Tehran is at war with Trump over the Strait of Hormuz and with the Iranians on death row

Whilst yesterday the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said that the time had come “to put an end to the war now that we find ourselves in a position of strength and dignity”, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, General Ali Abdollahi, responded to “the enemy’s new threats” from Trump by speaking of “overwhelming, punitive and devastating” responses. This position of strength lies in control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which Tehran has been holding maritime traffic to ransom for almost six months now and from which it has no intention of backing down; yet, amidst declarations of war and internal divisions between hardliners and pragmatists, the Iranian regime has for months continued, with impunity, to carry out death sentences against demonstrators who took part in the mass protests that began in January and which, within a few weeks, had spread across the country. In recent weeks, Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat, accused of spying for Israel, were killed, as was the 20-year-old Arvin Kheirkhah, who had been arrested during the protests.

This week, the Mizan news agency – the official news outlet of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary – announced the execution of another young man arrested during the protests on 8 January in Alikhani Square, in a neighbourhood in northern Isfahan. Regarding Ghaem Hosseini, an Afghan national, Mizan reports that the “foreigner” had been sentenced to death on charges of involvement in the deaths of four police officers and, consequently, of moharebeh – that is, “corruption on earth”, “destruction of public property with the intent to disrupt public order and security” and “conspiracy against national security”. Hosseini was hanged in Isfahan prison. Four other people – Golmohammad Mohammadi, Erfan Esfandiari, Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi – were also executed in connection with the street protests, whilst twelve others were sentenced to death. The four were hanged in public with the clear intention of sending a warning to Iranians: this is the price you pay for protesting here – take note. The crackdown on the protests has been brutal: the regime fired on the crowd, causing thousands of deaths; it shut down the internet, cutting off all contact between Iranians and the outside world; and it arbitrarily arrested anyone who had been stopped and identified by CCTV footage and videos circulated online. Death sentences are the final piece in the regime’s strategy of terror against the population; in recent months, it has even accelerated the trials of political prisoners accused of offences linked to ‘national security’. According to the Iranian Human Rights Organisation (Ihr), since wartime executions resumed on 19 March, at least 30 protesters have been executed, 28 for the protests that began in January and two for the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests of 2022: “This amounts to an average of more than one execution of a protester per week,” it writes.

August in Iran is the month of death sentences, echoing the 1988 massacre, when thousands of political prisoners were subjected to summary executions remembered as the ‘prison massacre’, and the international community expressed its solidarity through a campaign with the slogan: ‘No to the death penalty’. In recent days, students from seven Iranian universities have issued a statement of condemnation: “There is no separation” between the repression of street protests, imprisonment and the application of the death penalty. “A future built on the gallows is a continuation of the past, not a break with it.”