Iran’s Quiet Campaign of Domestic Terror

Opinion|Iran’s Quiet Campaign of Domestic Terror

Over the past week, Iran has begun a quiet campaign of terror — not against an outside adversary but against its own people.

After the U.S.-brokered cease-fire between Iran and Israel took effect on June 24, the Islamic republic began a brutal domestic crackdown. Nearly 1,500 Iranians have been arrested, according to activists and human rights lawyers in Iran. They include professors, musicians, students, dissidents, poets, former political prisoners, members of Iran’s religious and ethnic minorities and grieving parents of slain protesters. Executions are underway. Due process is nonexistent.

This is not a mere tightening of authoritarian control. The Iranian regime, reeling from the humiliating losses it suffered at the hands of Israel and the United States, appears to be using the trauma of last month’s short but intense war to settle domestic scores and reassert absolute authority through fear. Silence from the international community risks enabling this campaign, opening the door to state violence on a mass scale.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran has confirmed that most, if not all, of those swept up in mass arrests are being denied access to legal counsel and subjected to sham trials. Many have been charged with espionage or national security offenses — broad, ill-defined accusations routinely used by Tehran to imprison or execute dissidents. Since the war began, at least six Iranians have been hanged on such charges. Many more may face death sentences in the coming days.

The arrests are surgical, systematic and sweeping — an effort to extinguish the last embers of civic resistance ignited during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests and sustained by countless ordinary Iranians since then demanding dignity, liberty and justice. The regime is sending a chilling if all too familiar message: Dissent equals death.

Entire communities are under siege, according to the activists and lawyers the Center for Human Rights in Iran has spoken to in communities across the country. In Kurdish-majority areas, checkpoints controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps now encircle cities, and civilians are being detained at will, these people say. One activist from a Kurdish city told the center that intelligence agents had summoned and interrogated relatives of Kurdish political activists who live abroad and that the agents “have pressured and threatened the families to force their relatives overseas to stop their activism.” Religious minorities, especially Baha’is, have also seen arrests spike, and hundreds of citizens have reportedly been arrested and charged with antigovernment propaganda for posting comments on social media.