Iran International
Eight months after Iran's January protests, the partners left behind by some of those killed are recounting lives abruptly divided by gunfire – marriages measured in months or days, anniversaries spent at graves and final embraces they never knew were their last.
Their accounts preserve the intimate details of loss: the last phone call, kiss and touch, and plans for weddings and futures that never came.
A marriage cut short after 16 months
Shahrouz Mehrabi, a 36-year-old electrical engineer from Borujerd, was shot dead in Saveh on January 8, his wife Parvaneh's birthday.
The couple had struggled for years to build a life together. Their marriage lasted one year and four months.
“We loved each other and went through so much to finally be together,” Parvaneh wrote.
She remembered Shahrouz as kind, in love with life and full of plans. His death left those plans unfinished and turned her birthday into the anniversary of his killing.
‘I wish I had held you longer’
Matin Ghorbani, a 23-year-old barista, was shot dead during protests in Karaj on January 9.
His wife, Mahsa Khanjani, later published a photograph of herself embracing Matin's body.
“Why does this have to be our last picture?” she wrote.
In a recent video, Mahsa described the months that followed: nights reaching morning without him and memories of a final phone call, embrace and kiss that seemed ordinary because she did not know they were farewells.
“I wish I had known it was the last time,” she said. “I wish I had held you longer, looked at you longer. I wish I had recorded your voice more deeply in my mind.”
Seven days of marriage
Meysam Ghaderi, 32, and his partner had been together for 11 years before finally marrying.
Seven days later, he was dead.
Meysam was shot in the neck during protests in Karaj on January 8, leaving a marriage that had taken more than a decade to reach barely a week old.
A ninth anniversary without him
For Elham Sadeghi, another anniversary arrived this month without her husband, Mohsen Jabbarzadeh.
Mohsen, 41, who owned a currency exchange business, was killed during protests on Tehran’s Salsabil Street on January 9 after being shot with live ammunition.
His injuries were so severe that he died within minutes. At the hospital, his family was told the bullet had severed the main artery in his leg.
Marking what would have been their ninth wedding anniversary on September 12, Elham remembered how hard they had fought to build their life together.
“We went through so much to be together, we fought so hard,” she wrote. “My love, I love you forever.”
A first anniversary at his grave
Sadegh Ghorbani, 28, was shot in Shahr-e Qods near Tehran and died on January 10.
His wife, Atefeh Saei, spent their first wedding anniversary not beside him, but at his grave.
“Our first wedding anniversary; me without you, alone, frightened and in shock,” she wrote on Instagram.
In another post, Atefeh recalled touching her husband's cold body and fighting through a crowd to reach his coffin.
“I hate my hands; with these hands I touched your frozen body,” she wrote. “With these same hands, I made my way through the crowd to your coffin, held your lifeless feet and said: Don't be afraid. Go without worry, go in peace.”
Saei later described placing earth over her husband's body herself, fearful even during his burial that authorities might take his remains from the family.
A wedding that never came
For Aida Heidari, 25, the future she had planned with her fiancé Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti was supposed to begin around now.
Abolfazl was killed during protests in Qazvin's Zibashahr district on January 9. Their wedding was planned for about eight months later, people close to the couple said.
On September 3, around the time she would have been preparing for that wedding, Heidari died by suicide.
People close to Heidari said she had struggled with grief and psychological distress in the months after Soleimani Alamouti’s death. However, the circumstances that led to her suicide are not independently known.
“In some cases, prisoners have been forced to lift their shirts and the guards have also touched their breasts,” one source said.
Body searches have become routine in Evin's women's ward in recent months. Female guards search political prisoners before they leave for family visits, medical treatment or court appearances.
The searches take place in a cubicle recently designated for the purpose. Guards touch different parts of prisoners' bodies and sometimes order them to move or remove clothing, according to the account.
Families and children searched
Relatives visiting prisoners are also facing more intrusive searches under tighter security measures that differ from previous procedures, another source told Iran International.
