Iranian Prisoners Fight Back as The Islamic Republic Continue to Execute People

(Photo by Khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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In interviews with Fox News and CBS, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Islamic Republic’s appointed president, called January uprising participants “armed agitators” backed by the United States (U.S.) and Israel, having earlier labelled them “terrorists.” The remarks outraged Iranians at home and abroad, as a state that systematically terrorizes its people accused its victims of its own violence.

The Islamic Republic’s violence is twofold: physical, through executions, torture, imprisonment, and state killings; and economic, through an oligarchic system that concentrates wealth among those connected to the regime apparatus, leaving most people without the means to live with dignity. For many, the search for life ends at the gallows.

With the world’s highest documented per capita execution rate, the death penalty enforces both forms of violence. Born in prison, the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign challenges it through weekly hunger strikes. Some participants are themselves condemned.

Why Tuesdays?

Outside Karaj, a city adjacent to Tehran, sits a complex of buildings. It holds the largest collection of incarcerated people in Iran. That complex is called Ghezel Hesar prison. At least 16,000 people are held in it, which was designed over 60 years ago for 5,000. Daily life there consists of overcrowding, beatings, torture, and poor food, water, and healthcare. As in other Iranian prisons, wealth determines access to necessities: poorer inmates sleep on floors and struggle to afford clean water, medicine and treatment. Meanwhile,  wealthier prisoners can pay for better conditions.

Here the “No to Executions Tuesdays” movement began on January 30, 2024. Tuesdays are traditionally the day condemned prisoners are moved to solitary confinement before execution at dawn prayer on Wednesday. Week after week, prisoners watched cellmates say their final goodbyes and give away their few possessions before being taken away, never to be seen again. 

That year, 2024, the Islamic Republic would execute at least 975 people, a 17% increase from the year before and an all-time high in more than two decades. A record that the Islamic Republic would break the year after by 68%, executing at least 1,639 individuals in 2025.

The Islamic Republic neither documents nor publishes its own use of two-pronged violence. Court details, prisoner conditions, executions and extra judicial killings are made public due to the tireless work of millions of Iranians. The chain extends from incarcerated friends and companions to human rights lawyers and journalists, many of whom face jail for advocacy, to human rights organizations, forced into exile. As such, figures are never exact. Some people do not even make it into the statistics. Their lives end without anyone updating the kill toll of the state.

A Common Cause is Found

Five months before the campaign’s launch, in September 2023, political prisoners transferred from Evin to Ghezel Hesar encountered appalling conditions and a killing machinery executing groups of prisoners weekly, mostly drug offenders. By late 2023, they were discussing collective action.

On 23 January 2024, Mohammad Ghobadlou, arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising, a feminist movement responsible for social freedoms the state now claims credit for, and Kurdish Sunni Farhad Salimi were executed alongside drug offenders. Both faced “corruption on earth” charges, a religiously derived capital offence alongside “waging war against God,” used against political prisoners and protesters. Both confessed under torture.

The executions sparked prison outrage. Two days later, 61 women staged a hunger strike.

On 28 January, two days before the campaign’s launch, Radio Zamaneh received an anonymous letter from prisoners “We do not deserve death.” They feared identification would accelerate their executions. “For someone to hear our voice, from this week we are forced to go on hunger strike every Tuesday.”

“Among us are people facing all kinds of charges: those accused of drug offences, those sentenced to qisas [retributive punishment], and political and ideological prisoners. All are on death row.”

The following day, 10 prisoners joined. The strike spread, with women from Evin joining immediately. During an August sit-in, guards beat several women. By October 2026, the campaign encompassed 66 prisons across 27 provinces.

Beyond prison walls, 68 rights organizations endorsed it in August 2024, followed by a 24-hour livestream featuring activists, experts and families. Campaign statements urged publicity for prisoners, solidarity with families and abolition. 

As mentioned, publicity and advocacy, whether from Iranians, the diaspora, NGOs, or foreign governments, favour high-profile, hashtagged prisoners. While such solidarity remains vital, in an April 2024 statement, ten “No to Execution Tuesdays” prisoners called rapper Toomaj Salehi’s death sentence, which attracted over 140,000 people posting on X and 437,000 hashtag uses on Instagram within days, merely the tip of an iceberg.

