Syria veteran emerges as key figure in Shahriar crackdown

“The fact that a teenager sets out on a route where there is a risk of being shot, a mine explosion or an accident, either to help their family or cover school and living expenses, should be a serious warning to society,” labor activist Abdollah Belvasi told ILNA. “A child should be sitting at a school desk, not on a kolbari route.”

Poverty and unstable household incomes are increasingly affecting children in families living along Iran’s borders, Belvasi said.

• 

  Kurdish border couriers face snow, heavy loads, and death for $10

A shortage of jobs has also left many young people, including university graduates and accomplished athletes, facing a choice between kolbari, with its risk of death, or migration away from their homes and families, according to Belvasi.

Unemployment and a lack of prospects have prompted many young people in Kordestan to consider leaving their cities or even Iran, Belvasi added.

Economic pressures deepen

Iran has faced years of high inflation, a weakening currency and unemployment, eroding purchasing power and making basic living costs increasingly difficult for many households.

100%

Residents of some border communities have turned to kolbari to earn a living. Kolbars typically carry heavy loads on foot across difficult mountainous terrain, and some have been killed in shootings by Iranian security forces or died in accidents and mine explosions.

The growing gap between wages and living costs, reduced working hours and skilled workers moving into informal employment have highlighted the depth of Iran’s employment problems in recent weeks.

Hormozgan Workers’ House said on Friday that around 20,000 workers had lost their jobs because of an economic slowdown and business closures.

Kolbar deaths risk becoming routine

Deaths among kolbars are gradually being treated as routine news, receiving attention and prompting protests for several days before fading from public discussion, Belvasi warned.

“When a kolbar is killed, a family suffers,” he said. “A breadwinner may be lost, children may be left without a father, or a family may have to contend with medical expenses and disability. If we see kolbari only in terms of numbers and statistics, we ignore the human dimension of the tragedy.”

Government promises have failed to address the underlying conditions driving people into the work, Belvasi went on to say.

• 

  Deadly Toll Rises For Kolbars In Iran's Western Border Regions

“The issue of kolbari cannot be solved simply by confronting the kolbar,” Belvasi added. “If the main causes – poverty, unemployment and the lack of stable job opportunities –are not addressed, the issue will emerge again. The root causes must be addressed.”

Discrimination, uneven development and a lack of employment opportunities remain fundamental problems in Iran’s border regions despite their economic, human and natural resources, according to Belvasi.

Published in The Guardian on August 20, the open letter addressed political prisoners facing imprisonment, torture and execution under the Islamic Republic while also condemning US and Israeli military action against Iran.

“We write in solidarity with Iran’s political prisoners, who are trapped between two blades of a scissors,” the letter said, describing one blade as the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian rule and the other as the US-Israeli military assault.

The letter called for an end to executions and the release of political prisoners, arguing that opposing foreign military intervention should not mean remaining silent about repression inside Iran.

What followed was a fierce argument, particularly among figures on the political left.

Several people initially listed as signatories withdrew their names. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley said the published version was not exactly what he had initially seen.

University of Toronto professor Nisrin Elamin said she disagreed with the content and the process through which her name was added, arguing that the letter created a “false and harmful equivalency” between Iran and Israel.

Academics Rashid Khalidi and Nadia Abu El-Haj also removed their names. Other critics went further, characterizing the letter as contributing to efforts to manufacture consent for war.

Human rights lawyer Gissou Nia said the intensity of the reaction surprised her because she regarded the original statement of solidarity as “the bare minimum.”

For Nia, the dispute is about more than a single letter. She worries that ideology and disinformation can distort how international audiences understand repression inside Iran.

“There’s been a massive problem in terms of how narratives have been constructed since January of this year,” Nia told Iran International’s English language podcast Eye for Iran.

She pointed to internet shutdowns, restrictions on independent reporting and competing accounts of the January crackdown. Nia accused some commentators outside Iran of amplifying narratives that shifted responsibility for the killings away from the Islamic Republic despite evidence implicating its forces, describing some of the rhetoric as “mass atrocity denial.”

• 

  At least 916 executed in Iran since January - rights group

The stakes are particularly high amid a dramatic rise in executions.

The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran documented over 900 executions in the first seven months of 2026, including 56 on political or national-security charges. Its database now lists 967 reported executions this year.

Political prisoners welcome attention, with reservations

Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, said some former political prisoners she works with were pleasantly surprised to see prominent figures in Western academia and on the left publicly acknowledge their plight.

But the response was not without criticism.

Some felt politics weighed too heavily in the letter and questioned comparisons between their experiences under the Islamic Republic and injustices in Western countries. Others asked why China and Russia were absent if the principle was solidarity with prisoners more broadly.

