An appeals court in Tehran has upheld a one-year prison sentence for renowned actress Elnaz Shakerdoost over an Instagram story mourning people killed during January’s protests, her lawyer said Friday.
The ruling also upheld a two-year ban on political, online and artistic activity imposed by Branch 23 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, which convicted her of “propaganda against the system.”
Her lawyer, Houshang Pourbabayi, said the post expressed grief and sympathy for those killed and contained no call for collective action or reference to state institutions.
Shakerdoost, 42, is one of Iran’s best-known film actresses and has worked in Iranian cinema for more than two decades. In 2019, she won the performance prize at the International Political Film Festival of Carcassonne in France for When the Moon Was Full, which also won the festival’s Grand Prize.
In August, human rights activists reported that nearly 100 prominent Iranians, including artists and filmmakers, had been summoned by security agencies or judicial authorities after speaking out against the new wave of executions, particularly the public hanging of protesters in Isfahan.
More than 20 of those summoned were well-known film and television actors, a civil rights activist said.
The report said those targeted had been among public figures posting against the executions under the hashtag “No to executions.”
Shortly after the brutal crackdown on January protests, acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi warned that the Islamic Republic was intimidating artists to erase evidence of the massacre, citing the killing of a fellow director as the reality the authorities were trying to suppress.
Panahi said on Instagram that the killing of filmmaker Javad Ganji has been followed by an escalating campaign of intimidation against artists aimed at erasing the truth about protest deaths.
Panahi said directors Majid Barzegar and Behtash Sanaeiha were separately summoned and harshly interrogated for hours over a joint statement condemning state violence, warning that more cinema professionals are expected to face summons and that heavy judicial cases are already open.
Hamid Kouhsari was carrying a wounded woman on his back through the streets of Gorgan on January 8 when security forces shot him from behind. He spent the next eight months in hiding with his leg untreated, before leaving Iran.
Kouhsari, 31, told Iran International that during the January 2026 uprising he saw security forces use violence unlike anything he had witnessed before in Gorgan, the capital of Golestan province in northern Iran, including the shooting of a toddler in the face. He spoke from a location that is being withheld because he fears reprisals from the Iranian authorities.
Security forces opened fire directly on crowds on January 8 as demonstrations swelled across the city, he said.
"You couldn't believe what you were seeing," he said. "They pointed their weapons directly at the crowd and opened fire. People were falling like sparrows."
Kouhsari had taken part in the November 2019 protests and in the 2022 protests that followed the death in morality police custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for allegedly violating Iran's hijab rules. Nothing he saw then, he said, compared with January.
"It was unimaginable," he said. "They were firing bursts into the middle of the crowd."
‘The hardest part’
The scene that affected him most, Kouhsari said, involved a couple carrying a child he thought was about two years old.
"The hardest part for me was when there was a husband and wife with a child, about two years old, in their arms," he said.
All three were caught in the gunfire, he said. The father was hit below the waist, and the mother in her face, neck and abdomen. Kouhsari and others moved the parents toward people helping the wounded.
In the chaos, his attention turned to their child.
"I was thinking about the child in all that fear and panic," he said.
He realized he could no longer hear the toddler crying, he said, and then saw the child lying near the curb.
"I was just praying the child wasn't dead, that they were unconscious," he said.
When he picked the child up, he saw a severe gunshot wound to the face.
"Half of the child's face was gone from the bullet," he said.
Kouhsari said he screamed and began crying, then carried the child to a woman helping the wounded.
"I told her, 'This is their child too. Wherever you sent the mother and father, send the child there as well.'"
He never learned what happened to the family.
Shot while carrying a wounded woman
Later that night, another wounded woman begged him for help.
"Help me. Don't let them kill me," he recalled her saying.
Kouhsari lifted her onto his back and began carrying her toward the crowd.
"I told her, even if I die myself, I won't let you die here," he said.
As he neared the other protesters, security forces shot him from behind in the right leg.
He managed a few more steps before collapsing. Protesters pulled him into the crowd and used scarves and shoelaces to stem the bleeding.
Video reviewed by Iran International shows Kouhsari lying in a house where he was hiding, his wounded leg bleeding into a container, visibly in pain.
He could not risk going to a hospital, he said, and was afraid even to try to get medicine from a pharmacy, because wounded protesters were being identified and detained.
"I wasn't afraid of being shot," he said. "I was terrified they would come and take me away."
That fear came from what happened after the November 2019 protests. Kouhsari said he was detained and later summoned to a Revolutionary Guards facility in Gorgan, where over several hours he was pressured into recording a confession.
