Four-minute read
The clerical regime in Iran is escalating the rate of executions daily, a clear political maneuver rooted in a bid for survival. From its inception, the regime established a machinery of death and suppression, initially attempting to justify its actions by claiming to target individuals involved in heinous crimes such as drug trafficking, murder, and rape.
The grim reality, however, is that the regime itself is the primary perpetrator of violence against the Iranian people, particularly during national uprisings. Furthermore, its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controls vast drug trafficking networks, and acts of sexual violence are committed by its torturers against youth in the regime’s prisons.
Crucially, a huge part of those executed by the criminal clerics over the past 47 years have been political and ideological prisoners. The official statistics on these executions are consistently proven to be severely underreported.
Fearful of its current disastrous economic and social conditions, and terrified of potential uprisings, the regime employs executions to sow despair and terror, especially among Iran’s youth. As the mullahs face collapse, this campaign of terror serves as a form of psychological security for the regime, seeking to avenge its continuous setbacks across all fronts by targeting highly resilient political prisoners.
These executions—whether carried out in secret black sites, the country’s notorious prisons, or in public—are conducted under barbaric, medieval conditions. In most cases, they follow prolonged solitary confinement, severe torture, and are carried out after the condemned have already served extensive periods of their sentence, all while enduring immense physical and psychological pressure. This grotesque practice is a deliberate, inexplicable effort by the clerics to systematically crush human dignity.
NCRI Editorial: #Iran’s Reign of Executions, Erased Graves, and a Regime in Fearhttps://t.co/VCQ005wbuh
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 30, 2025
Defense of a Crime Against Humanity
A disturbing new development has recently emerged: official state bodies and several regime leaders have openly referenced and defended the 1988 massacre of political prisoners, questioning, “Why should the experience of 1988 be repeated?” This public defense of a crime of such horrific magnitude is deeply alarming.
The regime’s systematic daily execution of multiple prisoners today constitutes a continuation of the same crime of mass killing. It is an undeniable fact that the mullahs’ survival is founded on the blood of over 120,000 political prisoners, including the 30,000 executed in the summer of 1988 in a matter of months, without any semblance of due process. The 1988 massacre is widely considered one of the largest unpunished crimes against humanity since World War II.
Not only has the clerical regime persistently denied this atrocity, but the international community, informed from the very first days by the Iranian Resistance of the brutal mass execution of political prisoners, chose a path of deliberate inaction. This policy of appeasement led the world to turn a blind eye to this horrific crime, thereby abandoning all moral and human boundaries.
Despite the regime’s decades-long efforts to conceal the crime, hide the burial sites of the martyrs, and erase the victims’ identities, it failed to prevent the global exposure of this crime against humanity and genocide of political prisoners. Over 90% of the victims were members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). In a 2024 report, Javaid Rehman, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, explicitly labeled the 1988 massacre as both genocide and a crime against humanity.
#Iran News: Commentary Seeks to Whitewash #1988Massacre, Shield Khamenei’s Rolehttps://t.co/eu4efQ27st
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 22, 2025
The Disaster of Appeasement
The policy of appeasement and the international community’s failure to act decisively against the 1988 genocide directly emboldened the regime, paving the way for further crimes against humanity during the uprisings of December 2017, November 2019, and September 2022. It also enabled the genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated against PMOI members in Camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq, and the ongoing terrorist acts committed both inside and outside Iran.
The release of convicted terrorist Assadollah Assadi in 2023 and torturer Hamid Noury in 2024—following their trials in Belgium and Sweden, and before the completion of their substantial sentences—introduced a startling new phenomenon to the democratic world: the triumph of the politics of appeasement over justice.
This tragic development undermines the great legal achievements established after World War II, trampling on human rights, wounding the rule of law, and diminishing the vital role of the judiciary—the most critical pillar of any democracy. Just as the execution of terrorists puts governments on the same criminal level as the perpetrators, a failure to fully punish them in pursuit of self-interested political gain makes governments complicit.
When Courage Becomes a Crime: #Iran’s Regime War on the @Mojahedineng https://t.co/DMUroS7xjm
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 10, 2025
The regime’s current defense of the 1988 massacre—a crime it spent decades attempting to conceal—is its own greatest admission: it is executing political prisoners. The prominent presence of MEK members, such as Mehdi Hassani and Behrouz Ehsani, and the many others on death row with MEK affiliations, confirms the regime’s sustained practice of genocide and a crime against humanity.
The regime’s wave of executions belies its dilemma: If they execute, public hatred intensifies, the youth’s motivation to fight and overthrow them surges, and their downfall accelerates. If they cease executions, the machinery of murder stops, which also hastens their overthrow by the Iranian people.
The cycle of executions and massacres—from the early days of the revolution, through the 1980s, the 1988 genocide, and the ongoing oppression during the people’s uprisings—has never broken the will of the resistance or the struggle to overthrow the turbaned criminals. History affirms that the captivity of liberty, the destruction of justice, the disrespect for human dignity, and the rule of crime cannot last forever.
With lips sewn shut, Iran’s death row inmates enter 6th day of hunger strike against regime’s execution spree https://t.co/ImnFW9nNDE
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) October 20, 2025
The Inevitable Rise of Justice
Inside Iran’s prisons, the “No to Execution Tuesdays” movement continues, and the hunger strike of 1,500 death row inmates in Ghezel Hesar prison stands as a resonant “No to Execution” echoing nationwide. While the regime dreams of a repeat of the 1988 genocide and crime against humanity, it no longer possesses the power to execute it on the past scale, and it never will again.
The PMOI’s heroic Resistance Units are conducting increasingly widespread anti-regime activities, defying the regime’s wave of repression and reiterating their commitment to overthrowing the rule of the mullahs. The abolition of the death penalty is enshrined in the extraordinary Ten-Point Plan of Mrs. Maryam Rajavi for a free Iran.
It is time for the perpetrators, commanders, and chief violators of human rights—the leaders of the clerical regime—to face justice in international courts. The international community must act today. They must not turn a blind eye to Ghezel Hesar, the other death row prisoners, and the daily mass executions in Iran. Their response to this ongoing genocide and crime against humanity is the ultimate test of their respect and loyalty to the high ideals of human rights, offering the most powerful justification to prevent a further humanitarian catastrophe.