Iranian political prisoner sentenced to death, rights group says
Iranian political prisoner Arghavan Fallahi has been sentenced to death on an alleged charge of “baghi,” or armed rebellion, the US-based HRANA news agency reported on Friday.
The 24-year-old, held in Evin Prison, was sentenced by Judge Abolghasem Salavati of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court under Article 287 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, HRANA said.
The charge was based on allegations of membership in anti-government groups and involvement in armed activities. Human rights activists say she is accused of links to the exiled opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).
HRANA said Fallahi was previously subjected to severe psychological torture and pressure to make forced confessions after her arrest in January 2025.
This time, Taghi Changalvaei was one of those who went.
He entered the fire to help save Khayiz, a protected area in the southern Zagros near Behbahan, in Khuzestan province. He did not return.
For Zagros communities, his death was familiar. For years, local residents and environmental volunteers have been losing friends and relatives to fires that return each summer across the mountains.
Iranian media have reported that since 2020, 27 people have died while trying to control fires in the Zagros.
Most were not professional firefighters. They had no specialized training, no protective clothing and little more than improvised tools.
They went because the forests were burning, and because in many parts of the Zagros, people know that if they do not move first, help may arrive too late.
A landscape primed to burn
The Zagros Mountains run for about 1,600 kilometers, from northwestern Iran toward the Persian Gulf. Their oak woodlands cover almost six million hectares, roughly 40 percent of Iran’s forest area, and support millions of rural livelihoods while helping regulate water and prevent soil erosion.
The Persian oak defines this landscape, shaping village economies, water systems and grazing patterns. But the Zagros oak belt has been shrinking for decades under pressure from illegal logging, overgrazing, drought, climate change and poor management.
Each summer, fire turns that decline into an emergency. That pattern was visible again in Khayiz, where a blaze that began on Badil Mountain burned for days through protected forests near Behbahan, exposing shortages of aerial firefighting capacity.
Experts say the fires have become larger, harder to contain and more closely tied to climate stress, fuel buildup and weak management.
Winter and spring rains can cover the slopes with grasses and seasonal plants. By early summer, heat dries that vegetation into fuel load: the combustible layer that lets a spark, a cigarette butt, a campfire or an intentional blaze spread quickly.
One part of the debate concerns grazing. In the past, livestock consumed part of the seasonal vegetation that now dries out in the mountains. From around 2021, authorities pursued efforts to reduce grazing pressure more seriously to help forests and pastures recover from overuse.
The aim was environmental protection: overgrazing has long damaged Zagros forests, limiting natural regeneration and weakening young oak growth. But some experts argue that reducing livestock presence without alternative vegetation management may have left more dry grass and brush by summer.
That does not make grazing restrictions the cause of the fires. Climate change, drought, oak decline, human negligence, arson, weak fire roads, aircraft shortages, poor coordination and lack of equipment all remain central. Unmanaged vegetation, some experts say, may be one piece of a larger puzzle.
In parts of Spain and the western United States, targeted grazing is used to reduce wildfire fuel loads and maintain firebreaks. For the Zagros, the question is whether the state can protect forests without removing one form of vegetation control and failing to replace it with another.
Bigger fires, weaker capacity
The statistics point to a worsening burden. In the Iranian year that began in March 2021, about 21,000 hectares of forests across the country burned, according to figures cited in Iranian media. By the year that began in March 2024, that figure had risen to about 27,000 hectares.
By November 2025, Iran had recorded more than 2,300 fires across national land, forests and rangelands, burning about 46,000 hectares. A recent study of the southern Zagros recorded more than 13,000 fire events from 2000 to 2023, with a sharp increase in the most recent years covered by the study.
The year that began in March 2026 has opened with another wave of fires, from Khayiz and Mongasht to the highlands of Lorestan, Fars and Kordestan provinces. Mongasht, a long mountain massif between Khuzestan and Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, is one of several rugged areas where local residents are often the first responders.
The financial picture has also worsened. On paper, the rial budget of Iran’s Natural Resources and Watershed Management Organization has increased. But once the collapse in the value of Iran’s currency is taken into account, its real resources appear to have fallen sharply.
Calculations based on budget figures cited in Iranian media and market exchange rates suggest the organization’s dollar-denominated budget dropped from roughly $94 million in the Iranian year that began in March 2021 to about $41 million in the year that began in March 2026. Compared with the year that began in March 2016, the decline is estimated at more than 60 percent.
The direction is clear: while the fires have grown, the state’s real capacity to fight them has shrunk.
The consequences are visible on the ground. The fire in Khayiz is now out. But for Changalvaei‘s family, and for the families of others who died trying to save the Zagros, the fire has not ended.
Without changes in policy, funding and firefighting capacity, next summer will bring the same scene again: men with shovels, branches and bottles of water climbing toward the smoke, while fire moves through the oaks and leaves behind ash and names.
