Iran executed an 18-year-old and a 23-year-old Afghan refugee by hanging on Sunday for opening their doors to demonstrators running from the regime's security forces, and ten more death sentences may follow.
Erfan Esfandiari, 18, and Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, 23, were among 59 men arrested during January protests at Shahid Alikhani Square in Isfahan. Twelve of those men received death sentences. On Sunday, the Islamic Republic carried out the first two, the New York Post reported, drawing on an account by Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad.
Neither man was accused of carrying a weapon. Neither was accused of killing anyone. Their offense, as Alinejad described it citing local reports: they sheltered protesters who were fleeing security forces and offered refuge inside their homes. The Iranian regime considered that enough to warrant death by hanging.
Alinejad, writing for The Free Press, laid out the case against Esfandiari in stark terms:
"Erfan Esfandiari... was his parents first child. He did not kill anyone. He did not carry a weapon. His crime, according to the Islamic Republic, was opening a door. Sheltering protesters who were running from security forces. That was enough to send him to the gallows."
Mohammadi was a 23-year-old Afghan refugee. The specific circumstances of his residency in Iran are unclear, but his alleged conduct mirrored Esfandiari's: he took in demonstrators fleeing government forces, per Alinejad's account. For that, the regime hanged him alongside an 18-year-old.
Iranian officials offered a different justification for the crackdown. They said four security force members were killed during the January protests in Isfahan. But no reporting in the available record connects those deaths to Esfandiari or Mohammadi individually. The regime arrested 59 men in connection with the protests, sentenced 12 to death, and executed the two who stood accused of nothing more than giving shelter.
Alinejad warned that the remaining ten men under death sentence may not have long. She reported that all twelve condemned prisoners were moved into quarantine the week before the executions, a step that typically precedes hangings in Iran's prison system.
Two have now been killed. Ten remain. Their names have not been publicly identified in the available reporting, and details about their individual charges, trials, or legal representation are absent from the record. What is known is the scale: 59 arrests from a single protest, 12 death sentences, and a regime that treats sheltering a fleeing neighbor as a capital offense.
President Trump shared Alinejad's social media post about the executions on Truth Social. The post did not include additional commentary from the president, and his own words on the matter were not quoted in reporting on the case.
The January demonstrations in Isfahan were part of the broader pattern of anti-regime protests that have erupted across Iran in recent years. The regime's response follows a familiar script: mass arrests, closed-door proceedings, and sentences designed to make examples of ordinary citizens. The message to the Iranian public is plain, help a protester, and the state will kill you for it.
Esfandiari was his parents' firstborn. He was 18. Mohammadi was a refugee who had already fled one country. Neither picked up a gun. Neither threw a punch at a security officer, at least not according to any charge made public. They opened their doors.
A government that executes teenagers for an act of basic human decency is not projecting strength. It is advertising the one thing it cannot survive: its own people choosing each other over the regime.
