Three-minute read
On July 22, the clerical regime in Iran hanged Mehdi Khanki at Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj. He was, by human rights organizations’ count, the twenty-fourth person arbitrarily executed since March in connection with the January 2026 uprising — the latest in a lengthening roll call of young people put to death for ties to the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). A year earlier, Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani were hanged on the same charge. This spring, at least eight more MEK-affiliated prisoners were executed within days of one another. Iran, which Amnesty International confirmed carried out over 2,150 executions in 2025 — the world’s most prolific executioner per capita — is killing political prisoners at a pace not seen in a generation.
But the disquieting fact about these executions is not their volume. It is their sociology.
Most of those being hanged belong to a generation born long after the MEK’s organized cadres were driven underground or into exile. Their support for — and decision to join — the MEK came despite decades of censorship, repression, massacres, executions and torture, and despite a sustained campaign of fear designed to terrify an entire generation away from ever approaching it.
Hundreds of films, thousands of hours of online content, millions of social-media posts, and an entire publishing industry were mobilized to portray the MEK as treasonous, cultish, and dead. Yet here, on the gallows, stand twenty-somethings who looked at all of it and chose defiance. The question is not why they were caught. It is why they exist at all.
Harrowing video shows Iranian protesters sing before being hanged https://t.co/t188p28wt2 pic.twitter.com/mrjiz0ZRIU
— New York Post (@nypost) May 1, 2026
Consider the comparative frame. The world has no shortage of authoritarian. Yet none has produced anything resembling Iran’s half-century rhythm of nationwide uprisings: the early-1980s resistance, the 1999 student revolt, the 2009 protests, the eruptions of 2017 and 2019, the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, and the January 2026 uprising that Amnesty called “the deadliest period of repression by the Iranian authorities in decades.”
In most dictatorships, dissatisfaction stays atomized — people angry in private, passive in public, because no organizational vessel exists to give rage direction. Iran is different. For all the regime’s efforts — propaganda, the promotion of dead ends like the discredited “reformist” current, the cultivation of monarchist nostalgia as a pressure valve — an organized resistance has persisted. It survived the 1988 massacre, which the UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman described in his 2024 report as acts carried out with “genocidal intent.” It survived foreign-soil terrorism and the diplomatic bargains that sacrificed Iranian dissidents for Western convenience. Through its Resistance Units — small, decentralized cells inside the country — it has continued transmitting a culture of defiance into Iranian society.
The regime’s own behavior confirms the thesis. On July 21, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei warned: “If we do not make a decision today, by tonight or tomorrow it may be too late.” This was not the language of control. It was the language of triage. Meanwhile, the IRGC has spent the anniversary of the MEK’s 1988 Operation Eternal Light issuing public alerts about the organization’s continuing threat — an odd use of resources for a movement it claims is finished.
🚨 Iran News: "I hit a dead end once again… I discarded Reza Pahlavi. Against the blatant violence used by the regime, 'non-violence' and 'peaceful struggle' no longer had a place."
Part 1 of PMOI member Akbar Daneshvarkar from prison on how he joined the organization.
Akbar… pic.twitter.com/0dt6JjhlCW
— SIMAY AZADI TV (@en_simayazadi) May 8, 2026
During the 2022 uprising, the NCRI documented 3,626 MEK supporters arrested or disappeared. After January 2026, more than 2,000 were reported. The execution tempo has accelerated — but so has the tempo of Resistance Unit operations, the wall writings, the solidarity acts for hanged prisoners, the organized disruptions appearing city after city.
Every execution validates the movement it is meant to destroy. The thirteen MEK members hanged in recent months stand alongside dozens of executed protesters, all part of a lineage of tens of thousands who, when forced to choose between renouncing their beliefs and the gallows, chose the gallows with their heads held high. That a new generation makes the same choice — without having known those earlier prisoners, armed only with an idea that survived everything thrown against it — is the most damning indictment of the regime’s project of erasure.
Humans move by models. Where there is no model, anger dies in isolation. Where there is one, it finds form. The clerical regime has spent a fortune ensuring no Iranian ever encounters a credible model of resistance. The gallows at Ghezel Hesar are proof of how completely that investment has failed.