His father, he said, was a veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and was wounded in it. Decades later, the son was shot by his own country's security forces in the street.
A doctor who later examined his leg privately told him it needed surgery because of damage to the bone and nerves, Kouhsari said.
The operation never happened.
Kalashnikovs, pellet guns and lasers
Kouhsari said he saw security forces use Kalashnikov-type rifles and pellet guns on January 8, as well as a weapon he could not identify.
He also described gunmen positioned above the streets, and protesters being marked with lasers before they were shot from those elevated positions.
"They would keep the laser on them even when they went into the crowd," he said. "The sniper from above would shoot the people they had marked with the laser."
Separate CCTV footage from Gorgan on January 9, obtained and verified by Iran International, shows security forces using lasers during the crackdown.
Kouhsari said Reza Asadi, a protester killed by live fire in Gorgan on January 8, was among those he saw marked with a laser before being shot.
A body taken, a family kept searching
Among those killed that night was Kouhsari's relative Mostafa Kouhsari, a father of two from Azadshahr, about 75 kilometers east of Gorgan.
Mostafa was shot at around 9 p.m., Kouhsari said, and died on the way to the hospital as protesters tried to save him.
Revolutionary Guards forces took his body, Kouhsari said, and for four days the family had no word of where he was. After days of searching, they found him at a morgue in Gonbad-e Kavus, a city in the north of the province.
Intelligence agents then escorted the body back to Viro, a village east of Gorgan, and pressed the family not to hold a public funeral, Kouhsari said. Mostafa was buried there at around 6 a.m.
The pressure continued after the burial. The family held no memorial at the village mosque and instead marked the third, seventh and 40th days after his death, the customary points of mourning in Iran, privately at Mostafa's home.
Others close to him were also killed, Kouhsari said, but some of their families had asked him not to name them for fear of reprisals.
Eight months in hiding
With his leg still badly injured, Kouhsari went into hiding.
For about eight months, he said, he moved between car washes, cattle sheds, abandoned houses and remote villas belonging to friends.
"When I heard the sound of police, the hair on my body would stand up," he said.
Friends brought him food and medicine. The surgery the doctor had said he needed never took place.
His fear of being found grew after a friend was detained. The man revealed information under torture, Kouhsari said, and he became increasingly afraid the authorities could identify him.
In the end, facing the threat of arrest and fearing for his life, he was forced to leave Iran.
A final goodbye
Before leaving, Kouhsari photographed his home after emptying it of his belongings.
He could not properly say goodbye to much of his family, he said, and does not know when he will see them again.
"Saying goodbye to my mother was very hard," he said.
One of his last memories is of saying goodbye to his dog, whom he left with a friend.
"When I was saying goodbye to my dog, I saw my whole family in that animal," he said.
"The night I left Iran, for the first time in eight months I was able to sleep peacefully."
Four men detained during Iran’s nationwide January protests have been sentenced to death by Tehran Revolutionary Courts, HRANA reported Thursday, as rights groups warn of mounting use of capital punishment against protest detainees.
HRANA identified three of the men as Khosrow Mohammadi-Nia, Masoud Tushmalani and Sirvan Shabani, all from Kermanshah province in western Iran. The fourth, Mehdi Nami, was prosecuted separately.
Citing information received from Iran, HRANA said Branch 23 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court tried Mohammadi-Nia, Tushmalani and Shabani in a joint case and sentenced them to death on charges including “moharebeh” or “waging war against God,” “assembly and collusion with the intent to disrupt national security” and “operational activity in favor of hostile states.”
HRANA said judges Karimi and Taghizadeh issued the ruling.
Security forces arrested the three in Eslamshahr during the January protests, according to HRANA. Tushmalani was initially released on bail but was detained again several days later.
The three are being held at Qezel Hesar prison in Karaj. HRANA said Shabani is around 22 years old, while Mohammadi-Nia and Tushmalani are between 30 and 50.
A woman prosecuted in the same case was sentenced to five years in prison, HRANA said. The group did not identify her and said it was still investigating details of the allegations against her.
Separately, HRANA said Mehdi Nami, who was also detained during the January protests, had been sentenced to death by a Tehran Revolutionary Court on a charge of “operating in favor of hostile governments.”
The verdicts come amid a series of death sentences and executions involving people detained during nationwide protests that began in late December 2025 and intensified in January.
Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said in September that Iranian authorities had announced the executions of at least 29 protest detainees between March 18 and the end of August. Five were executed publicly.
The groups said 16 of the 29 had not been accused of killing anyone, with some convicted over alleged acts such as damaging public property, throwing stones or entering government buildings. They said such conduct does not meet the threshold for capital punishment under international human rights law.
