Alarm grows over health of Iran’s female political prisoners

Several Baha’i citizens have been arrested to date across Iran since nationwide protests began in late December, sources told Iran International.

Those arrested include Peyvand Naeimi, Borna Naeimi and Shakila Ghasemi in Kerman, southeastern Iran; Behzad Yazdani and his wife Romina Khazali, Mahsa Sotoudeh, Mandana Sotoudeh, Pejman Zare, Sara Sepehri and Anqa Siavoshi in Shiraz, southern Iran; and Flora Samadani in Yazd, central Iran.

Vafa Kashefi, Navid Zarrehbin Irani, Payam Faridian, Rabee Maleki and Sepehr Koushkbaghi were also arrested in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, while Riyaz Behrad was arrested in Karaj, west of Tehran, and Artin Ghazanfari in Tehran.

Many remain in detention and legal limbo, and there has been no new information about the release or continued detention of some of them, including Faridian, Maleki and Koushkbaghi.

Some other Baha’i citizens have also been arrested in recent weeks and temporarily released after posting heavy bail.

Seventy-two days after the internet shutdown in Iran, sources told Iran International that the real scale of arrests and pressure against the Baha’i community is far wider than the cases reported publicly, but disruption to the flow of information, threats against families and the security atmosphere have made access to precise information difficult.

Detainees held in limbo, families pressured

Several Baha’i citizens arrested in recent weeks and months remain in legal limbo, with no clear access to judicial proceedings, sources Iran International.

Families in some cases have been denied information about their relatives’ location, physical condition, charges or possible release dates, and have faced threats and pressure from intelligence agents when seeking answers.

Some detainees have had only brief contact with relatives, at times lasting just a few seconds, leaving families unable to assess their physical or mental condition.

Sources told Iran International that some detainees remain in custody despite families securing heavy bail, while new charges have been added in some cases.

There are also serious concerns about detainees with medical conditions or caregiving responsibilities, who have faced limited contact, shortages of medicine, inadequate medical care and restricted access to their families in detention.

The simultaneous arrest of relatives, prolonged legal limbo and threats against families seeking information have added to the pressure on Baha’i families, sources said.

Homes raided, property confiscated

The homes of all Baha’i citizens arrested in this wave were searched by security forces, according to information obtained by Iran International.

During the raids, security forces confiscated personal belongings, identity documents, mobile phones, laptops, computers, books and, in some cases, valuable property.

Sources said the searches were not limited to inspecting homes and in some cases involved ransacking residences and taking whatever officers wanted, from digital devices and personal documents to gold and jewelry.

On the morning of May 4, security forces raided the Shiraz home of Faramarz Nadafian and his wife, Parivash Nadafian.

Officers presented a handwritten warrant, searched the home and confiscated mobile phones, a computer case, books and even the family’s gold and jewelry.

A day later, on May 5, security forces raided the home of Afsaneh Jazzabi, also known as Rasekhi, a 66-year-old Baha’i citizen in Shiraz.

Sources said officers entered the home with a warrant titled “cooperation with Israel,” threatened and humiliated her and her 85-year-old mother, and confiscated items including books, frames, a mobile phone, a gold pendant and a gold chain without providing a receipt.

They also threatened the family with confiscation of their home and transfer to an unknown location, the sources added.

Prison sentences enforced

Alongside arrests and searches, authorities have continued enforcing prison sentences against Baha’i citizens, sources told Iran International.

Didar Ahmadi, Boshra Mostafavi and Elna Naeimi in Kerman, southeastern Iran, as well as Negin Khademi, Yeganeh Rouhbakhsh, Neda Badakhsh, Mozhgan Shahrezaei, Shana Shoughifar, Arezoo Sobhaniyan, Parastoo Hakim and Neda Emadi in Isfahan, central Iran, have been transferred to prison to serve their sentences, the sources said.

Baha’is face long-running persecution

Iran does not recognize the Baha’i faith as an official religion, unlike Christianity, Judaism or Zoroastrianism, although Baha’is constitute the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority.

The community has faced systematic harassment and persecution since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, including arrests, confiscations, denial of education and lengthy prison sentences.

Iranian authorities have long accused Baha’is of links to Israel, partly because the faith’s spiritual center is in Haifa, where the shrine of its founder stands. Rights groups say such claims have been used to justify pressure on the community.

