Since US and Israeli forces struck Iran on 28 February 2026, over 4,000 people have been arrested on national security charges, according to a United Nations report published in late April. Many have been forcibly disappeared and subjected to torture. Political prisoners have been executed, and reports of forced "confessions" extracted under duress have become alarmingly routine.
Among those affected is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who was being denied medical treatment while in detention before authorities temporarily suspended her sentence and released her on bail in May. Her case, while ultimately drawing enough international attention to prompt action, laid bare a harsher reality: for every high-profile prisoner, there are countless others languishing in silence, invisible to the global media.
The crackdown did not begin with the war. In December 2025 and January 2026, nationwide demonstrations against the Iranian government were met with lethal force. Thousands of protesters are reported to have been killed by security forces. Activists say the war has since provided the regime with both the justification and the cover to dramatically intensify its internal repression.
Human rights groups draw a chilling historical parallel. In 1988, as the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close, the Islamic Republic carried out a mass execution of political prisoners across the country — a massacre documented by Human Rights Watch and long denied by Tehran. Survivors and analysts now fear that history is repeating itself, with a wartime climate once again being exploited to eliminate dissidents under the pretext of national security.
The organisation Freedom from Torture, which supported Parvaz after her escape to the United Kingdom, reports that in the past five years it has assisted more survivors from Iran than from any other country — a grim indicator of the scale and severity of abuses inside the Islamic Republic.
Activists stress that international attention is not merely symbolic. When the global media spotlight falls on individual prisoners in Iran, the regime has historically eased pressure — suggesting that sustained scrutiny can be a matter of life and death.
"By speaking their names, we help them stay alive," Parvaz wrote. "We must stand shoulder to shoulder with the Iranian people in their struggle for a life free from torture."
With the war reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, human rights advocates warn that the international community faces a stark choice: maintain pressure on Tehran over its internal abuses, or allow the chaos of conflict to bury the stories of those suffering behind its walls.