zahra, and bodies stacked on top of one another in hospitals. Those who shared the videos told similar stories. They described seeing overwhelming numbers of bodies, some transported in shipping containers, and said they spent hours searching through piles of corpses left behind after the crackdown, trying to find their loved ones.

Kahrizak is a name that evokes trauma in the Iranian collective memory; it was the site of a notorious detention center where protesters were tortured and killed in 2009. Behesht-e Zahra is the largest cemetery in Iran, located in southern Tehran.

Mohammad Mehdi Khanmohammadi, 19, was killed in Karaj on January 8, 2026, by a government gunshot to the head. His family found his lifeless body six days later in the warehouses of Kahrizak in Tehran. Benyamin Eghdami experienced a similar fate, and his family found his body in those same warehouses.

The Kahrizak warehouses were the first “horror sites” to appear in images, but they were not the only ones. In Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra, other warehouses were allocated for storing corpses. The “Meraj Warehouses” were another location associated with these sites of terror. One person who visited these warehouses recounted: “The Meraj warehouses were overflowing with corpses. Two thousand corpses were dumped in each warehouse, and we had to open the zippers of the body bags one by one, move aside the bloody cotton, and see if we could find our loved one.”

The narrator said the warehouses were full and had no remaining space. Families later noticed vehicles near the warehouse, and one of the drivers told them, “Go behind there; several ambulances and several ice cream and dairy refrigerated containers are parked. Open their doors; they are full of corpses. The warehouses had no room, so they kept them there.”

Another witness said, “I got closer to the warehouses and could look inside. I saw two to three layers of corpses in black body bags piled on top of each other. On the other side, I saw trucks arriving, opening the containers, and tossing the corpses onto the others. They would roll and fall. There were at least 1,500 to 2,000 people in each of these warehouses. In total, 4,000 or maybe more.”

Another eyewitness spoke of at least two warehouses near the “Uroujian Washing Halls” (the mortuary or ghassalkhaneh) at Behesht-e Zahra, most likely referring to the Meraj warehouses. He said that inside two large storage halls, bodies were stacked in two to three layers. Even as some were taken away for ritual washing and burial, trucks kept arriving with more bodies wrapped in black covers, unloading new victims into the same space >>>