Iran's Islamic Republic hanged two more political prisoners on Saturday, bringing the regime's latest wave of executions to at least six members of a banned opposition group in a matter of days. Abolhassan Montazer, a 66-year-old architect, and Vahid Baniamerian, a 33-year-old with a master's degree in management, were put to death after being convicted of membership in the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the New York Post reported.
Both men were arrested in January 2024, charged with "armed rebellion," and sentenced to death. State media labeled them a "terrorist team of the enemy." Four other members of the same opposition group were executed days earlier.
The hangings come as Tehran faces mounting pressure from within and without. The regime has leaned harder on the gallows as its grip on power weakens, and the numbers tell a grim story that the international community has been slow to confront.
Two days before Montazer and Baniamerian were killed, Iran hanged Amirhossein Hatami, an 18-year-old musician. Hatami had been arrested in Tehran during nationwide protests that erupted in January over the country's faltering economy. His execution drew fresh attention to the regime's willingness to target the youngest members of the opposition.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps moved aggressively to silence dissent when anti-regime protesters filled the streets of Tehran. The crackdown that followed has produced staggering casualty figures, though the exact toll depends on who is counting.
Iran's own state media confirmed 12 executions so far this year. But the Iranian human rights group Hengaw reported evidence of 160 hangings since January alone. The gap between the regime's official number and the independent count is not a rounding error. It is a measure of how much the clerical establishment wants hidden.
The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency put the broader death toll even higher, confirming more than 7,000 killings of protesters, with thousands more cases still under investigation. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran indicated the total could exceed 36,500 people.
Those figures, as reflected in Iran's own admissions about protest deaths, paint a picture of a government waging a sustained campaign against its own citizens.
The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran issued a statement framing the executions as an act of desperation by a weakening government. The group said:
"Driven by profound weakness and reeling from its weakening grasp on power following recent nationwide uprisings, the clerical establishment is desperately using the gallows to physically eliminate its organized opposition and terrorize a restless society."
The opposition group also warned that the killings would not achieve their intended purpose. In a second statement, the group declared:
"These brutal executions will not silence the opposition. Instead, they will only intensify the resolve of Iran's rebellious youth to overthrow the regime."
Amnesty International raised fears that more executions are planned in the weeks ahead, including of protesters arrested during January's mass demonstrations. The regime has shown no sign of slowing down.
Saturday's hangings fit a broader pattern that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations and Iranian dissidents alike. The execution of 23-year-old protester Mohammad Ghobadlou, a prisoner with a mental health condition, triggered a hunger strike by 61 female political prisoners inside Iran, Fox News reported. Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi announced the prison hunger strike, which drew international support from journalists, lawyers, former prisoners, artists, and Iranians in the diaspora.
Ghobadlou's lawyer said he received only 12 hours' notice before the execution was carried out, and argued there was no legal basis for it. The Iranian Supreme Court had previously overturned Ghobadlou's death sentence and ordered a retrial, a retrial that never happened.
Political prisoners at Evin Prison said "the news of the execution of Iranian youth has sparked a wave of anger and protest in society." Activist Masih Alinejad wrote on X that the hunger strike was "an act of solidarity with 61 female political prisoners in Iran."
The through-line is clear. The regime arrests dissidents, labels them terrorists, rushes them through opaque courts, and carries out sentences before the outside world can react. When international bodies overturn the verdicts, Tehran ignores them.
The scale of Iran's execution campaign should be impossible to ignore. A 66-year-old architect. A 33-year-old graduate student. An 18-year-old musician. These are not battlefield combatants. They are citizens whose government decided they had no right to live because they opposed it.
Yet the international response has been muted, and the domestic political conversation in the United States has often treated Iran's internal brutality as an afterthought. Some Democratic officials have gone out of their way to avoid confronting Tehran's record when it proved politically inconvenient.
The contrast with the current administration's posture is worth noting. The Trump White House has pursued a harder line on Iran, a campaign that even some liberal commentators have acknowledged is producing results. Whether maximum pressure translates into fewer hangings in Iranian prisons remains an open question, but the alternative, years of diplomatic deference, plainly did not.
Meanwhile, the violence inside Iran extends well beyond the execution chamber. Militia groups aligned with the regime have opened fire on civilians in the streets, turning protest into a death sentence with or without a courtroom.
State media says 12 executions this year. Independent monitors say 160 hangings since January. Human rights investigators say more than 7,000 protesters killed. The UN rapporteur says the death toll could top 36,500.
Those numbers represent real people, architects, students, musicians, mothers, fathers. The regime calls them terrorists. The rest of the world can see what they actually are: citizens who dared to speak.
Montazer and Baniamerian spent more than a year in custody before the regime hanged them. Hatami was barely old enough to vote. None of them received the kind of transparent legal process that any civilized government would consider a minimum standard.
Amnesty International's warning about more planned executions means the next round of hangings could come within weeks. The regime has every incentive to move fast, before international attention catches up.
A government that has to hang architects and teenagers to stay in power is not projecting strength. It is advertising its own fragility, and daring the world to notice.
