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.
Making matters worse, Iran’s Parliament has moved to fast-track legislation that would codify and escalate this repression. The measure’s vague language would equate online activism and information sharing with terrorism and treason. Anyone accused of undermining national security or sharing content with foreign media could face life imprisonment or death.
To be sure, this is not the regime’s first crack at mass violent suppression. It killed over 500 people during the Women, Life, Freedom protests and more than 1,000 people in protests in 2019. But Iranian activists have noted that the current number of arrests in just one week is exceptional, as are the checkpoints for people heading into and out of many cities. And this time, the government is not arresting protesters. Instead, ordinary citizens are being swept up, creating a climate of fear throughout the population — which is perhaps the intention.
The United States and its allies must not treat this unfolding human rights catastrophe as a sideshow to geopolitical diplomacy. Any talks between the United States and Iran would provide a vital opportunity for Washington to make clear that engagement with Tehran requires these conditions: an immediate halt to arbitrary arrests and detentions, transparency regarding the condition and whereabouts of detainees and political prisoners, a moratorium on executions and a commitment to due process and legal representation.
To ignore this moment is to validate the regime’s strategy: to eliminate dissent at home while the world’s attention is elsewhere, too distracted to intervene. It’s a strategy that has long been central to the Islamic republic’s survival. In 1988, after a badly weakened Iran reluctantly agreed to a cease-fire with Iraq after eight brutal years of war, the regime ordered the executions of up to 5,000 political prisoners, most of whom had been tried and were serving their prison sentences.
The casualty of the Islamic republic’s unchecked aggression will be Iranian civil society, which is deeply at odds with the regime’s domestic and foreign policies and, if supported, could one day form the foundation of a new, free Iran.
The United States has the leverage — and thus the lead role to play. Yet the broader international community, especially other democratic governments, must also act. They can strengthen sanctions targeting human rights violators, coordinate diplomatic isolation, apply pressure at the United Nations and use public accountability measures that include prosecution of responsible officials in national courts under the principle of universal jurisdiction. These actions are essential.
Iran’s leaders are counting on the fog of war to obscure their crimes. Let the world prove them wrong. If we fail to respond now, we will not only abandon the people of Iran; we will help write a dangerous new chapter in the history of impunity.
Karen Kramer is the deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran.
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