Iran’s Islamic Republic has executed at least 28 political prisoners in the past 46 days, a pace of state killing without modern precedent outside the mass purges of the 1980s. The condemned include 13 detainees seized during the nationwide protests that erupted between 2025 and 2026, and their deaths mark a deliberate shift in the regime’s use of capital punishment. Where Tehran once executed thousands each year largely for drug offences, the current wave is overwhelmingly political: more than 70% of those put to death since the outbreak of hostilities with the United States have been charged with offences such as moharebeh (waging war against God), espionage, or cooperation with a foreign enemy. The executions are not a by-product of war; they are a weapon of it.

Viewed from Washington, human rights organisations have described the campaign as a calculated strategy to crush dissent while international attention is fixed on the battlefield. The case of Erfan Kiani, a 22-year-old executed on 25 April, has become emblematic. State television broadcast his forced confession – a practice condemned by 900 Iranian activists last year as a flagrant violation of due process – in which he admitted to blocking streets with a knife during the January 2025 protests. Kiani’s lawyer was appointed by the court, not chosen by his client, and independent access to his case file was denied. Three other men, aged between 21 and unknown, were hanged on the same weekend. Among them was Mohammad Reza Miri, only 21 years old.

Analysts in London note that the regime is deploying what human rights monitors term “therapeutic executions” – a Persian neologism capturing the idea that killing political opponents serves as a language of power, not of justice. This language has deep roots. From the mass executions of the 1980s, when thousands of political prisoners were summarily hanged, through the crackdown after the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, to the present, the cycle has never broken. What has changed is the pretext: war provides both a justification for speed and a cloak of impunity. The Tehran judiciary has rushed cases through revolutionary courts and secured final approval from the Supreme Court, whose presiding judge, Ghasem Mozinani, has confirmed death sentences for three more detainees – Mohammad Reza Tabari, Dr Mohammad Reza Abdollahpour, and Amir Mohammad Zare – all held in Evin’s satellite prison while denied access to lawyers of their choice.

Forward-looking analysis suggests that the pace of executions may intensify if the war drags on or if ceasefire talks emerge. The regime has historically used moments of diplomatic truce to settle internal scores, as observed during the 2015 nuclear negotiations. Yet this strategy carries risk. Each extrajudicial death further erodes the regime’s legitimacy among its own population and reinforces international isolation. For now, however, the noose remains the Republic’s most reliable instrument of control – and it is being deployed with a ruthlessness that leaves little room for doubt about Tehran’s priorities in wartime.