Sometimes a single number hits you like a punch in the gut. Over one thousand people executed in less than nine months. Let that sink in for a second. In 2025, before the year has even ended, the Iranian state has already put more people to death than in any full year most of us can remember.
I’ve followed human rights stories for years, but this surge feels different – colder, more systematic, almost industrial in its efficiency. It isn’t random cruelty. It’s a calculated message written in blood and rope.
A Grim Milestone Nobody Wanted
The figures are brutal in their simplicity. From January 1 to the end of September 2025, at least 1,003 men and women have been hanged or shot by the state. That already surpasses the previous annual record set only last year, and we still have three months to go.
To put it in perspective: the last time the yearly count crossed a thousand was more than ten years ago. Since then, the numbers have climbed steadily, but 2025 has shattered every ceiling. Independent monitors believe the real total is probably higher – the regime doesn’t exactly publish transparent spreadsheets.
“The death penalty has become the Islamic Republic’s go-to instrument for instilling fear.”
– Senior human rights researcher, 2025
The Timeline That Should Worry Everyone
Let’s look at how we got here. After the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, the state promised harsh consequences. They delivered. Executions jumped almost 50 % the following year and kept climbing.
Then came the direct military exchanges with Israel in 2024 and 2025. Suddenly “national security” became the magic phrase that justified everything. People arrested years ago for protest-related charges were rushed to the gallows. New cases – sometimes decided in minutes-long trials – ended the same way.
- 2021 → roughly 330 executions
- 2022 → more than 580 (post-protest spike)
- 2023 → 834 recorded
- 2024 → 972 (previous record)
- 2025 → already 1,003 in nine months
That’s not a trend. That’s an avalanche.
Who Are the People on the Ropes?
The victims aren’t only – or even mostly – the political activists you might picture. The majority still fall under drug-related charges, a category the regime expanded aggressively in recent years. Possessing a few kilograms of methamphetamine can now carry a mandatory death sentence.
But the political cases are the ones that chill the spine. Protesters from 2022, dual nationals accused of espionage, members of ethnic minorities – especially Baloch and Kurdish citizens – are disproportionately represented on the execution lists.
In my experience reading these reports, one pattern always stands out: the poorer and more marginalized you are, the faster the system moves against you. Wealthy or well-connected defendants often get sentences commuted. Ordinary people do not.
At least 40 % of those executed this year come from minority communities that make up roughly 10 % of the total population.
The Machinery of Death
Iran’s judicial process for capital cases is a world away from what most Western readers imagine. Revolutionary courts, closed sessions, appointed lawyers who sometimes advise their clients to confess – the deck is stacked from day one.
Confessions extracted under torture are routinely broadcast on state television before the trial even begins. Appeals? Technically possible, but rarely successful. Once the Supreme Leader’s office signs off – or simply stays silent – the sentence is carried out within days, sometimes hours.
And the method hasn’t changed much since the 1980s: hanging, often from construction cranes in public squares or inside prison courtyards. Families are informed after the fact, if at all.
Why Now? Fear Is the Real Currency
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is how openly the state admits what it’s doing. Officials have described the execution surge as necessary to “maintain security and calm society.” In plain language: we will kill enough people until the rest of you shut up.
After the humiliation of direct strikes on Iranian soil and the loss of key proxy leaders, the regime appears desperate to project strength at home. When your missiles can’t stop Israeli jets, you hang a few dozen drug couriers and call it restoring deterrence.
It’s a strategy as old as tyranny itself – when external power wanes, internal terror fills the gap.
The International Silence That Enables It
European governments issue statements. The UN holds urgent sessions. Sanctions are debated. But the cranes keep rising at dawn.
Oil still flows. Diplomatic channels remain open “to avoid escalation.” And every time a European leader sits down with his Iranian counterpart to discuss regional stability, another anonymous prisoner somewhere in Zahedan or Urmia gets a black hood pulled over his head.
I’ve never understood the moral calculus that decides some atrocities are worth condemning loudly while others get a polite footnote.
What the Numbers Don’t Capture
Statistics are clean. Lives are messy.
Behind every tally mark is a mother who will never hear her son’s voice again. A child who watched state television announce her father’s execution as “justice served.” Entire communities living in terror because they speak the wrong language or pray the wrong way.
The regime wants us to see only numbers. That’s how authoritarian systems survive – by reducing human beings to entries on a ledger.
I started this piece with a number. I’ll end with a question that keeps me awake some nights: how many more cranes will they need to build before the rest of the world decides that “stability” purchased with thousands of broken necks is no stability at all?
Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that the rope eventually runs out – either for the condemned, or for those who tied the knot.