Still, Boroumand said support for Iranian political prisoners should be welcomed rather than subjected to an ideological test.

“You can't criticize people for doing the right thing because the victims they are talking about are not the right victims in your politics,” she said.

Boroumand said political imprisonment can follow Iranians long after they leave a cell. Prisoners may endure physical and psychological torture and lose jobs, educational opportunities and their health. After their release, they may remain under state surveillance, while their relatives can also face pressure over their activities.

Even exile does not necessarily end it. Former prisoners can receive calls from interrogators and see relatives inside Iran summoned over social media posts made abroad.

“You have to face the people who say you don't exist or you don't matter,” Boroumand said.

Why Iran becomes an ideological argument

Journalist and author Jay Solomon said the backlash should also be understood through the ideological legacy of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

For parts of the anti-imperialist left, he said, the revolution came to symbolize a historic defeat for US power. The Islamic Republic later cast itself as a leading opponent of the United States and Israel, creating a political framework in which criticism of Tehran can be seen as weakening that broader struggle.

Solomon said he was struck by the “callousness” of some responses, which he interpreted as effectively asking political prisoners to accept their suffering for the sake of a broader geopolitical cause.

He also pointed to a political purity test in which criticism of the Islamic Republic can quickly generate accusations that critics are serving Western or Israeli interests. Solomon compared the dynamic with other ideological movements that became increasingly intolerant of internal criticism.

That rhetoric is particularly significant in Iran, where authorities themselves have long portrayed dissidents as agents of foreign powers.

For Iran’s political prisoners, the debate is anything but theoretical. They are living through an escalating campaign of executions and repression while arguments continue abroad over how their suffering should fit into competing political narratives.

“Solidarity is really being in solidarity with people and their plight,” Nia said, “regardless of the politics.”

Simin Fahandej told Iran International that pressure on the community had intensified following nationwide protests in January, fitting what she described as a longstanding pattern in which Bahá’ís are targeted during periods of crisis.

“Every single time that there has been a crisis in Iran, the Baha'i community is the first to be scapegoated,” Fahandej said, adding that confiscation of Bahá’í property had been a feature of persecution since the 1979 revolution.

Fahandej said hundreds of cases of persecution had been recorded since January across more than six provinces, while prosecutions of Bahá’ís had doubled from the previous year.

“These arrests and imprisonment of Baha'is isn't an incident,” she said. “It's a nationwide state-led campaign of persecution.”

Cash, gold, instruments

Thirteen United Nations experts earlier this month also warned of an increase in persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran, including allegations of torture and enforced disappearance, and said 57 members of the community were detained or imprisoned.

The warnings come amid a series of raids on Bahá’í families in the central city of Isfahan in which security forces seized cash, gold, household belongings, vehicles, musical instruments and equipment used by families to make a living.

More than 20 security agents simultaneously raided three homes on Monday belonging to Amin Tabyanifard, his mother Bahariyeh Askarinasab and his son Nima Tabyanifard, a source familiar with the matter told Iran International.

The source said plainclothes agents searched the properties from around 8 a.m. until about 1 p.m.

100%

Askarinasab lives in a separate unit in the same building as Amin Tabyanifard, while Nima Tabyanifard lives in another neighborhood of Isfahan.

Agents searched the family’s musical-instrument workshop and seized its tools, equipment and specialized machinery, along with several valuable handmade instruments.

They also seized cash, gold, electronics, household belongings and numerous musical instruments. Authorities later sealed the family’s music and musical-instrument store.

The source said agents in one of the raids used violence, beat people present and made threats.

Nima Tabyanifard was ordered to report to the Isfahan Intelligence Department, while other members of the family received summonses to appear before a court located at Isfahan’s Dastgerd Prison.

Fahandej said some recent arrests and confiscations in other cases had been carried out without warrants.

“These arrests and confiscations, I have to make clear, have taken place entirely illegally,” she said. “They did not have warrants for confiscation nor arrest.”

She said security personnel had in some cases climbed over walls to enter Bahá’í homes.

“If this is not theft and stealing people's property, I don't know what is,” Fahandej said.

She described one case in which a parent was arrested in front of a two-year-old child, and another in which authorities deployed 14 guards, five vehicles and a representative of the prosecutor general to arrest one woman.

‘You didn’t learn your lesson’

In a separate Isfahan case, filmmaker and journalist Sepehr Atefi said security forces raided his parents’ home for the second time in several months.

Atefi wrote on X that eight male agents and one female agent spent more than six hours searching the property and his father’s workplace, including the soil in flowerpots and a bag of rice.

