The IG caption reads: “This mural was created today (May 5) in Cali, Colombia. The portrait is of the political prisoner Mehran Raouf (Raoof), a British-Iranian citizen and workers' rights activist who is arbitrarily detained in Evin Prison in Tehran. Next to him, a gallows on fire repudiates the death sentences of political prisoners in Iran. The mural puts forward the slogans: Free Iran's political prisoners now! Stop the execution and oppression of the women fighters!”
On this wall (and in other Colombian cities and on campuses) in a distant continent and speaking a different language, artists and youth mobilized by revolutionaries have been putting the faces and names of Iranian political prisoners in front of the ordinary people and struggling for them to take up this fight as their own. This has been consistently done in the internationalist spirit of “the struggle of the people of Iran is our struggle.”
In a moment when Iran and the Middle East in general concentrate a maelstrom of contradictions on a world scale, intensified and imperiled by an increasing surge of executions in Iran, including of political prisoners and dissidents, it is all the more beautiful and precious to see this inspiring spirit in vibrant, living color.
Repression of Anti-Execution Activists Intensifies; Police Murder Protester
Azim Heydari was standing outside the police station protesting the execution of his relative that morning, May 1. Police shot Azim dead on the spot, not even giving any excuse. Two days earlier, a large number of people in this town of Dezful, population more than 265,000 in southwestern Iran, had been protesting outside the prison gate, demanding a suspension of executions. They were fired upon by prison authorities.
For many years, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has concentrated an especially vicious repression and slander against family members of political prisoners, as well as people killed by security forces on the street. But this cold-blooded murder of an anti-execution protester for standing in front of a police station is a new leap in viciousness, exposing their fear that the protest against executions, as limited as they are currently, even by family members, may gain strength and ignite others to rise up against this atrocity.
Other examples of intensified repression show how the IRI fears even mild protest.
A poet and street vendor, Peyman Farahavar, 37, was sentenced to death allegedly for “rebellion” and “waging war against God” in Gilan province in northern Iran. While authorities claim Farahavar was involved in arson at a construction site, those close to him insist his interrogations focused almost exclusively on his writings. Before his arrest, he was working selling fruit alongside his brother to support himself and his 10-year-old son.
“Peyman always had environmental concerns. The Gilaki language was very important to him,” a source told IranWire. “His identity and the language of his people were important to him - especially the forgotten people, the poor, and the suffering villagers.... In short, he grew to hate this government because of their oppression of the people. He spoke very harshly and stood against them.”
Burn The Cage reported that four protesters who had staged a sit-in against the death sentences in the “Ekbatan Boys” case were sentenced to a total of 9 years in prison, 184 lashes and a large fine. The “Ekbatan Boys” are six young protesters from Ekbatan, the huge housing project in Tehran where protests took place nightly during the 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising. They were vindictively convicted, without evidence, in the death of a plainclothes spy during one protest.
In another example, Zartosht Ahmadi, a political prisoner in Ghezel Hesar Prison, was moved to solitary confinement as a punishment for his protests against death sentences and the distribution of related statements and recordings. A family source told IranWire, “Ahmadi declared he will stand for human rights until his last breath, despite punishments like solitary confinement.” In July 2024, prison officials filed charges that resulted in an additional one-year prison sentence and two years of internal exile, preventing his release after serving five years on previous charges.
“To Break the Gallows, the Voice of Each Is Not Enough”
Political prisoner Golrokh Iraee, in the women’s ward of Evin Prison, has been smuggling out letters to be posted on her social media, emphasizing the need for many more people to put their bodies on the line to stop the executions. On May 5, the conclusion of her letter said:
Voice has a strange power to imagine dreams and nightmares. But to break the gallows, the voice of each other is not enough. Maybe it was necessary that after hearing each other's voice, after hearing the voice of Mohsen's mother, the voice of Mohammad's mother, or the voice of Agha Mashallah Karami3, we would tie our shoelaces and slam the doors of the house together and go to [protest at] the prison door.
These escalations in repression are taking place in a nightmarish increase in executions, even outpacing 2024, when it is estimated conservatively that the regime executed 900-1000 people. In April, according to Iran Human Rights, out of at least 110 executions in April alone (!!), only two were announced by official media. The number of executions in the first four months of 2025 has increased by 75% compared to the first four months of last year.
Commemorating the Fallen to Shine a Light for the Future of Humanity
On May 6, the women’s ward of Evin Prison was the site of a solemn and inspiring commemoration in memory of five political prisoners who were hanged in secret at Evin Prison 15 years ago. It was in conjunction with the “Tuesday No To Execution” prisoner hunger strike, now in its 67th week and in 41 prisons spread across Iran.