Guards force relatives to remove their shoes, inspect the inside of their mouths and touch different parts of their bodies. Children and teenagers visiting imprisoned family members are not exempt and are also touched during searches.
Twenty-two female political and ideological prisoners at Evin demanded an investigation into what they called “sexual harassment” during body searches in a letter in October 2024.
Transgender prisoner Ghazal Marzban also wrote from Evin on August 21 that she was raped following her arrest in May 2023 at an Intelligence Ministry detention facility and threatened into silence.
Sexual violence against detainees has been documented in Iranian prisons since the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, with former prisoners and rights groups describing its use as a means of torture and humiliation.
Searches deter treatment and visits
The increasingly invasive searches have led many women to forgo medical transfers or meetings with relatives and lawyers rather than undergo the procedures, the sources said.
Pressure over prisoners' clothing when leaving the ward has also increased. Women have in some cases been forced to wear slippers and handcuffs.
Iran's Prisons Organization regulations permit searches without clothing only when necessary and under specified conditions. They also require body searches to be conducted with electronic equipment wherever possible.
The sources questioned why scanning equipment was not being used, describing the current procedures as a means of harassment rather than necessary security measures.
More than 40 women imprisoned for financial offenses were recently transferred to Evin's women's ward, and restrictions increased following their arrival, another source told Iran International.
Prison authorities have justified some of the tighter rules by pointing to the presence of non-political prisoners. Women imprisoned for financial offenses now make up around half of those held in the ward.
Iran International reported on July 12 that women protested the transfer over overcrowding and the failure to separate prisoners according to offense. Special prison guards entered the ward and beat several protesters with batons.
Some political prisoners view the mixing of political and financial prisoners as a deliberate policy intended to weaken collective resistance to restrictions.
Evin's women's ward has become a center of political prisoner activism in recent years, with women staging protests and hunger strikes over executions and other political and social issues.
The Alaj platform – whose name means “remedy” or “cure” in Persian – accepts information through its website, a Telegram bot and Iran's Bale messaging service.
“Alaj operates with the aim of safeguarding national security against anti-Iranian currents,” the Guards-affiliated Fars News Agency said in announcing the project on Monday.
State television also promoted Alaj, giving wider exposure to a system Iranian media had previously discussed but not promoted on the same scale.
Alaj says it has identified and monitored 1,600 people, including 600 identified through reports from members of the public, according to Iranian state media.
Its website publishes information about Iranians abroad, including names and photographs and, in some cases, national identification numbers, dates of birth and fathers' names.
The platform says it targets people outside Iran who act “against the country's interests and security,” including those advocating sanctions or military action and members of separatist groups.
Alaj also lists potential measures against people it identifies, including freezing assets and withdrawing access to consular and citizenship services.
The project's name carries a pointed connotation. Alaj translates as “remedy” or “cure,” framing the people targeted by the platform as a problem to be treated.
People ridicule campaign
Responses to the post promoting Alaj ranged from mockery of Iran's security establishment to explicit warnings that people who inform on opponents could themselves be identified and punished in the future.
One commenter predicted the platform would be hacked and the identities of those submitting reports made public, arguing that previous breaches of major Iranian institutions gave little reason to trust Alaj with sensitive information.
Another suggested the government's turn could eventually come, writing that authorities appeared to have little hope left even of securing future amnesty.
Others portrayed the campaign as a tactic opponents of the Islamic Republic could use themselves. One user said supporters of the Revolutionary Guards and Hamas abroad had already been publicly identified by opponents and several had lost their jobs as a result.
Several responses contrasted the effort to identify ordinary Iranians overseas with Israel's apparent intelligence penetration inside Iran.
“Start with the infiltrators inside your own ranks,” one person wrote, arguing that Israeli intelligence appeared to have extensive knowledge of Iranian officials.
Another mocked the limits of Iran's controls over information, asking whether authorities intended to “nationalize the internet outside the country” to prevent overseas opposition activity.