He said agents packed household possessions, including a television, vacuum cleaner and toolbox, along with gold, valuables, communications devices and children’s toys, into his parents’ own suitcases and bags before taking them away in a pickup truck. The family’s car was also seized, Atefi said.

Atefi told Iran International that the repeated raids were taking a psychological and practical toll on his parents.

“This incident and its recurrence can mentally exhaust them,” he said. “Confiscating their IDs and mobile phones can trap them in administrative bureaucracy for days and disrupt their daily lives.”

When his mother objected to the confiscations, agents told her: “These are illicit possessions,” and: “You didn’t learn your lesson the first time,” according to Atefi.

He interpreted the remark as meaning that the family had failed to change its religion and said they were being targeted because they were Bahá’ís.

Fahandej said such language made what she described as the discriminatory nature of the raids explicit.

“There is no other basis for any of these confiscations, arrests, raids ... other than the fact that they're Baha'i,” she said.

She said court documents in some prosecutions had also explicitly cited membership in the Bahá’í community.

“With the misuse of their state authority, they essentially steal Baha'is' properties with complete impunity,” Fahandej said.

Livelihoods targeted

Fahandej said the economic impact of the seizures was particularly severe because Bahá’ís already face restrictions on higher education and public employment.

“Baha'is in Iran are banned from universities,” she said. “Then they're also banned from public employment, so they can't be doctors or lawyers, teachers, and any form of public employment.”

That leaves many members of the community dependent on small businesses and home-based work, she said, making the confiscation of tools, equipment and businesses particularly damaging.

“The basic and modest livelihoods that they would be able to build through these small businesses, sometimes home businesses, are also confiscated.”

Fahandej said authorities had increasingly used Article 49 of Iran’s Constitution, which allows the state to confiscate wealth deemed to have been acquired through illicit means, to seize Bahá’í property under what she described as vague pretexts.

She also pointed to large bail demands as another form of economic pressure.

“Some of the bail amounts that we see actually becomes the equivalent of working for a hundred years in Iran,” she said, calling it “quite a devastating form of persecution.”

Property confiscation has a long history in the Islamic Republic’s treatment of Bahá’ís. Fahandej said community and individual properties were seized in the early years after the 1979 revolution, while Bahá’í institutions were banned from 1983.

Crackdown widens

Recent cases have extended beyond property seizures.

Fahandej pointed to Peyvand Naimi and Venus Hosseini-Nejad, two Bahá’ís arrested in Kerman in southeastern Iran in January whose coerced confessions were later broadcast on state television. The Bahá’í International Community said Naimi was tortured and subjected to mock hangings in detention.

“We saw the forced live confessions of two Baha'is on television, essentially to justify persecution against them and the entire community,” Fahandej said.

A Revolutionary Court in the northern city of Sari has also sentenced 12 Bahá’ís to prison terms and restrictions on their social rights. Six other Bahá’ís were recently arrested in Sari and Karaj, while a Bahá’í student at Islamic Azad University in Birjand was expelled and barred from continuing his studies because of his faith.

Unofficial estimates put Iran’s Bahá’í population at more than 300,000. The Bahá’í faith is not recognized under the Islamic Republic’s constitution, which recognizes Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

Human Rights Activists in Iran said Bahá’ís accounted for about 62 percent of reported violations of religious minority rights in 2025.

Fahandej said the latest escalation was taking place as Iranians were already struggling with severe economic pressures.

“It's heartbreaking that amid an already difficult economic crisis in Iran, that the state-sponsored attack against the Baha'is is now sweeping the community, as they, together with all other Iranians, are already suffering,” she said.

The source said Abolhassani was only filming a supermarket fire when she was arrested on the evening of January 8. Branch 5 of Isfahan’s Revolutionary Court nevertheless sentenced her to death on charges of participating in setting fire to the store.

Abolhassani, who worked as a nail technician, was transferred following her arrest to Dowlatabad Prison in Isfahan, where she has been held for more than seven months.

Her case was referred to Iran’s Supreme Court following an appeal against the sentence and remains under review, the source said.

She faces execution if the Supreme Court upholds the ruling.

Abolhassani’s case follows reports of death sentences against two other men detained during January’s nationwide protests.

Earlier in the week, US-based rights group HRANA reported that Amir Mohammad Mojallal Choubari, 22, and Hossein Nazari, 25, were sentenced to death in separate cases.

Last Sunday, Iran executed Majid Adineh, another January protest detainee, after the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence.

Adineh was arrested on January 9 in Mohammadshahr, near Karaj. A Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death and ordered the confiscation of all his property over accusations of taking “operational action” for Israel, the United States and hostile groups.

