An Iranian revolutionary court has sentenced one twin sister to death and the other to 36 years in prison for joining anti-regime protests, part of a broader crackdown that has already produced more than 900 documented executions this year alone.
Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were 19 years old when masked men dragged them from their beds in the middle of the night, placed bags over their heads, and hauled them away. The sisters had joined anti-regime protests in Isfahan roughly a month earlier. Their mother, Marzieh Nourmohammadi, spent months searching courts, hospitals, and government offices trying to find out where her daughters had been taken. Four months passed before authorities allowed her to visit them at Dowlatabad Prison. She barely recognized them.
Now 20, the twins face sentences handed down by Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court. Taraneh received a death sentence plus an additional 11 years in prison. Romina received 36 years. Both are initial-stage verdicts, Fox News Digital reported, meaning they could still face appellate review, though the Iranian judiciary's track record offers little comfort.
The Rahimi sisters are not isolated cases. They are two of 16 defendants prosecuted in what human rights monitors call the "Isfahan Shohada Square" case. Ten of those 16 defendants received death sentences. Collectively, the group was handed 256 years in prison.
The family's U.S.-based cousin, Masoud Nourmohammadi, told The Guardian that when their mother finally saw the twins at Dowlatabad Prison, both had badly swollen and bruised faces, injuries to their elbows, hands, and feet, and significant hair loss from guards pulling them by their hair. He said the family learned the sisters had been held in solitary confinement.
The allegations go further. Nourmohammadi told The Guardian that Taraneh was threatened with the rape of her sister Romina in front of her unless she signed a confession. Radio Farda separately cited Nourmohammadi describing physical and psychological abuse and forced confessions. The Hana Human Rights Organization told Fox News Digital it has verified the torture allegations against the sisters.
Taraneh herself addressed the court directly, telling judges that admissions attributed to her had been obtained through torture.
She was not the only defendant to make that claim. Co-defendant Ahmadreza Saeidi told judges during the hearing that the investigating judge personally used an electric stun gun on his neck and genitals. Defense lawyers in the case complained they had not been given access to substantial portions of the case file or adequate time to examine evidence before trial. Nourmohammadi, the twins' mother, was not permitted to attend.
The twins' case sits inside a much larger pattern. The Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran has documented 901 executions during the first seven months of 2026. Fifty-six of those were carried out on political or national-security charges.
The regime's willingness to execute protesters in public view has not diminished. On Tuesday, authorities hanged Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi in Isfahan's Shahid Alikhani Square, the same location where he had joined anti-government demonstrations months earlier.
While the regime wages this campaign at home, it has simultaneously faced military confrontations in the Strait of Hormuz and sustained economic pressure from the United States. Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital the two fronts are connected.
Ben Taleblu argued that Iran's external losses only intensify the domestic violence:
"We saw this trend in the aftermath of the 12-day war as well. Lose a war abroad, come home and pretend like you're the victor."
He framed the crackdown not as a reaction to any single protest movement but as a permanent feature of the Islamic Republic's governance:
"Simply here, the Islamic Republic is continuing the longest war it's ever fought, which is the 47-year war against the Iranian people."
The regime's targets extend well beyond street protesters. Seyed Ahmad Seyedabdollahi, a 32-year-old psychologist, posted an English-language video on January 4 appealing directly to President Donald Trump to support Iranian protesters. Ten days later, he was arrested.
Seyedabdollahi was sentenced to seven months in prison, barred from government and public services for five years, and had his professional license revoked. He has been held at Borujen Prison since July 7. On August 9, the Hana Human Rights Organization reported that authorities had opened a second case against him on a charge of "propaganda against the system of the Islamic Republic", a catch-all offense the regime uses to criminalize speech it cannot tolerate.
The Trump administration has made economic pressure against Iran a centerpiece of its foreign policy, and Seyedabdollahi's case illustrates how Tehran responds to Iranians who welcome that pressure. His relatives say authorities pressured him to record a video insulting Trump and Americans and subjected him to solitary confinement and torture. They say the regime continued pressuring him to say he was a "foreign agent" paid by the U.S. government.
Wednesday marked four years since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman detained by Iran's morality police over what authorities described as "improper hijab." She died on September 16, 2022, three days after her arrest. Iranian authorities maintained she died of "natural causes." The United Nations said reports that she had been beaten in custody warranted an independent investigation.
Amini's death sparked the nationwide "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, the most significant challenge to the regime since the 2009 Green Movement. But Iran had already faced major protest waves in 2017, 18 and 2019. Each time, the regime's answer was the same: arrests, internet shutdowns, and escalating force.
Ben Taleblu described the regime's playbook in stark terms:
"The Islamic Republic is quite literally cracking skulls, cracking down on civil society, on dissidents, on protesters."
He pointed to internet shutdowns as a deliberate tool of suppression, noting that the regime cuts connectivity every time a major protest emerges. The logic, he argued, is straightforward: Tehran fears coordination among its own citizens and fears what happens when Iranians can communicate with the outside world.
As the broader U.S. strategy of economic pressure continues to tighten the vise on Tehran, the regime's domestic violence shows no sign of easing. If anything, the pace has accelerated. Nine hundred and one executions in seven months is not a crackdown. It is a policy.
Ben Taleblu's appeal was direct:
"We should not let the Iranian people continue to die in the darkness."
The Rahimi twins joined protests because they wanted a different country. The regime's answer was a death sentence for one and a lifetime behind bars for the other. That response tells you everything about who Tehran considers its real enemy, and it has never been a foreign power.
