Iran Uses the Ceasefire To Intensify an Internal Oppression Campaign

An underreported aspect of the two-week ceasefire that was extended indefinitely on Tuesday is that it allows the Islamic Republic, one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, to intensify a wholesale assault on Iranians who oppose it.Since the April 8 announcement that suspended Operation Epic Fury, regime enforcers have accelerated a campaign of hangings, torture, and rape, mostly targeting participants in the mass protest movement, but other regime opponents as well. According to some tallies, Iranian prisons now execute on an average three people a day. Women are in some cases being raped before being hanged. Foreign fighters are reportedly pouring in by the thousands to replenish the ranks of the regime’s enforcers, which had been targeted by America and Israel prior to the ceasefire. These foreign mercenaries include Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to several sources. Last week the Department of Treasury imposed new sanctions on Kata’ib Hizballa and other Iraqi militias that are closely tied to the Iranian regime. Hard numbers on the executions are hard to come by, as information from non-regime sources only trickles sporadically. A regime-imposed denial of access to the internet, which started on the February 28 launch of the war, is now the longest-ever state-sanctioned such blackout. “I can confirm Bita Hemmati, a protester from the January 2026 nationwide uprising, has been sentenced to death alongside her husband Mohammad Reza Majidi Asl, and now both of them are facing imminent execution,” an Iranian-American journalist and activist, Masih Alinejad, writes on X. “They are going to be hanged in the 21st-century for demanding freedom.” The couple are “among more than hundreds of Iranians sentenced to death after the January uprising but because of Internet blackout, we cannot reach out to their family members or their lawyers,” Ms. Alinejad adds.” We can barely get information from inside Iran.” In two days, January 8 and 9, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and members of the Basij internal enforcing group fired at and killed tens of thousands of unarmed regime opponents. The enforcers were reportedly joined by militias from Iraq that according to the Department of the Treasury are part and parcel of the Iranian regime. In accordance with Economic Fury, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions on commanders of the Iraq-based Kata’ib Hizballah, Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, Harakat Al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haqq. “We will not allow Iraq’s terrorist militias, backed by Iran, to threaten American lives or interests,” Secretary Scott Bessent said. “Within the past couple of weeks” more of these foreign enforcers, including Iraqi militia members, came in, a correspondent for Iran International, Negar Mojtahedi, tells the Sun. “They were there before, but it’s just more of them now. During the ceasefire the Iranians brought in many more.” With new recruits in tow, arrests of regime opponents and leaders of the January uprising are intensifying, as are the hangings. “It looks like they’re executing at least three or four people a day,” Ms. Mojtahedi says.President Trump highlighted on Tuesday the case of eight Iranian women who were on death row. He asked the regime to release them as a “great start to our negotiations.” In a Wednesday follow-up on TruthSocial posting, the president claimed that after his plea four of the women were released and four were sentenced to a year imprisonment. Mr. Trump’s intervention was “important,” Ms Alinejad writes, but “this is bigger than” the eight women. “Every innocent political prisoner facing execution must be released, immediately.” The focus on human rights in Iran brought along even some Democrats who are opposed to the war. “We need to be a nation that finds a way for the Iranian people to be free from a regime that is doing horrific things to its own people,” Senator Cory Booker said this week. Iranians, he added, have faced “generations of suppression of basic, fundamental human rights.”Meanwhile the United Nations frames the regime-imposed humanitarian crisis in Iran in the context of its universal opposition to the death penalty. “We have been very vocal on calling out and condemning the use of the death penalty, whether it’s in the Islamic Republic of Iran or in other countries,” the spokesman for Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun.

Iran Uses the Ceasefire To Intensify an Internal Oppression Campaign

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