Other comments were considerably more explicit, threatening revenge against people who cooperate with Alaj after any future change of government.
Pezeshkian targets Iranians abroad
The campaign coincides with sharper official rhetoric toward politically active Iranians overseas.
“Some Iranians abroad, aligning themselves with the enemy, seek to incite the public within the country,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said during a social event on Monday, according to state media.
Pezeshkian accused Washington of seeking “to cause social collapse through the problems and restrictions they have imposed,” and said preserving domestic unity would prevent Iran from yielding to US pressure.
Guards used similar model at home
Alaj follows a similar crowdsourcing project launched by the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Organization in June to identify citizen journalists and social-media users inside Iran.
Known as Jasous-Yab, or “Spy Finder,” the project used channels on the Iranian Eitaa and Bale messaging platforms to ask members of the public to identify people photographing or filming missile strikes and other sensitive locations.
“This time, you identify the spies,” the campaign told users.
People were instructed to scrutinize buildings, roads, sounds, distances and other details visible in photographs and videos to determine where material had been recorded and submit information to Revolutionary Guards intelligence.
The project also sought to identify social-media users opposing the Islamic Republic, extending its scope beyond people recording events on the ground.
Alaj takes that crowdsourcing model beyond Iran's borders, asking citizens to help identify overseas opponents and feeding the resulting information into a system that advertises consequences for those it identifies.
Overseas operations
Iranian intelligence activity targeting dissidents and journalists overseas has previously prompted criminal investigations, sanctions and warnings from Western governments.
Authorities in the United States and Europe have accused Iranian security bodies and people working on their behalf of conducting surveillance and plotting abductions or killings of opponents abroad.
Activities linked to Alaj could therefore face scrutiny under espionage, foreign-interference or transnational-repression laws in countries where targets live, depending on how information is gathered and subsequently used.
The restaurant, Dastpokht-e Bibi (Bibi’s Cooking), posted an Instagram story reading “Nothing beats Bibi’s cutlet” alongside Iranian pop star Moein’s song Bibi Gol.
Shortly after the post went viral, the restaurant’s account was blocked by judicial order for what authorities described as “publishing criminal content.”
On its face, the post advertised one of the restaurant’s dishes. But both words carry meanings in Iran’s increasingly coded political vocabulary.
“Bibi” is an old-fashioned Persian term for one’s grandmother. But it is also the widely used nickname of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has become politically charged in Iran, particularly after the wars with Israel and the United States, as the nickname appeared in anti-government memes and expressions of support for Israeli attacks on the Islamic Republic.
“Cutlet,” meanwhile, has been a political taunt since Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. Opponents of the Islamic Republic began referring to the former Quds Force commander as “cutlet” or “kotlet”, mocking the condition of his body after the strike.
The term subsequently became a broader euphemism on Persian social media for senior regime figures killed in military attacks.
The combination of the two words therefore allowed the restaurant’s slogan — “Nothing beats Bibi’s cutlet” — to be read as a reference to Netanyahu and Iranian officials killed by Israel, although the restaurant did not explicitly make such a political statement.
Authorities have acted over similar wordplay before. Celebrity chef Navab Ebrahimi was arrested in January 2023 after posting a recipe for cutlets on Instagram on the anniversary of Soleimani’s killing. His restaurant was also sealed and his Instagram account taken offline.
In January 2024, an Iranian doctor and university professor from the city of Bojnourd in the northeast was detained after posting a picture of "cutlet" on the night of the death of IRGC commander Razi Mousavi.
In June 2024, the Iranian judiciary initiated a legal case against Hossein Pakdel, a playwright and theater director, for allegedly "disrupting the psychological security of society". Pakdel's Instagram post suggested that politics transform "stupid men into special diet cutlets".
The sensitivity surrounding references to Israel has intensified further during the current war.
Iranian authorities said in March that more than 1,000 people had been arrested over accusations including sharing anti-government material online or cooperating with Israel and the United States, while the judiciary warned that some forms of assistance to hostile states could carry the death penalty.
