Iran escalates internal repression amid U.S. tensions, targeting dissidents as spies

On a December afternoon in Tehran, Masoud Piahú raised his phone to record a man sitting in front of a security forces vehicle on one of the city's central avenues. It was the kind of street scene that had become routine during the January protests—ordinary, almost forgettable. Within hours, the video went viral. Within days, it had become a symbol of public desperation against economic collapse and state security apparatus. Within weeks, Piahú was sentenced to ten years in prison.

His crime, as the authorities framed it, was documenting the moment. Piahú insisted in a social media statement that he had played no role in spreading the footage, yet the charge stuck. Online, supporters distilled the injustice into a phrase that spread across networks: his only offense was recording the anguish of a people. But the Iranian judiciary saw something different. It saw espionage. It saw collaboration with the enemy.

The numbers tell a story of systematic escalation. Since the January protests, Iranian courts have opened cases against 3,121 people and ordered the detention of 2,406 others on charges of espionage and collaboration with Israel. The accused have been branded traitors and mercenaries. This machinery of prosecution operates under a recently enacted law that dramatically stiffened penalties for alleged espionage—a statute that permits capital punishment and the seizure of all assets. According to Asghar Jahanguir, the judiciary's spokesman, forty-three percent of those pursued face charges related to political, cultural, media, and propaganda activities on behalf of what the regime calls the Zionist entity. Another seven percent stand accused of possessing, buying, or selling Starlink equipment—the satellite internet system developed by Elon Musk's SpaceX, which the government views as a tool of American interference.

Executions have accelerated in parallel. Since the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran began, authorities have reported approximately forty executions. At least nineteen of these involved participants in the January demonstrations. The most recent case involved a man named Fatholah Avarí, executed in a prison in Hamadan on charges of murdering a military commander. Yet the authorities have released no public details about his arrest date, trial proceedings, or execution date—a silence that raises questions about the fairness of the proceedings themselves. The regime describes the January protesters as rioters and their uprising as an attempted coup.

The repression extends beyond the courtroom and execution chamber. Universities have begun purging students deemed politically unreliable. At Sharif University of Technology, between five and seven students have been expelled, while more than twenty have been suspended for one to three semesters. At Shahid Beheshti University, access to the academic profiles of twenty to twenty-five students has been blocked entirely. This occurred despite a promise from the science minister, made before the recent conflict, that students with political cases would not be excluded from the educational system. Asset confiscation continues as well, applied independently of prison sentences or even death penalties. The state justifies these seizures as punishment for those who finance anti-Iranian gatherings or damage Iran's international reputation.

Shiva Mahboubí, a women's rights activist and spokesperson for the Committee for the Liberation of Political Prisoners, argues that the regime identified mass protest as its primary existential threat after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement erupted in September 2022. The state learned that social mobilization posed the greatest danger to its stability, and it has responded with repression as a tool of deterrence. Yet the climate inside Iran, according to lawyer Amir Reza in Tehran, is one of exhaustion. Inflation, unemployment, and cascading crises have created a population overwhelmed by economic hardship. After months of grim news, people respond with a mixture of helplessness, frustration, and even indifference to executions and arrests.

Human rights observers warn of a broader phenomenon: the erasure of human rights concerns in contexts of prolonged conflict. Sharmin Meymandineyad, a former political prisoner and founder of the Imam Ali Student Relief Society, notes from New York that the pattern visible in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran shows how civilian victims become invisible. Media cycles move from initial intensity to wars of attrition, during which public attention shifts and abuses fade from view. Mahboubí criticizes what she sees as a double standard in international discourse. While the conflict dominates headlines, violations of human rights in Iran barely register. She insists that opposing war means opposing all forms of militarism—whether from Trump, Netanyahu, Hamas, or the Iranian regime itself, which continues to kill its own population.

The death toll from the January protests remains contested. Official figures claim 3,117 deaths. Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based organization, places the number at 7,005 and maintains more than 11,000 additional cases under investigation. A physician named Hamid, around fifty years old, has witnessed both the deaths inflicted by state repression and the casualties of the subsequent war. He argues that the brutality of the January crackdowns obscured the machinery of conflict that the United States and Israel would soon unleash. Those who promoted military solutions to Iran's crisis, he contends, bear responsibility not only for the deaths their wars produce but for the hardening of the repressive climate within Iran itself. The war, as multiple voices now insist, has only worsened the situation for ordinary Iranians.