Condemning thousands of anonymous executions rooted in unjust structures, poverty and class divisions, they rejected distinctions between political and ordinary prisoners, demanding universal abolition and nationwide solidarity.

When Poverty Becomes a Death Sentence

Excluding political and “security” cases, Iran’s executions overwhelmingly concern two categories: In 2025, 94.1% of Iran’s executions involved drug offences (48.5%) or murder under qisas (45.6%), a religious eye-for-eye punishment.

It also allows wealth to determine survival. Under qisas, victims’ relatives can demand execution or accept diya (blood money). The 2026 benchmark was 2.1 billion tomans, but demands are uncapped. Azad Shushtari was executed in June 2026 after his family raised 4 billion but failed to meet 6 billion.

Unlike qisas, drug-related death sentences cannot be averted through diya. Since 1989, privatization, inflation, sanctions and insecurity have transformed livelihoods. Economic distress correlates with certain crimes, yet poverty is punished rather than addressed. 

Nearly 39% of Iranians live in poverty. Between January and August 2026, the estimated cost of basic living expenses for workers rose from 42.9 million to 90 million tomans, while wages lagged and food inflation reached 128%. For poorer households, this meant cutting back on basic consumption.

Not all Iranians Face the Same Brutality

Ethnicity compounds inequality. Baluch people constitute 5% of Iran’s population, yet 142–149 were executed in 2025, including 106 for drugs and at least one child, accounting for 7.6–9% of executions. Baluch people also represented 60% of civilians killed by government gunfire, including 173 sukhtbars, economically marginalized fuel carriers.

At least 264 Kurds were executed, representing 14.2% of executions despite comprising 10% of the population. Fifteen Kurdish civilians were among 74 killed by government gunfire. Although kolbari (cross-border portering) is not a capital offence, 59 kolbars were killed. Mohiyedin Ebrahimi was executed in 2023 following a torture-induced confession; security forces had killed his kolbar brother.

Anti-imperialism Turned on Its Head

How did Iran, with the world’s third-largest oil and second-largest natural gas reserves, vast mineral wealth and a substantial university-educated population, reach such poverty?

In 1989, Rafsanjani became president, one of two candidates approved by the supreme leader’s Guardian Council, an insult to the word “election.” With the Iraq war over and political opponents taken care of, following an estimated 20,000 political killings since 1979, including 2,800–5,000 massacred in 1988, his Five-Year Plans introduced price decontrol, subsidy cuts, trade liberalisation and privatisation, IMF-style structural adjustment reforms imposed across the Global South, which Iran adopted without IMF or World Bank loan conditionality.

Simultaneously, the 1989 narcotics law mandated death sentences; 900 people, mostly drug offenders, were executed within five months. Economic insecurity expanded alongside an apparatus prepared to execute those involved in criminalised economies.

In 2005, Khamenei “reinterpreted” Article 44. Overnight, day was night and night was day. This permitted privatisation of 80% of major state holdings. Between 2006 and 2010, over $80 billion across 370 enterprises was divested, only 13% to genuinely private businesses. Assets instead concentrated among bonyads, pension funds and IRGC-linked companies. Ahmadinejad’s “justice shares” reached 40 million but delivered little control or dividends as management remained state-affiliated, while the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya expanded through energy, infrastructure and construction contracts. 

While political insiders accumulated wealth, Iranians faced growing insecurity and precarious livelihoods, including criminalised survival economies. The same state that enabled this concentration of wealth punished marginalised communities through imprisonment, executions and lethal border policing.

Sanctions: Who benefits? Who pays?

Sanctions compounded this domestic inequality and corruption. Those imposed in 2012 and reintroduced by the US in 2018 further devastated Iran’s economy. The 2012 sanctions cost up to 19.1% of real GDP by 2016, with poorer households suffering 2.3–2.8 times greater welfare losses.