Iran’s Intelligence Ministry said in late December that it had identified a 32-member “espionage network” linked to Baha’i citizens, accusing them of “rioting and sabotage” and saying 12 had been arrested and 13 others summoned.

Officials also accused Baha’i citizens of spying for Israel during Iran’s 12-day war with Israel in June and opened cases against several members of the minority.

Nearly three quarters of documented violations against religious minorities in Iran over the past three years have involved Baha’is, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

Erfan Shakourzadeh, born in 1997, was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence organization in February 2025 on charges of “espionage and cooperation with hostile countries.”

His death sentence was recently upheld by Iran’s Supreme Court after he reportedly spent nine months in solitary confinement before being transferred to Evin prison.

Shakourzadeh was a graduate student at Iran University of Science and Technology specializing in satellite technology.

He had previously studied electrical engineering at the University of Tabriz and was described by supporters as a researcher focused on satellite testing software and satellite control and positioning systems.

His case has drawn comparisons to the prosecution of other elite Iranian students on national security charges, including Sharif University student and international astronomy medalist Ali Younesi, whose 2020 arrest became emblematic of a widening crackdown on academically gifted young Iranians accused of links to hostile states or opposition groups.

Younesi is currently serving a 16-year sentence alongside fellow Sharif University student Amir Hossein Moradi after both were convicted on national security charges.

Aerospace, satellite and advanced engineering fields have become especially sensitive areas for Iranian security agencies amid years of cyber conflict, sanctions pressure and fears of foreign infiltration of strategic sectors.

Rights advocates have also raised alarm in recent months over the transfer of political and security prisoners to Ghezel Hesar prison, which has increasingly been used to hold inmates facing execution.

Iran has seen a sharp rise in executions this year as authorities tightened security controls after the January uprising and the subsequent conflict with the United States and Israel.

Most affected are businesses reliant on Instagram and other global services, but even users pushed onto domestic platforms described repeated outages, poor functionality and heavy censorship on apps such as Rubika, Bale and Shad.

One citizen said Rubika often fails to send photos and videos for much of the day and alleged the platform checks users’ phone galleries. Another said uploading a single image on Rubika can take an hour.

Citizens also raised concerns that domestic applications could expose their data and devices to state monitoring.

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Thursday that 69 days of widespread international internet disruption in Iran had fueled unemployment among workers and redistributed wealth in favor of groups aligned with the government.

Education disrupted

Dozens of students, parents and several teachers said Shad, Iran’s state-run online education platform, does not allow users to properly download photos and videos and does not provide a suitable environment for teaching.

“The children’s classes are online, but the application is designed so only the teacher can speak,” the mother of one student said.

“If a student has a question or does not understand something, they have to wait until five in the afternoon, when student access is reopened. In reality, students are present in the online class, but even if they are absent the teacher does not notice. The entire education process depends solely on parental supervision.”

Some teachers continue to expect students to produce clips and upload them despite low internet speeds, users said.

The problem of accessing information through domestic networks has also affected university students.

A computer student in Tehran said: “Neither the online classes have quality nor can you find anything worth learning in the ‘dictatorship information network.’”

Students said online learning and access to professors’ teaching materials have effectively come to a halt.

Costly barriers

With Instagram blocked by the state, many Iranians have lost a free channel to market goods and services, while domestic apps such as Rubika and Bale charge high advertising fees and impose lengthy, censorship-driven approval processes, citizens said.

Several citizens said Rubika charges business owners about 63 million tomans, roughly $359 at the current open-market exchange rate, for 15 minutes of advertising.

She pointed to what she described as the government’s contradictory treatment of insiders and outsiders in recent months, saying the Islamic Republic used women without compulsory hijab or women with looser dress to promote pro-government nighttime gatherings during and after the war, while rejecting a short advertisement because an elbow was visible for a few seconds.

One female business owner said she was forced to advertise on a domestic app after two months without work so she could sell goods left in her inventory.

“Before approving my channel they took my money, but then rejected my ad with the excuse that my activity on the app was low and my elbow was visible in the video,” she said.

The female business owner added that when she called to ask for the advertising fee back, she was told the money would remain in her wallet until she “fixed the video and channel.”

“So I have to work on an empty channel for several months, bring in goods and invest, just for an empty channel, so maybe they will approve my ad?” she said.

“I spent eight years on Instagram and put time into building my page, but with the internet cutoff I effectively came to a halt. How am I supposed to start again?”