The organizations also documented allegations of torture, coerced confessions, denial of access to lawyers of the defendants’ choosing and accelerated judicial proceedings. In some protest-related cases, the period between arrest and execution was little more than five weeks.
The Basij has long maintained a presence in Iran's high schools and universities. Its growing visibility among much younger children is drawing attention to a new front in the Islamic Republic's effort to shape a generation that has repeatedly challenged its authority.
As millions of students returned to classrooms this month, Iran's paramilitary Basij appeared prominently in elementary schools as authorities rolled out an education campaign infused with military and ideological messaging.
Iran's Education Ministry announced over the summer that material related to the recent war and the country's military and nuclear capabilities would be incorporated into educational content.
The push comes at a precarious moment for the Islamic Republic, following war, economic turmoil and nationwide unrest—and four years after schoolgirls became some of the youngest and most visible participants in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
“Iran is obviously right now at sort of a crossroads,” historian Arash Azizi told Iran International, as the Islamic Republic struggles to command the loyalty of generations born decades after the 1979 revolution.
“We're talking about much younger people, people under 13,” Azizi said, adding that the Basij had some involvement in primary schools during the early years after the revolution, but considerably less in recent decades.
The memory of Woman, Life, Freedom
Historian Shahram Kholdi said the increased attention to schools cannot be separated from what happened inside them four years ago.
“We should remember that during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement we saw a huge wave of solidarity with this movement, especially in girls' schools in Iran,” he said.
The nationwide protests in January served as another warning. “It was again a wake-up call, harkening back to Woman, Life, Freedom, that they have to control schools,” Kholdi said.
After the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality police custody in September 2022, protests spread into schools.
Videos showed schoolgirls removing their headscarves, chanting against the Islamic Republic and removing or defacing images of its leaders. Some were barely teenagers.
The protests turned schools into one of the most visible arenas of youth opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Kholdi argues that the significance of a Basij presence extends beyond ideological instruction. Schools can provide authorities with greater visibility into students and, through them, their families at a time of considerable social and economic discontent.
The Basij's role in policing students also has a history. Kholdi recalled his own high-school years, when Basij members searched students' backpacks each morning for what he described as “contraband cultural material.”
What stands out now, he said, is how far down the age ladder the attention appears to be moving.
The Islamic Republic's concern about losing younger Iranians predates the latest unrest and war. In a January 2025 interview with Iran International, Iran specialist Holly Dagres said the establishment was already looking beyond an increasingly alienated Generation Z.
“They've been actually looking at the next generation, which is Gen Alpha,” she said.
‘North Korea scenario’
Azizi sees the push into younger age groups as part of a broader argument within the establishment over how to respond to a society that has moved away from some of the ideological positions that have defined the Islamic Republic.
“The regime has been trying to sort of bolster its base amongst the youth because it's lost them and it knows they're the future,” Azizi said.
One tendency, he said, favors a return to a more rigid and intensely ideological state—what he described as a “North Korea scenario”—drawing on mass mobilization of its remaining supporters to reinforce mandatory hijab and Islamist social rules.
In that vision, the Basij becomes an instrument not only for building support but for imposing what Azizi called “societal submission.”
But he said such an approach carries its own risk.
“If the regime wants to go toward bringing back Iran to the 1980s and then North Korea,” Azizi said, such policies could “lead to more social protests and social resistance.”
That tension is now reaching further into Iran's classrooms.
During Woman, Life, Freedom, schoolgirls who had spent their entire lives under the Islamic Republic turned some of those classrooms into places of protest. Four years later, the children entering elementary school belong to an even younger generation.
The spread of Starlink could deliver the “final nail in the coffin” of Iran’s ability to control cyberspace, Deputy Communications Minister Mohammad Hafez Hakami said Wednesday, even as authorities seek to suppress the technology through arrests, seizures and criminal penalties.
Hakami said Starlink had fundamentally changed that equation. “Our control over cyberspace is no longer based on our domestic network. It is based on Starlink,” Hakami said.
He said officials had warned for more than two years that wider use of the satellite internet service could eventually render existing methods of controlling communications ineffective, but had failed to produce an adequate policy response.
“I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
Iran has repeatedly restricted internet access during periods of unrest. Hakami said the government’s response has grown progressively more restrictive, from blocking a single platform in 2017 to shutting down internet access during the 2019 protests, blocking two major platforms after the 2022 protests and ultimately disconnecting the entire network during the bloody crackdown on nationwide protests in January 2026.
Starlink poses a challenge to that approach because its terminals connect to satellites rather than relying on Iran’s domestic telecommunications network.
