Hit from the Sky, Iran Escalates War on the Ground Against Civilians 

After Israel and Iran engaged in a 12-day war in June, some analysts and even members of the Iranian public wondered if the regime was on its way out. After all, with its proxies abroad and its stores of conventional weapons decimated, and its security apparatus and nuclear program severely weakened by Israeli and US airstrikes, the Iranian regime looked “more enfeebled” and “imperiled,” than it had at any time since the 1979 revolution that brought it to power, the Atlantic wrote.  

But as it hit back at Israel and the US, Iran’s mullahs-in-chief responded by intensifying another war – the one on its people.  

In less than two weeks in June, for example, Iranian police arrested 21,000 people, including nearly 2,800 foreigners in the country, for espionage or other perceived crimes, as an atmosphere of fear seeped into homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, and even prisons.  

That’s because, as Amnesty International warned in a report this month, the regime’s “calls for expedited trials and executions” have underscored how the government was increasingly using the death penalty to crack down in the wake of the war.  

Long-time observers of Iran know that crackdowns by the country’s repressive leaders on its perceived domestic enemies are nothing new. In 2019, hundreds of Iranians were gunned down for protesting fuel price hikes. Three years later, the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police” for improper dress sparked a national uprising: The regime responded by killing more than 750 protesters and arresting about 30,000, with many accused of vague crimes such as “waging war against God” or “corruption on Earth.”  

In 2023, more than 850 people were put to death, many of them participants in the 2022 uprising and some of them children. In 2024, the number approached 1,000. This year, a United Nations official warned that Iran is set to surpass that number.  

“The regime’s response to its perceived vulnerability in the wake of that conflict has become increasingly aggressive,” wrote Stephen J. Rapp, a former war crimes prosecutor at special tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone, who also served as US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues from 2009 to 2015, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. 

“Though its failures might be attributed to incompetence and the foreign penetration of its security services, its fury is being directed at domestic political opponents,” he added. “Thousands of Iranians are in danger as parliament now seeks to expedite death sentences in cases involving imagined collaboration with foreign entities. These judicial killings…are calculated measures to suppress dissent and reassert control in the aftermath of two nationwide uprisings, as well as the most recent war with Israel.”  

In addition to targeting Iranians, the government has also focused on Afghan refugees in Iran, officially around 6 million, accelerating arrests and deportations in the aftermath of the war. The Iranian government accused some refugees of being spies for Israel, fueling a wave of xenophobia and suspicion that resulted in the loss of employment, housing, residency permits, and incarceration.  

As a result, almost 700,000 Afghans have been deported or fled Iran since the war, the United Nations said, noting that the daily returns increased 15-fold in June. “The pace and volume of returns (to Afghanistan) is shocking,” said UN refugee official Arafat Jamal.  

Iranian officials, meanwhile, cast the deportations, arrests, and executions as necessary to shore up state security. Press TV – the government’s global mouthpiece – said the government has struck a “heavy blow” to Mossad’s networks and “restored public order by punishing traitors.”  

Meanwhile, in late June, Iranian lawmakers moved to pass an espionage bill that makes “collaboration with hostile states or their media” and other acts such as “propaganda against the establishment” a capital crime and also makes it applicable to past acts.  

Some Iranian lawyers said that the law violates Islamic legal and religious principles, especially the provision making it retroactive.  

Political analyst Babak Dorbeiki told Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty that the passage of the bill was so “shocking,” he initially thought it was a knee-jerk reaction to the war with Israel. “But when you read the bill, you realize it is just a strange way of seeking vengeance,” he said. “This will be dangerous to not only critics of the Islamic Republic, but also supporters who want to reform it.”  

But Iranians now say the war and the domestic fury it unleashed have hurt their chances of any change coming to the country.  

Mehraveh Khandan grew up visiting her mother, civil rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, in Tehran’s Evin prison, where thousands of so-called enemies of the state are housed. Her father, Reza Khandan, was thrown into Evin in December for distributing buttons opposing the mandatory headscarf for women. 

After Israel struck the prison in June, she had hoped it would prompt the government to relent and release the prisoners. But after seeing reports of mass detentions and executions, she said she despaired that anything would ever change.  

“All this hope is gone,” she told the Associated Press. “(The war) just destroyed all the things the activists had started to build.”