Tehran — August 27, 2025
Across the world, cranes lift steel and build skylines. In Iran, they lift human bodies. What elsewhere is a tool of progress becomes in Tehran a symbol of death, as executions are carried out with mechanical precision.
Human rights groups warn that Iran is breaking execution records unseen in a decade. Nearly 200 people were put to death in a single month this year — 21 of them women. Three executions were staged in public squares, with children forced to witness the spectacle.
The United Nations reported more than 900 executions in 2024. If current trends continue, this year will surpass that grim tally. Officials cite crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, or sexual assault. But rights defenders, including Amnesty International, stress that many verdicts come after sham trials, coerced confessions, and violations of international law.
Executions have surged alongside waves of protests, suggesting the death penalty is not only punishment but a weapon of political control. To silence dissent, the regime relies on fear — but fear also fuels rage. As observers note, public anger is like a flood: no wall or dam can hold it forever.
The cruelty is not new. In the 1980s, mass executions under clerical rule earned Ibrahim Raisi the nickname “The Butcher.” Decades later, as president, Raisi presided over another surge in death sentences until his death in a helicopter crash in 2024. The machinery he left behind, however, runs on.
Adding insult to injury, Amnesty International revealed that Tehran authorities have begun bulldozing the graves of executed political prisoners from the 1980s, even paving parts of Behesht Zahra cemetery into bus stops — erasing the evidence of state crimes.
Today’s record pace of executions raises a haunting question: if Iran buries the past beneath asphalt, how will it conceal the tragedies of the present?
Bizim.Media
