Inside Iran's crackdown at home: Women arrested, protesters executed amid the war

Iran's Islamic Republic has long used periods of external conflict to tighten its grip internally. The ongoing war with the United States and Israel, which began in February 2026, is no exception. Human rights organisations monitoring Iran report that the pace of arrests, trials, and executions of political prisoners, protesters, and dissidents has sharply accelerated since the conflict began — with the war providing the regime a convenient justification for emergency security measures that bypass even Iran's own limited judicial procedures.

Iran's security forces have launched what activists describe as a ‘planned intensification’ of repression against women. Mass arrests of women who removed their hijabs in public — a form of protest that surged during the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising — have resumed at scale. Reports from inside Iran describe women being detained at checkpoints, dragged from cars, and in some cases taken from their homes at night. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) documented hundreds of such arrests in the weeks following the February 2026 military escalation.

The most alarming development is the execution of individuals who were arrested during the January 2026 nationwide uprising that erupted in the weeks before the US-Israel air campaign. Protesters condemn these executions as political killings dressed up as terrorism convictions. Iran's judiciary has moved with unusual speed, processing cases in closed sessions with state-appointed lawyers, and carrying out death sentences in prison facilities rather than public squares — a change from earlier practice designed to reduce visibility and international attention.

Families who have lost relatives to IRGC gunfire during protests, or whose children have been executed, are being systematically pressured to remain silent. Security forces have visited homes, confiscated phones, and threatened further arrests of surviving family members if they speak to journalists, foreign media, or human rights organisations. In several documented cases, families were told they could not hold public funerals or post mourning notices on social media without prior approval from local security authorities.

The January 2026 uprising was one of the largest waves of civil unrest in Iran since the 2019 November protests. Triggered by economic collapse, fuel shortages, and rage at government corruption, the protests spread from provincial cities to Tehran within days. The IRGC and Basij militia responded with live ammunition, killing dozens and arresting thousands. The uprising was still ongoing when the US-Israel air campaign began in February — and the regime has since used wartime powers to conduct mass trials of those arrested during that turbulent period.

Iran has imposed rolling internet blackouts in provinces with the highest levels of domestic unrest — including Kurdistan, Sistan-Baluchestan, and parts of Khuzestan. The blackouts, nominally justified as wartime security measures to prevent ‘enemy intelligence gathering,’ effectively blind the outside world to what is happening on the ground. Citizen journalists who managed to smuggle footage out of the country describe scenes of extraordinary fear — empty streets after dark, arbitrary checkpoints, and a pervasive atmosphere of surveillance that has silenced even private conversation.

International attention is almost entirely focused on the Strait of Hormuz, ceasefire negotiations, and oil prices. The human rights emergency unfolding inside Iran is receiving a fraction of the diplomatic and media attention it deserves. UN Special Rapporteurs have issued statements, and the NCRI continues to document cases, but with the global agenda dominated by energy security and war-or-peace calculations, the fate of Iran's political prisoners, its women, and its protest generation has been effectively deprioritised by the very governments that claim to champion human rights.