"They Are Trying to Kill"

As Ayatullah Khomeini prepared to fly home, the army and the people of Iran appeared to be on a collision course. For the third time in four days, crowds of Khomeini's supporters taunted the soldiers. The troops answered words with bullets, opening fire in emotional outbursts, then sniping with a coldblooded capriciousness. TIME Correspondent William Mc-Whirter, who witnessed a bloody confrontation at 24 Esfand Square in central Tehran, reports on the grim consequences:

After four hours of shooting, the city had turned into a festival of pain. Street marshals of the revolutionary movement stopped cars to beg for blood donations. Emergency vehicles careered through the streets with horns blaring. Every pharmacy in town was searched for cotton wool and bandages. People by the thousands answered the call for supplies and rushed to the hospital with clean sheets, blankets and blood. Requests for antiseptics seemed to reach Tehranis faster than one of Prime Minister Bakhtiar's broadcasts.

Within Pahlavi Hospital, where most of the casualties were being taken, volunteer doctors, nurses and orderlies had all turned up for special duty as ambulance after ambulance pulled into the driveway of the emergency entrance. Stretchers were set up in rows outside, as if at an emergency medical center in a battle zone, while volunteers with megaphones shouted instructions to the drivers. The casualties were a microcosm of the revolutionary movement itself: a fashionably dressed woman in her 20s with knee-high beige plastic boots; a seven-year-old boy dressed inexplicably in a blue track suit; a frail old man with a grizzled beard; countless young men and women in the cotton shirts and faded blue jeans that are the unisex uniform of the city streets.

Almost all of their wounds were in the stomach, chest, neck or head. One doctor, his white apron covered with blood, looked shocked as he probed them. "They are trying to kill these people," he said. Fifteen of those who had been wheeled into Pahlavi would die after surgery. One was a man in his 50s, another a 16-year-old boy. There was a young, muscular soldier whose uniform, even in death, was still smartly pressed. Outraged by the massacre, he had wounded his commanding officer and had in turn been fatally shot by his own comrades.

Dr. Ali Muhammad, 50, a surgeon, spent part of his time operating, part on the telephone attempting to reach his good friend Shahpour Bakhtiar in an effort to halt the shooting. Muhammad was furious at the extent and kinds of injuries he had been treating. "If they do not stop this," he predicted, "everyone will be Communist. We have been fighting the Communists for 20 years. Now all of us in my profession are nationalist, independent and pro-Khomeini. They must deal with us."

Muhammad finally got through to one of Bakhtiar's aides. Casualties were still rolling through the emergency-room door as he banged down the telephone. "They said only that these people were trying to take army headquarters. With what? Their bare hands?" He sighed as he selected a scalpel and went back to work. "They are pushing the people to take arms. Next I shall be operating on soldiers killed or wounded by the friends of the people who died under my care today."

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