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Repression and Mass Killings in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Updated 2026-06-12
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The Islamic Republic of Iran has, since its founding in 1979, maintained power through a security and judicial apparatus that human-rights bodies have repeatedly accused of crimes against humanity. This page documents the major, well-attested episodes of state repression and mass killing carried out by that apparatus — drawing on the reporting of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and Iranian-diaspora documentation centers. It is a record of a state's conduct against its own citizens; the Iranian people, including those named below, are overwhelmingly the victims of this history, not its authors.

The apparatus of repression

Several institutions carry out and authorize this violence. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, Sepah), founded in 1979 to defend the revolution, controls its own intelligence organization, ground and naval forces, and the missile program, and has been the lead instrument in suppressing protest. The Basij, a volunteer paramilitary militia subordinate to the IRGC, supplies the plainclothes enforcers and street-level shooters documented in successive crackdowns. The Ministry of Intelligence (known by its Persian acronyms VEVAK and later VAJA) runs surveillance, detention, interrogation, and — as Iran later admitted — assassinations. The Revolutionary Courts, operating since 1979 with summary procedures and little pretense of due process, hand down the death sentences; in 1988 these were supplemented by ad hoc panels that survivors and historians call "death commissions." Above all of this sits the clerical leadership, the office of the Supreme Leader as guardian-jurist (velayat-e faqih), which has issued or ratified the most consequential orders.

The 1980s: mass executions of dissidents

After the political rupture of June 1981, the new authorities launched one of the largest waves of political executions in modern Iranian history, targeting the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK/PMOI), leftist organizations such as the Tudeh (Communist) Party and the Fedaian, and a wide range of other opponents. Amnesty International's Annual Report 1983 recorded more than 4,600 executions between the revolution and the end of 1982, and noted with alarm that in many cases sentences appeared to precede trial, or that no trial took place at all. Amnesty issued repeated appeals against the executions of Tudeh members and others.

The defining atrocity of the decade came in 1988. Following an MEK incursion from Iraq near the end of the Iran–Iraq War, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a secret fatwa ordering the execution of imprisoned dissidents who remained loyal to the organization. Between late July and September 1988, "death commissions" subjected prisoners — many already serving fixed sentences — to interrogations lasting only minutes before sending them to the gallows in Tehran's Evin and Karaj's Gohardasht prisons and elsewhere. Bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves whose locations the state still conceals. In its 2018 report Blood-Soaked Secrets, Amnesty International put minimum estimates at around 5,000 killed and argued the killings constitute ongoing crimes against humanity; other estimates range from roughly 2,800 upward, and some victims' organizations cite higher figures. Among officials linked to the commissions was Ebrahim Raisi, later head of the judiciary and President of Iran (2021–2024); Amnesty and the UN repeatedly called for him to be investigated. The killings were not unanimous within the establishment: Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, then Khomeini's designated successor, denounced them to the officials carrying them out as "the greatest crime in the Islamic Republic" — words preserved on an audiotape his family released in 2016, and which had cost him his succession in 1988.

The Chain Murders

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, dissident writers, intellectuals, and political figures were murdered in a campaign that became known as the Chain Murders. Victims included the opposition leader Dariush Forouhar and his wife Parvaneh, stabbed to death in their Tehran home in November 1998, and the writers Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, strangled the following month. Estimates of those killed over the campaign run to at least 80 people. In 1999 the Ministry of Intelligence admitted that its own agents had carried out a set of the killings; a number of operatives were tried, and the official named as the operation's organizer, Saeed Emami, reportedly died in custody before he could testify — a death many regard as a convenient silencing.

From the Green Movement to Bloody November

State violence against mass protest recurred across the 2000s and 2010s. Following the disputed 2009 presidential election, the Green Movement brought millions into the streets and met a lethal response. The young woman Neda Agha-Soltan, shot dead by a Basij member according to eyewitnesses, was filmed dying on a Tehran street and became a global symbol of the crackdown. At the Kahrizak detention center, at least three detainees were beaten to death and others tortured; the facility became one of the most documented atrocities of the suppression, though no senior official was held accountable.

The deadliest single crackdown came in November 2019. A sudden fuel-price increase triggered nationwide protests ("Bloody November," or Aban), which security forces met with live fire while the authorities imposed a near-total internet shutdown for roughly a week to hide the scale of the killing. A December 2019 Reuters Special Report, citing Iranian interior-ministry sources, reported that about 1,500 people were killed and said Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had ordered officials to do whatever it took to end the unrest. Amnesty International, working from verified evidence, documented at least 304 deaths as a floor and stated the true toll was higher, describing a shoot-to-kill pattern of shots to the head and torso.

Woman, Life, Freedom and the ongoing record

In September 2022 the death in morality-police custody of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained over her hijab, ignited the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising. A UN investigation later concluded that Iran bore responsibility for the physical violence that caused her death. The state's response again was lethal: Amnesty International documented the killing of at least 23 children between 20 and 30 September 2022 alone — most shot with live ammunition — and the killing of at least 82 people in a single day in Zahedan ("Bloody Friday"). Security forces fired metal pellets that blinded or maimed large numbers of protesters and bystanders. Tens of thousands were detained, and the judiciary subsequently executed protesters after trials the UN and rights groups condemned as grossly unfair and reliant on torture-tainted "confessions." In its March 2024 report, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found that Iran had committed crimes against humanity — including murder, torture, rape, enforced disappearance, and gender persecution — and recorded that the crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.

These episodes sit atop a permanent infrastructure of capital punishment and coercion. Amnesty International reported that Iran carried out at least 972 executions in 2024 — the highest annual figure since 2015 and roughly two-thirds of all recorded executions worldwide — with many tied to political repression, and Iran continues to execute people for crimes committed as minors in breach of international law. Beyond its borders, Iran's services have pursued a documented campaign of transnational repression: Freedom House and Western prosecutors have detailed kidnapping and assassination plots against dissidents and journalists in the United States and Europe, including against the activist Masih Alinejad, alongside the long-standing practice of detaining dual and foreign nationals as bargaining leverage.

Operation Epic Fury

Strategic Deterrence

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Updated:
2026-06-12

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