Import, currency and trade restrictions fuelled smuggling and squeezed production. Annual smuggling rose from $2.5–3 billion in 1988–2002 to an estimated $30–35 billion in incoming smuggling by September 2026, “one-third of the economy,” though estimates are not directly comparable.

Sanctions punish the poor while enriching those circumventing them. By 2024, the IRGC and affiliates controlled up to 50% of oil exports. Meanwhile, Kurdish kolbars and Baluch sukhtbars, transporting goods and fuel for survival, risk being shot dead by security forces.

Domestic Abuse, Sexual Exploitation, and Gender Apartheid 

Women’s executions expose poverty, gender apartheid and gender-based violence. Though few executed prisoners are women, they suffer physically, emotionally and economically when loved ones and breadwinners whose wages sustain women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour are executed, imprisoned for years or killed in the streets.

Between 2010 and 2025, 289 women were executed: 146 for murder, 123 for drugs, four for security offences and 16 unidentified. At least 22 more followed January 2026; figures remain provisional. Homicide cases included domestic abuse survivors, child brides and women defending themselves against rape.

Article 156 recognises self-defence but disadvantages abuse survivors. Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed in 2014 after killing a sexual assailant; Marzieh Nayeri, forcibly married at 17, in August 2026 after defending herself against her husband’s associate’s attempted sexual assault.

Goli Kouhkan, an impoverished Baluch married at 12, faced her husband’s family’s 10-billion-toman blood-money demand. International fundraising saved her life in 2025.

Discrimination also operates through tafazol-e diyeh: a murdered woman’s family must ordinarily pay her male killer or heirs half the full diya before execution, since women’s lives are legally valued at half those of men for blood-money purposes. Despite Article 551’s (2013) compensation provisions, families have waited years for state funding, leaving murderers imprisoned, eligible for release or executed following intervention.

Families face a cruel choice: demand qisas (execution) or forgive the killer, perhaps for blood money, risking three to ten years’ imprisonment, or none under that provision if legal conditions are unmet. In so-called honour killings, this loophole in justice lets relatives forgive family perpetrators; fathers and paternal grandfathers are exempt from qisas altogether.

Maryam Yarmohammadi, 28, a mother of two, was murdered and mutilated in an October 2026 honour killing by her brother with her husband’s help. Relatives reportedly protested their arrests and declared no complaint, potentially sparing her killer qisas.

Yet this same system, lenient towards men who kill women, has stoned at least 77 people, including women, for adultery and other criminalised sexual offences. Following domestic resistance and international outcry, none have been documented since 2010, though stoning remains legal.

The Campaign Beyond the Prison Walls 

Iranians rose in late December 2025, with protests spreading to 203 cities across all 31 provinces. The uprising reached beyond the streets into prisons. On 6 January, ten days into the protests, prisoners in 55 prisons, many facing execution, launched solidarity hunger strikes, condemning the shooting of young people, student arrests, torture and forced confessions, and highlighting Seyyed Mohammad Mousavi, an Arab political prisoner newly sentenced to death. 

What followed, particularly between January 8 and 9, 2026, was the deadliest act of political terror in Iran’s modern history. Two weeks later, an internet shutdown prevented the campaign from publishing its statement, but hunger strikes continued in 56 prisons.

The crackdown extended beyond street killings. In June, the campaign warned that uprising detainees faced execution and lengthy imprisonment. By September, “nearly 200 political-ideological prisoners faced death sentences”, many arrested in January. Among them was 33-year-old Mahboubeh Shabani, reportedly sentenced for transporting injured protesters to hospitals by motorcycle during the January 2026 uprising.

Prisoners also paid for resisting the gallows. In July 2025, Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, Tuesday hunger strikers for 18 months, were executed. The previous day, guards violently raided their Ghezel Hesar ward. Survivors continued in their memory.

Their message cuts through labels: whether condemned for dissent, drugs or qisas, no charge makes life disposable. Poverty and protest meet at the gallows, alongside demands for abolition.

Under a regime refusing even to document deaths as statistics, activists must amplify lives lost daily and defend their humanity against geopolitical narratives valuing lives based on nationality and ideology.

Edited by Atena Abbaspourbenis