Earlier this month, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said on that Iran was using capital punishment to “instill fear among the population and suppress dissent,” urging authorities to halt executions and move toward abolishing the death penalty.

He called the persistent lack of fair-trial and due-process guarantees “deeply troubling,” citing reports of confessions obtained under torture and cases in which executions followed within weeks of arrest.

The US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said Wednesday it had documented 950 executions in Iran since the beginning of 2026, including at least 20 women and 30 protesters. It recorded 45 executions in August so far.

The rights group said Iran’s use of the death penalty took place within a judicial system marked by unfair proceedings, a lack of transparency and political interference, with fair-trial protections systematically violated.

Abolfazl Shekarchi, a brigadier general and senior spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, said on Wednesday journalists working for Persian-language media abroad could be placed on a list of military targets.

“Media outlets such as Iran International, BBC Persian and Radio Farda are directly connected to Mossad, the US Central Intelligence Agency and other foreign intelligence services and receive support from them,” he said.

He called the employees of the Persian-language outlets “soldiers of Israel and the United States,” adding: “They can be included in the bank of military targets because, from our perspective, these are not media outlets.”

He provided no evidence for the accusations.

The remarks extend years of military and ideological rhetoric from Shekarchi against people and organizations Iranian authorities consider hostile, from protesters and opponents of compulsory hijab to foreign officials and media organizations.

PS752 reports called ‘absolute lies’

Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 shortly after takeoff on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 people aboard.

Reports that an Iranian surface-to-air missile had brought down the Boeing 737 were “absolute lies” and “ridiculous,” Shekarchi said as evidence pointing to a missile strike emerged.

100%

Shekarchi portrayed the reports as psychological warfare against Iran, while Iranian authorities initially attributed the crash to a technical problem.

Iran's armed forces acknowledged three days after the disaster that its air defenses had shot down the passenger plane, saying it had been mistakenly identified as a hostile target during a period of heightened confrontation with the United States.

The admission triggered protests in Iran and abroad and accusations that authorities had sought to conceal responsibility for the disaster.

Shekarchi's categorical denial became one of the most prominent official responses to early reporting on PS752 before the armed forces acknowledged that an Iranian missile had brought down the aircraft.

His latest accusations against foreign-based Persian-language media employ a similar framework, casting journalism and information as components of an enemy operation.

Protesters and hijab opponents

Shekarchi has also directed security and military rhetoric at domestic dissent.

During nationwide protests in 2022, Shekarchi described demonstrators as deceived and accused the United States of seeking to manufacture deaths to sustain the unrest.

The protests spread across Iran following the death in morality-police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained over compulsory hijab rules.

His rhetoric had already extended to opponents of compulsory hijab.

Participants in a campaign encouraging women to appear in public without mandatory head coverings, along with artists supporting them, were “forces of Satan,” Shekarchi said.

Thousands detained over coronavirus information

Shekarchi also played a public role in the authorities' response to information circulating during the coronavirus pandemic.

Around 3,600 people had been detained by police and the Basij over what authorities characterized as rumors or false information about the outbreak, with more than 1,100 judicial cases opened, Shekarchi said in April 2020.

The figures showed the scale of the authorities' effort to police information about the pandemic as questions mounted over infection and death figures.

Shekarchi also drew criticism after minimizing coronavirus deaths among military personnel and healthcare workers.

The deaths of four doctors, nurses and paramedics were “not a number” of significance, Shekarchi said during the early months of the pandemic.

The coronavirus outbreak became another period in which Iranian authorities treated the dissemination of information as a security matter, with people detained or prosecuted over online material about the disease.

Threats beyond Iran

Shekarchi's rhetoric has also targeted Israeli and US officials and personnel abroad.

Israel's destruction was Iran's “greatest aspiration,” Shekarchi said in 2021, presenting it as an objective from which the Islamic Republic would not retreat.

Even tourist and recreational locations around the world would not necessarily provide safety for American and Israeli officials targeted by Iran, Shekarchi warned in March.

“From now on, based on the information we have on you, tourist destinations, resorts, and recreational and leisure venues around the world will no longer be safe for you.”

100%

Earlier, responding to threats by US President Donald Trump against Iran's leadership, Shekarchi said an attack on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would prompt Iran to “set their world on fire” and leave its adversaries without a safe haven.

“Trump knows that if a hand is raised against our leader, not only will we decisively and courageously cut off that hand, but we will set their world on fire, give them no respite and leave them no safe haven.”

His latest remarks extend such language explicitly to journalists working outside Iran.