Four of them were of the Kurdish oppressed nationality, accused of membership in a banned Kurdish political party. All had been tortured, and denied lawyers and family visits. Their “trial” was over in less than 10 minutes. To this day their burial place is unknown. These horrific details are not much different from those of tens of thousands of prisoners, political and general, who have been killed before them and since. But this commemoration especially uplifts the undaunted stand they took as they faced death.
In particular, one of those executed was Farzad Kamangar, who taught in the Kurdish countryside, wrote poetic and joyful notes to his students from prison, his poems smuggled out one by one. Kamangar read to his students from, and followed the example of, the Marxist-Leninist teacher and writer Saman Behrangi, who was drowned at age 29, apparently by agents of the late Shah of Iran, the dictator imposed by a CIA coup in 1953. Kamangar symbolizes the “chain of resistance” stretching back to those who resisted and revolted against the Shah and forward to those resisting the Islamic Republic. Read an excerpt of one of Kamangar’s letters in the accompanying piece.
Golrokh Iraee, a political prisoner in Evin women’s ward, in one of these smuggled posts, managed to get the following account out.
The memorial began in the prison courtyard with the reading of excerpts from Farzad Kamangar's enduring letters, words which, after many years, still speak of hope, kindness, resistance, and love for the people. Afterwards, the prisoners read the biography and narrative of the struggles of each of the victims of May 9 to the audience, which reveal human dignity in the face of the repressive machine… Then, stories were read by Shirin Alam Holi's former fellow prisoners, vivid and human stories that painted a picture of a woman who shined a light in the heart of darkness.2
The ceremony concluded with a collective singing of the enduring anthem “Purple Blood”… This memorial, while paying tribute to the fallen, was an opportunity to remind ourselves that: The path to freedom cannot be blocked.
These prisoners who gave their lives managed to share with others a sense of broadmindedness that models a universal lesson, not only for these heroic women in Evin and others held in Iran’s theocratic fascist dungeon and society, but for all people globally at a crossroads moment in history in which heroic sacrifices will be required, which have the potential of ushering in a brighter future.
IEC Q&A
Some well meaning people around the IEC have asked us why they should care about freeing Iran’s political prisoners in the face of U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, and a fascist regime rises in the U.S. Here’s our short answer: Through our updates, we have brought out the examples of the courageous, implacable resistance of Iran’s prisoners and dissidents that holds meaning for everyone in the world today who hates injustices and oppression. They are not just victims as horrible as that is—they are heroes to be emulated. The IEC has kept a letter by nine political prisoners on our website since it was issued in November 2023 for good reason. It is clarion call for all of us to take responsibility for the lives of others in the world, for the common good bigger than just ourselves:
But indifference towards the war and genocide in Palestine—and perhaps wishing for a military attack on Iran—is far more widespread than just among these extremist forces. Our message is this:
We simply cannot cover over this complex and unequal war being waged against the Palestinian people, with the justification of our resentment against the government [of Iran] and its destructive policies and wars [in the region]. We cannot close our eyes to what is genocide, in the full sense of the word: “the intention to completely or partially annihilate a national, an ethnic, a racial or a religious group, simply because of their very nature.” Nor can it get glossed over by the media-monopoly.
The dichotomy presented to us—Hamas or Israel, military intervention or the current situation going on and on—offer only a choice between bad and worse. As long as we look only at options the rulers give us, rather than creating our own way forward, the result can only be bad or worse.
Mehran Raouf was one of the nine brave political prisoners who signed this letter that speaks for millions and urgently: in the interest of humanity, bring forward another way rather than choosing between oppressors. Listen and act.
****
“Hello, Class”, by Farzad Kamangar
Farzad composed this letter to his students the day after his death sentence was decreed. It was translated from Farsi for barricadejournal.org by Tyler Fisher and Haidar Khezri.
Hello, class.
My heart constricts from missing every one of you. Here in prison I compose the poem of life’s eternal song, day and night, with sweet recollections and dreams of you…when we returned, exhausted from all the excitement of our games in the fields (an “official school field trip,” we called it, of course)…
I wish we could again furtively practice our Kurdish alphabet, far from the principal’s stern eye, and compose poems for each other in our mother tongue, and sing and dance hand in hand, and dance and dance…
I wish I could again join in the “Ring-around-the-Uncle” game, leading the chants of the first-grade girls, you girls who, years later, at the corner of a page in your diary will write: “I wish I wasn’t born a girl.”… you would not be forced to bid farewell to school for the last time at age thirteen, with eyes full of tears and regret, under the white veil of becoming a woman, and would not experience, with every fiber of your being, the bitter story of the second-class gender…
You sons of the land of nature and the Sun, I know you are no longer able to sit with your classmates, to read and laugh, because right after the tragedy of becoming a man, the grief of earning your daily bread will seize you by the collar. But remember not to turn your back on poetry, on song, on your lovers and your shared dreams. Teach your children to be heirs of poetry and rain, for their homeland, for their todays and their tomorrows.