Another user referred to the “thousands of rules and clauses domestic apps have imposed for advertising” and said the platform took “a huge amount of money” before saying it would not advertise an “underwear channel.”

“What am I supposed to do with all this merchandise?” the user said. “Set myself on fire or burn the goods? My business was on Instagram. Restore the internet so I can go back to work.”

A user on X had earlier written that searching for “women’s underwear” on Zarebin, a search engine promoted as Iran’s domestic version of Google, leads to a “no results found” page, while searching for “men’s underwear” produces meaningful results.

“With the national internet, you cannot even buy women’s underwear. It is both ridiculous and tragic,” the user wrote.

Other users said people had turned “out of necessity” and because of the two-month internet cutoff to the Islamic Republic’s “fake” networks such as Bale and Rubika, but said it remained unclear how much access the government could gain through the platforms to citizens’ phones and whether it could monitor or surveil their devices.

Efforts to bypass censorship

Despite the imposed restrictions, users said they continue to find ways to bypass content censorship.

Several citizens said that after access to Telegram was blocked, several channels appeared on local apps such as Soroush Plus, Rubika and Bale offering free or low-cost configurations to bypass filtering.

“They nationalized the internet to gather supporters for the government, but exactly the opposite is happening,” one user said.

Users said this contrasted with content circulated by government-linked figures and channels, which they described as including false claims about the Islamic Republic winning the war with the United States and Israel, false reports of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s death and inaccurate accounts of negotiations.

One user said government-linked content on Rubika portrays the Islamic Republic as defined by “peace, friendship and human rights.”

Despite the government’s efforts to keep the platforms tightly controlled, accounts using the Lion and Sun as profile pictures have appeared. The historic Iranian national emblem is associated by many with the pre-1979 monarchy.

Other accounts have used portraits of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as profile pictures.

Citizens said such accounts, as well as channels reposting news from the outside world, are blocked and banned after some time.

Still, they said daily resistance continues, with new and larger channels replacing those that are shut down.

I grew up in the Soviet Union and learned early that the walls had ears, letters were opened, and you never knew who was listening to your phone calls. My parents and grandparents spoke in half‑sentences. We were what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called “doublethinkers,” saying what the state wanted to hear while thinking the opposite.

But at night, doublethinkers like my family would gather around a shortwave radio and twist the dial until the static gave way to the sounds of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The signal may have faded in and out, but the message was clear: the world was bigger than the one the regime allowed us to see.

That same hunger for an unfiltered signal is palpable today in Iran. Since Feb. 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic has flipped the kill switch, keeping 92 million Iranians at roughly 1% connectivity—the longest nationwide shutdown ever recorded.

The question for the West is whether we will help them hear the signal or let the regime kill it.

The Iran playbook

Circumvention today is a layered game. No single tool defeats a full shutdown. What works is redundancy and creativity.

Software that adapts under fire. Cheap VPNs are largely dead. The regime deploys military-grade jamming to hunt them down. But purpose-built tools persist. Psiphon and Conduit allow diaspora activists to share their laptop connections with users inside Iran—roughly 400,000 used Psiphon to pull people through. FreeGate, built on a peer-to-peer proxy network, leaves no trace.

Obfuscation protocols like V2Ray and Shadowsocks hide traffic by making it look like standard web browsing. Direct Tor connections are blocked, but bridges with pluggable transports open during the brief windows when international routes flicker back on.

Satellite with discipline. Starlink was a lifeline during Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Now it faces 30% packet loss from sustained RF jamming. The operational fix is rigorous: hide dishes, camouflage them, power on only briefly, never reuse a location.

We should also utilize satellite data broadcasting, like Toosheh, which allows users to “record” news and software from standard satellite TV dishes, bypassing the internet entirely. The next frontier is Direct-to-Cell—satellites that connect to standard smartphones, requiring no visible terminal and leaving no dish to confiscate.

Low-tech resilience. When bandwidth is throttled, Iranians switch to text-only news, email digests, RSS feeds, and messaging apps running in “light” modes. Users are also distributing "offline Wikipedias" and content packages via high-capacity SD cards.

When the internet goes dark entirely, they build offline networks using Bluetooth mesh apps, Wi-Fi Direct file sharing, and USB drives passed hand to hand. Near the Azerbaijan border, some Iranians roam onto foreign towers. Private rooms inside multiplayer video games become covert chat channels.

