Searching for Iran’s Disappeared Prisoners
Shailin and her siblings come from a family of dissidents who have long hoped to see the government fall. But she was furious at the military campaign led by the United States and Israel, which had trapped her loved ones in Iran between autocracy and possible death. If her family left their homes to search for her brother, they risked facing airstrikes that were “now destroying our oil, our water and our neighborhoods,” Shailin told me. She called Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “manipulators” who have “no interest in regime change” in Iran. (In a speech Wednesday night, Trump said as much, saying “regime change was not our goal. We never talked about regime change,” although he added that regime change was a byproduct of his Iran operation.) “This is not the war we wanted,” Shailin said. “It’s just a new hell.”
As Trump threatens to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” many Iranians are still grappling with the human consequences of pre-war protests that pushed the Islamic Republic toward a political precipice. The regime ruthlessly suppressed the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets in late December and early January. No one knows exactly how many protesters were killed, but estimates vary between seven thousand and thirty thousand. Still others have been arrested: up to fifty thousand people are believed to be detained in facilities across the country, many after being sentenced to harsh sentences in court proceedings closed to the public. Some of these prisoners have since been transferred to new locations, making it more difficult for their families to find them, let alone defend their interests.
Prisoners were moved due to lack of staff, food and capacity in the facilities where they were held. There is also the risk that the prisons themselves will become military targets: last June, during the Twelve Day War, Israeli airstrikes hit Evin Prison, killing around eighty people, including inmates, visiting family members, and prison staff. Security agents forced the remaining prisoners to walk, chained and at gunpoint, through a “tunnel of horror” to an undisclosed location, according to Mehdi Mahmoudian, a screenwriter and activist previously imprisoned in Evin, with whom I spoke last month. He later wrote that he felt “caught in the clutches of foreign beasts and domestic executioners who passed on to each other.”
Since the March bombings, prisoners have been transferred to military zones, police facilities, shelters and other prisons that were also damaged by airstrikes, according to human rights groups and relatives of prisoners. Families like the Asadollahis also feared that the regime would use the U.S.-Israeli assault as a pretext to abuse or kill their loved ones under the cover of war. “Prisoners are in real danger of being systematically executed in this darkness,” Hadi Ghaemi, director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told me. In March, a group of inmates were shot and killed by guards at a prison in Sistan-Baluchistan, a poor province in southeastern Iran, after protesting against conditions in their neighborhoods. That same month, in the city of Qom, Iranian authorities hanged three men accused of killing police officers during nationwide protests. These executions “crossed a critical threshold”, according to a United Nations press release, which emphasizes that these are the first Iranians hanged in connection with the demonstrations. “We fear they will not be the last,” the statement said.
The Islamic Republic also doubled down on propaganda and enlisted its supporters — including soldiers, their families and children as young as 12 — to go out and “occupy the enemy within, so that they have no chance to mobilize,” Ghaemi said. “They tell their base that they are waging two wars: one against foreign aggression, and the other at home, against protesters in the streets.” In a recent television interview, Iran’s police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, warned that “from now on, if anyone acts at the behest of the enemy, we will no longer consider them protesters or anything like that.” We will consider him the enemy.” Shortly after, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared that any future protests would suffer an “even bigger blow” than before. Ghaemi said this language was reminiscent of the propaganda that helped fuel and justify other historical atrocities, such as the massacres in Myanmar or Rwanda. “The regime is making it clear that any dissident, protester or anyone else who is not with it will soon face its wrath,” he said. “It’s deeply worrying.”
