By Emran | 2024-12-05

Iranian activists have engaged in desperate measures to expose the abuses they have suffered in the regime's prisons, eliciting an outpouring of sympathy from ordinary Iranians on social media.

The Iranian regime, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their proxies like Hizbullah systematically employ brutal tactics to suppress dissent and advance their destabilizing regional agenda.

Just before his November 14 suicide, veteran activist Kianoosh Sanjari, who had been imprisoned nine times and spent nine months in solitary confinement, issued an ultimatum demanding the release of four political prisoners.

He was advocating for Fatemeh Sepehri, Nasreen Shakarami -- whose teenage daughter was killed during the 2022 protests, civil rights activist Arsham Rezaei and rapper Toomaj Salehi.

Salehi was released December 1 after 753 days for using his music to support women's and human rights in the Islamic Republic.

"No one should be imprisoned for expressing their opinions," Sanjari wrote on X before his death. "Protest is the right of every Iranian citizen."

"Years of interrogations, unjust detention, torture & exile haunted him as his oppressors remain unpunished," Amnesty Iran said in a post mourning Sanjari.

"His death is our collective grief & galvanizes our calls for justice."

Yet abuses have continued, with civil rights activist Hossein Ronaghi reporting that security forces sexually assaulted him after arresting him during a protest of Sanjari's death.

In response, Ronaghi staged a protest with his lips sewn shut outside Tehran's Evin Prison.

Systematic oppression

The Iranian regime uses every means of pressure to intensify prisoners' suffering and to frighten everyone who stands against it, Tehran-based human rights activist Farhad told Pishtaz.

"Political prisoners who raised their voices in defense of the Iranian people are stripped of all human rights in the prisons of the Islamic Republic," said Farhad, who uses just one name.

"Many of these innocent political prisoners have been executed, and many others are awaiting execution," he said. "The regime's prisons have turned into slaughterhouses for the innocent."

At least 570 prisoners have been put to death this year, per Iran Human Rights.

"Young Iranian men and women who have raised their voices for freedom and liberation from oppression and tyranny are met with execution, torture and sexual violence as the regime seeks to silence them," Farhad said.

The regime's security agencies aim to silence journalists "by imprisoning and torturing them in detention," said Javad, a journalist from Khorasan Razavi province, describing a systematic campaign of intimidating the press.

"The Islamic Republic reacts harshly to even the smallest criticism," he said.

"The regime's prisons are filled with Iran's intellectual and freedom-seeking youth," he told Pishtaz. "The regime's machinery of oppression and violence inflicts the worst forms of abuse upon them."