Hakami said even measures such as mandatory mobile phone registration could become ineffective with Direct-to-Cell technology, which allows ordinary mobile phones to connect directly to satellites.
“I don’t want to create ‘Starlink-phobia,’ but nothing will remain of our ability to control cyberspace,” he said.
Arrests and seizures
Iranian authorities have intensified their crackdown on Starlink as its use has expanded. Iran’s Economic Security Police said in August that authorities had seized 997 Starlink devices and related equipment and arrested 163 people during the four months through July. Police also impounded 15 vehicles carrying the equipment.
The crackdown has extended to individual users and sellers. Two men from Bukan were sentenced to two years in prison each for buying and selling Starlink equipment.
Iran also criminalized unlicensed satellite internet equipment under legislation adopted in 2025. The law prohibits the use, possession, purchase, sale and import of devices such as Starlink and provides for prison terms and confiscation. It permits the death penalty for specified activities involving the equipment when carried out for espionage or to confront the state and the perpetrator is deemed an enemy force.
Amnesty International said Iran’s Intelligence Ministry announced in March that “hundreds” of Starlink devices had been seized. The rights group said authorities had portrayed the use of alternative satellite connections as potential espionage or collaboration with hostile states and threatened users with prosecution.
Death after Starlink-related arrest
The crackdown has also been linked to a reported death in custody.
Hesam Alaeddin, a 40-year-old man detained in Tehran over his alleged use of Starlink equipment to bypass an internet blackout, died after he was severely beaten by government agents, a source familiar with the case told Iran International in May.
Alaeddin had gone to a hospital to check on his brother, Hamid, who had been shot during protests, when some of his electronic devices were seized, according to the source.
A week later, he went to retrieve the devices and was arrested. Agents took him to his home for questioning and a search, where they severely beat him with various objects and he died, the source said. Authorities concealed his death and continued to treat him as a living detainee before eventually telling his family to collect his body.
Amnesty International later documented Alaeddin’s death but said the precise timing and circumstances remained unclear. The rights group said his arrest was connected to an investigation involving his brother and alleged possession of a Starlink device.
Despite the enforcement campaign, Hakami said Starlink had already reached a significant level of use in Iran and questioned whether existing policies could keep pace with the technology.
“Tell me: What policy have we adopted to protect the country against Starlink?” he said.
Prisoners in a security ward at Dastgerd Prison in Isfahan are beaten with cables and metal rods and held in overcrowded, windowless cells with poor ventilation, according to accounts provided to Iran International.
Informed sources described the section known as “Alef-Ta” as a place used for interrogations, holding prisoners before execution and, in some cases, applying additional pressure.
“Some prisoners put their faces close to the gap beneath the cell door so they can breathe,” one informed source said.
The ward holds some political prisoners alongside people accused of violent crimes and a number of clerics. Alireza Sepahi, a January protest detainee sentenced to death in the case known as the Alikhani case, has also been transferred there.
The Alikhani Square case stems from anti-government protests in Isfahan on January 8, during which authorities said four members of the security forces were killed.
Twelve protesters were sentenced to death, drawing concerns from rights groups and UN experts over due process and fair-trial standards. At least five had been executed by August, including Abolfazl Sepahi and Amirhossein Safari, who were publicly hanged in Alikhani Square on July 28.
Windowless cells
The section consists of rooms originally designed for solitary confinement, with each cell measuring about eight square meters.
The cells have no windows or adequate airflow and rely on a single ventilation fan that is sometimes switched off. Despite being designed for one person, several prisoners are sometimes held in the same cell, leaving insufficient room to sleep normally.
Prisoners receive two dirty blankets, while a shower and toilet without a separating door or wall occupy a significant portion of each cell. Using water further increases humidity inside the enclosed space.
Access to fresh air can be limited to about 15 minutes once a week. Prisoners are blindfolded and taken to the roof, where only the sky is visible.
Lights inside the cells remain on continuously. With no windows or clocks, prisoners can struggle to distinguish day from night. The central sewage system, which operates at around 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., can become one of the few indications of time.
Prisoners also have no access to phones, television, a prison shop or facilities for heating food. Sources said poor-quality food and the inability to reheat it have led to repeated cases of food poisoning.
'Cables and metal rods’
Prisoners can be removed from their cells for interrogation several times over a 24-hour period, sources said.
Sources described prisoners being beaten with cables and metal rods during interrogation and returning to their cells with injuries to their legs, mouths and teeth. Iran International also received accounts of interrogators pulling out prisoners’ fingernails.
Iran International reported on September 9, citing a judicial document, that 18 prisoners held at Dastgerd face charges connected to unrest and a fire in April that could carry the death penalty.