In the final hours before his execution, Ali Akbar Daneshvarkar found something to laugh about.
Guards at Ghezel Hesar Prison had descended on the political prisoners’ ward to take six members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) to the gallows. They attacked Daneshvarkar and tore his clothes. But it was the guards’ panic that caught his attention.
“Why are you so scared?” he shouted, laughing. “We are the ones being executed, why are you terrified?”
Around him, the others displayed the same composure. Babak Alipour pushed past guards so he could bid farewell to his cellmates. Vahid Bani Amerian comforted grieving prisoners. Pouya Ghobadi raised his handcuffed hands in farewell.
It was a scene separated by 54 years from another execution ground. But the choice confronting those standing before the executioners was essentially the same.
The choice that defined a movement
When Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeid Mohsen, and Asghar Badizadegan founded the PMOI on September 6, 1965, they could not know every ordeal the organization would face. But within a few years, they confronted the test that would help define its character.
After SAVAK arrested and tortured the PMOI’s leadership, the Shah’s regime offered its founders a way to save themselves: renounce their struggle and their lives would be spared. They refused. On May 25, 1972, the regime executed Hanifnejad, Mohsen, and Badizadegan.
For the founders, preserving the struggle was more important than preserving themselves. Hanifnejad understood that their conduct in defeat could determine whether those who followed would continue. From prison, he urged his comrades to draw the right lessons from setbacks. Days before his execution, he predicted that their deaths would help motivate and fuel future struggles.
Their sacrifice established a standard: when forced to choose between surrender and paying the price for freedom, a Mojahed chooses the latter.
Fifty-four years later, the answer was the same
Between March 30 and April 4, 2026, the regime executed six PMOI members in Ghezel Hesar Prison: Mohammad Taghavi, Ali Akbar Daneshvarkar, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, Vahid Bani Amerian, and Abolhassan Montazer.
Their final hours transformed what the regime intended as an act of terror into another display of defiance.
At the heart of the group was Resistance Unit commander Vahid Bani Amerian, who had endured repeated imprisonment and remained steadfast even after being sentenced to death. Months before his execution, in a message smuggled from Ghezel Hesar Prison to his mother, he explained what had given that choice meaning: “Mom, I found the meaning of life in rebelling against oppression, in sacrificing myself for the ideals of freedom and justice.”
Babak Alipour had also explained his choice months before his execution, while he knew his execution was looming. “I am ready to give my life and everything I have on this path,” he wrote, so that Iran’s people could gain everything. He concluded that his execution would strengthen rather than intimidate rebellious youth, and then posed a simple question: “So, what fear is there!”
Ali Akbar Daneshvarkar reached the same conclusion by a different road. Weeks before his execution, after describing everything his struggle had cost him—his property, his family life, and soon his life—he wrote: “I have no regrets.”
Bani Amerian went further, directly challenging the purpose behind the regime’s executions. Addressing the regime from prison, he argued that killing those who resist would reproduce rather than eliminate resistance. His words gave literal expression to the legacy the founders had established more than half a century earlier: executions could take individual lives, but they could not terminate the cause for which those lives were given.
The Shah’s firing squads and the clerical regime’s gallows belonged to different eras. But when dictatorship posed the same question—surrender or pay the price—the answer had not changed.
A legacy inherited by another generation
Mehdi Khanaki made that continuity even clearer.
Mehdi was a 26-year-old law graduate when the regime executed him on July 22, 2026, little more than five months after his arrest. Former cellmates later described repeated attempts by authorities to force him to abandon his convictions. At one point, officials reportedly told him that if he wrote a letter of repentance, they would release him.
He refused. In court, rather than showing remorse, he reaffirmed his allegiance.
Two years earlier, Khanaki had already put his commitment in writing. He vowed never to retreat from fighting dictatorship and swore to “remain a Mojahed,” to “die a Mojahed,” and to continue the struggle with all his being.
Khanaki was born decades after the PMOI’s founders went before the Shah’s firing squads. He belonged to another generation, under another dictatorship. Yet when offered essentially the same bargain, he made the same choice.
That is how history becomes legacy.
The flame passed from hand to hand
This is the meaning of 61 years of PMOI resistance. Organizations can preserve names, books, slogans, and histories. But a resistance remains alive only when one generation makes the values of those before it its own.
From Ghezel Hesar Prison, political prisoner Akbar Bagheri described sacrifice as the secret of that continuity. He drew a line from Hanifnejad, Mohsen, and Badizadegan to those executed in the present generation, asking what kind of spring the founders had created that, 61 years later, young Iranians were still prepared to sacrifice themselves for their people’s liberation.
That spring continues to flow because sacrifice in the PMOI has never meant seeking death. It means refusing to surrender freedom for personal safety; putting the people and their cause before the self; and continuing even when the immediate odds appear overwhelming.
As we celebrate the 61st anniversary of the PMOI’s founding, the distance between 1965 and 2026 seems to disappear.
The founders lit a flame and paid with their lives to keep it from being extinguished. Generation after generation carried it forward—through the Shah’s torture chambers, the clerical regime’s prisons, and finally to the gallows where Daneshvarkar laughed at frightened guards, Alipour asked what there was to fear, and Khanaki refused to repent.
Vahid Bani Amerian left behind another warning to those who believed executions could break that chain: “Even if you execute me and people like me, we will multiply.”
Today, all those martyrs who laid down their lives for Iran’s freedom are present in the struggle they sustained. Their flame lives in those who have taken up their cause and burns brighter than ever.
And as the flame of resistance passes from hand to hand, the fire of dictatorship—fed for decades by prisons, torture, and executions—flickers and dwindles.
The martyrs are watching. The flame they kept alive still burns. And the darkness they fought is giving way.