While the Iranian regime attempts to project an image of stability and power, the grim reality within its prisons tells a different story. The regime is orchestrating a vicious and systematic escalation of suppression against political prisoners. This campaign of cruelty, which targets the nation’s brightest students, its most resilient women, and its elderly activists, is not a sign of strength but a clear admission of the theocracy’s profound fear of an unstoppable popular uprising.
The recent cases of four political prisoners—Ali Younesi, Amirhossein Moradi, Fatemeh Ziaei Azad, and Arghavan Fallahi—are not isolated incidents but damning evidence of a regime in its death throes, lashing out at the very people who represent Iran’s future.
Targeting the nation’s future: the persecution of Ali Younesi and Amirhossein Moradi
The regime’s deep-seated paranoia is most evident in its relentless persecution of Iran’s best and brightest minds. Ali Younesi and Amirhossein Moradi, two elite, award-winning university students, have been imprisoned since 2020 for supporting the PMOI. Already serving a 10-year sentence, a so-called revolutionary court handed them a new 15-month prison term on August 9, 2025, for the charge of “propaganda against the system.”
https://twitter.com/en_simayazadi/status/1954535774386364683
In a further act of vindictive cruelty, Ali Younesi was sentenced to an additional five years for the fabricated charge of “supporting Israel.” He has been transferred from prison to a secret “safe house” in Qom, run by security agencies. This facility functions as a site for indefinite solitary confinement, where he is held incommunicado, denied regular access to his lawyer, and completely cut off from the outside world.
This illegal detention is designed to break his spirit and silence a voice the regime fears. By targeting these decorated students—Younesi, a global gold medalist in the Astronomy Olympiad, and Moradi, a silver medalist—the regime is declaring war on Iran’s intellectual future, seeing knowledge and courage as existential threats.
Weaponizing cruelty: the slow-motion killing of Fatemeh Ziaee Azad
The regime’s barbarism extends to its most vulnerable prisoners, deliberately using medical negligence as a form of torture and a tool for slow-motion execution. On August 7, 2025, agents from the Ministry of Intelligence arrested political activist Fatemeh Ziaei Azad, 68, in Tehran without a warrant and took her to an unknown location.
My mother, Fatemeh Ziaei Azadi, has spent 13 years in prisons of the regime, and suffers from MS due to the torture she has endured
Now, she has been arrested once more in a raid on our house
I call on the @UN @drmaisato @amnesty to act now to save her and #FreePoliticalPrisoners pic.twitter.com/aH74K0zn8W— Niloofar Azimi (@NiloofarAz87) August 9, 2025
Fatemeh, a PMOI supporter and political prisoners who had been on temporary medical leave since September 2023, suffers from multiple life-threatening illnesses, including Multiple Sclerosis (MS), an advanced lung infection similar to tuberculosis, and a chronic bladder infection. Her condition is so severe that she has largely lost the ability to walk. Prison doctors had already issued a stark warning: continued incarceration would directly threaten her life.
By re-arresting her and cutting off her critical medical treatment, the regime is knowingly and willfully pushing her toward death. This is not a judicial action; it is a calculated act of state-sanctioned murder, designed to eliminate a resilient activist whose spirit they could not break.
The war on women: the torture and isolation of Arghavan Fallahi
The regime reserves a special level of brutality for the courageous women who stand at the forefront of the resistance movement. The case of political prisoner Arghavan Fallahi, 24, lays bare this misogynistic policy. Arrested on January 26, 2025, on charges of “propaganda” and “supporting an opposition organization,” she was subjected to months of psychological and physical torture in solitary confinement by the IRGC and the judiciary’s intelligence apparatus.
After being held incommunicado and shuffled between Evin and Fashafuyeh prisons, Arghavan has now been transferred to the infamous Qarchak prison. This facility is notorious for its medieval conditions: severe overcrowding, contaminated water, and a systematic failure to separate political prisoners from violent criminals, placing their lives in constant danger. Although she is no longer in solitary, the pressure has not ceased. She is denied fundamental rights, including regular contact with her family, and the marks of her prolonged torture are evident. Her ordeal is a textbook example of the regime’s strategy to break the will of female activists through systematic abuse and terror.
A regime in its death throes – a call for international action
These horrific cases are not the actions of a confident government but the panicked spasms of a dying dictatorship. The regime is terrified of its own people, especially the growing support for the Iranian Resistance across the country. Therefore, it is ratcheting up its attacks on political activists and increasing its brutality against political prisoners who are already behind bars.
This is a reminder of the responsibility of the international community. As the regime becomes more desperate, it will likely become more brutal and violent. It has already hinted at the possible repetition of the 1988 massacre against political prisoners. Silence in the face of such systematic atrocities is complicity. It is time to abandon any hope in fictitious moderates and hold the regime accountable for its crimes against humanity. The world must stand unequivocally with the Iranian people and their organized resistance, who are paying the ultimate price for freedom and are the only force capable of bringing democracy to Iran.