Iran’s regime continues its alarming wave of executions as it struggles with multiple crises at home and abroad. According to a new statement by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the regime hanged nine prisoners from January 21 to January 23. These executions are taking place as the regime continues to grapple with unrest from different segments of society and has failed to stifle dissent across the country. The regime has ramped up executions after the beginning of the war in Gaza, finishing 2023 with more than 850 executions and beginning 2024 with an unprecedented rise in death sentences.
At the same time, the regime is resorting to more death sentences against political prisoners. After carrying out two political executions last week, the regime’s judiciary has handed out death sentences to more political prisoners. The regime is being especially harsh toward religious and ethnic minorities.
A regime court in Khuzestan sentenced Arab political prisoner Ali Obaidavi on charges of attacking a Basij base in Hamidiyeh district on charges of attacking a Basij base during the 2019 protests. His brother Hossein was sentenced to 13 years in prison by the same court.
The regime’s Supreme Court also confirmed the death sentence of Kurdish political prisoner Yousef Ahmadi, the 38-year-old father of three. He was arrested in 2020 and exposed to severe physical and psychological torture in Sanandaj. The regime’s Revolutionary Court sentenced Ahmadi to death in August 2023 on charges of killing two members of the Revolutionary Guards. Three other defendants in this case were sentenced to 20 and 25 years each.
These sentences come on the back of the execution of Mohammad Ghobadlou, one of the protesters from the 2022 uprising, and Farhad Salimi, a Kurdish political prisoner who had been held in jail since 2009.
The regime also continues the use of medieval and barbaric corporal punishments. According to the NCRI statement, regime authorities plan to carry out the sentence for gouging the left eye of Mehdi Mousavi, a youth arrested during the January 2018 uprising. Regime authorities have accused Mousavi of blinding a colonel of the State Security Forces (SSF) while defending himself against repressive forces who had been dispatched to violently quell protests in Farrokhshahr, Charmahal and Bakhtiari province. In accordance with its brutal law of “retribution in kind,” the regime has sentenced to blind Mousavi’s left eye and plans to carry out the sentence soon. Ironically, the regime’s security forces blinded the eyes of hundreds of innocent civilians during the 2022 protests and not a single one of them has been held accountable.
This sentence comes against the backdrop of an uptick in violent punishments. The regime recently cut off the hand of a person charged with theft and flogged a woman who had supposedly violated the regime’s misogynistic hijab laws.
And the regime is making it clear that it will continue to ramp up violent measures.
The Mizan news agency, affiliated with the regime’s judiciary, quoted Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, the head of the judiciary, on Wednesday, January 24, as saying, “All issues cannot be resolved with preaching, and we must go after those who, in an organized manner and with their affiliation to foreigners, intend to stand against the people’s values and their psychological and physical security.”
Ejei instructed prosecutors across the country to “seriously address this issue” and work with the security apparatus to “identify and prosecute and punish organized and foreign-affiliated elements who commit irregularities without leniency and within the framework of the law.”
The international community has a responsibility to hold the regime to account for its human rights abuses. The regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and its senior officials, including regime president Ebrahim Raisi and Ejei, must be tried for their crimes against humanity.
But as far as the people of Iran are concerned, the regime’s repressive measures are not having the effect that the regime wished for. The more the regime ramps up executions and repression, the more the people—especially the youth—become defiant in their resistance against the regime.
On January 24, the state-run Didar website wrote, “Even the insiders within the political establishment and the elements within the system see the continuation of this trend as impossible. With force, threats, prison, and execution, society cannot persist…. One to one and a half years from now, not even more, society can no longer tolerate it…. Rest assured this dam will break, and if it breaks, everyone will be harmed.”