The bread emoji (🍞) once organized food-price protests in Iran beneath the radar of automated filters. Code evolves faster than censors.

This cat-and-mouse dynamic has always defined information warfare under repression. In China, students held up blank white sheets of paper—a silent protest against a regime that had made even the simplest words illegal. In Hong Kong during the 2019 protests, AirDrop became a political tool, pushing messages directly to strangers in public spaces without relying on open networks.

Censors ban words, dissidents find symbols. They block a platform, activists find a workaround. During Romania’s Ceaușescu era, Irina Margareta Nistor secretly dubbed thousands of banned Western films. Her grainy VHS tapes, smuggled apartment to apartment, helped puncture a system built on lies. Today’s dissidents have different tools, but the same ingenuity.

What US and Silicon Valley should do

A growing ecosystem in the free world is building tools to keep information flowing under pressure. The Open Technology Fund and Tor Project support censorship-resistant networks and rapidly deployable bridges, while SpaceX pushes satellite connectivity toward direct-to-cell models. Jigsaw and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are advancing tools that make platforms harder to block and safer under surveillance.

Washington’s task is to scale, coordinate, and sustain this stack so the signal gets through even under a full blackout.

Fund the stack that works under fire. The US should maintain Psiphon, Conduit, FreeGate, and Tor bridges, rotating them rapidly during thaw windows. This means supporting mirror sites, secure hosting, and offline content packages—and requiring low-bandwidth, offline-first design as a condition for any platform operating in high-risk markets.

Accelerate Direct-to-Cell. Streamline spectrum allocation and licensing so D2C technology can scale quickly. The goal is connectivity without hardware the regime can seize or jam.

Sanction the enablers. Target firms selling RF jammers, deep packet inspection systems, and surveillance technology to Tehran. Make information control a balance-sheet risk, not just a diplomatic talking point

Empower diaspora networks. Iranian diaspora communities verify video footage, translate eyewitness accounts, and run independent media that is trusted inside the country. During Belarus’s 2020 protests, SMS chains, printed leaflets, and neighborhood word-of-mouth coordinated action when connectivity collapsed. Iran’s diaspora is running the same model now and deserves structured support.

Pre-bunk, don’t just debunk. Companies like Jigsaw have pioneered inoculation-style media literacy—teaching people to recognize manipulation before they encounter it. In a world of deepfakes and synthetic media, this preparation is essential. This “pre-bunking” content should be scaled through diaspora-run news channels to reach users before the regime's propaganda takes root.

The crack of light

Václav Havel famously wrote that the “power of the powerless” is the ability to live in truth. For those of us in the free world, that imposes more than a moral obligation; it creates a strategic necessity.

The Cold War was won, in part, because a static-filled shortwave radio delivered the sound of freedom to those behind the Iron Curtain. Today, the “signal” is digital, but the stakes are identical.

Washington and Silicon Valley must act now to scale the tools of circumvention, raise the economic cost of censorship through data-driven diplomacy, and strengthen the “mental immune system” of those under fire. We have the technology to puncture the digital Iron Curtain. Our job is to ensure the crack of light gets through.

The detainees include women swept up during the nationwide uprising and others arrested following the military conflict involving Iran, the US, and Israel that began in February.

According to the HRANA report, 23 women are being held in the Aramesh ward, described as a basement-like structure with low ceilings and minimal ventilation.

Former detainees told the group the cramped conditions, which one compared to an ant nest, frequently trigger breathing problems and panic attacks.

Seven other women are currently being held in a quarantine unit characterized by poor sanitation and sewage odors. HRANA said that prisoners face a shortage of beds, limited medical treatment, and are often denied phone calls and family visits during their interrogation.

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Serious charges and legal limbo

The reports of poor conditions coincide with concerns over the legal status of those currently held in the facility. Iran International reported earlier that three female political prisoners – Mahboubeh Shabani, theatre actress Sima Anbaei Farimani, and Azar Yahou – remain in legal limbo at the prison.

These women face severe charges including enmity against God, conspiracy against national security, and alleged links to Israel. Despite weeks in detention, they have been denied access to lawyers and have not been informed of the status of their cases.

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Escalation of executions

The crackdown in the northeast reflects a wider national trend of severe punishment for security-related detainees. Center for Human Rights in Iran reported that at least 28 prisoners accused in political and security cases have been executed across Iran in the past 50 days.

Of those executed, 13 were individuals detained during the recent winter protests.