Mohammad Amin Biglari vanished into Iran's security apparatus in early January, his fate unknown to his desperate father for a month. The 19-year-old had been arrested during anti-government protests, dragged into a Basij paramilitary base after leaving his job at a hair salon. His father searched morgues in Tehran. Instead of finding his son's body, a revolutionary court lawyer delivered the crushing news: the boy was in prison.
Ghezel Hesar prison, roughly 30 miles west of Tehran, became Biglari's tomb. Authorities allowed only one-minute phone calls with his father. On the fourth call, Biglari wept as he told his father he had been sentenced to death. The Iranian judiciary announced his execution on April 5.
Biglari's case is not an outlier. It is part of a systematic campaign of violence and control that Iran's government has unleashed on its own people even as it battles external enemies.
Since mid-March, Iran has carried out at least 28 executions, with 13 of those victims arrested during the January protests, according to Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based monitoring organization. The pace of killing has accelerated precisely as conflict with Israel and the United States has intensified, a grim inversion of what might be expected during wartime.
Beyond executions, the numbers paint a darker picture. The United Nations reported two weeks ago that Iranian authorities have arrested at least 4,000 people on national security charges since the February 28 U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. Among those detained, the U.N. found credible reports of forced disappearances, torture, coerced confessions, and mock executions.
"The Iranian authorities have used the context of armed conflict as a pretext to further intensify repression," said Raha Bahreini, an Iran researcher for Amnesty International. "Authorities have escalated their use of the death penalty as a tool of political repression. It's really unfathomable that as people were being bombed, they were also waking up almost daily to news of hangings of protesters and dissidents."
The regime's reach extends beyond executions. In a bid to punish those it deems disloyal, authorities have confiscated the properties of 40 people labeled "traitors to the country," according to the judiciary's Mizan news site. The financial destruction complements the physical devastation.
High-profile detainees are not exempt. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, a 54-year-old human rights activist, was being held in Zanjan prison on national security charges when she suffered a heart attack in late March. Amnesty International warned that she was at risk of death because authorities were denying her access to specialized cardiac care. Her lawyer announced Sunday that she was finally transferred to a Tehran hospital for treatment, after intense pressure from her family and international advocates.
The crackdown has been explicitly framed from the top. Iran's national police chief Ahmad Reza Radan told state television in mid-March that any protesters would be treated as the "enemy." Security forces made their intentions clear even before that pronouncement: people were killed on the first day of the conflict simply for celebrating the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in public.
Biglari's arrest illustrates the arbitrary nature of the campaign. He was seized while walking home from work in an area where protests were occurring and a building had been set on fire. Paramilitary forces pushed him into their base. He was later accused of breaking into a military facility and setting the fire, charges his family insists are false. His lawyer was never permitted to review the case or mount a defense.
After Biglari's execution, authorities refused to return his body or reveal where he might be buried. A family member, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, confirmed these details to NBC News.
U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk declared himself appalled at the convergence of conflict and repression. "On top of the already severe impacts of the conflict, the rights of the Iranian people continue to be stripped from them by the authorities, in harsh and brutal ways," he said in a statement.
The intensity of the crackdown raises alarming questions about what happens when the current conflict ends. Human rights advocates warn that the current leadership, far from being the moderate force some Western observers have suggested, represents a harder line that will likely escalate repression once war no longer provides cover.
"We have not seen any sign of reasonableness or flexibility or any attempt at reconciliation on the national level from the current leadership," said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. "I think the future, especially once the war is settled, could be very bloody."
For now, large-scale protests have ceased. Ordinary Iranians are focused on survival and navigating economic hardship. The resistance that erupted in January has been crushed by force, fear, and the fog of war. Biglari, who had been saving money to buy a computer and taking music classes, represents thousands whose lives have been obliterated not by bombs from abroad but by their own government's machinery of control.
Author Sarah Mitchell: "The Iranian regime is weaponizing national security as cover for a purge, and the international community should be watching closely for what comes next."
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