Stop Executions

A Conversation About Living in the Time of Executions, 

With memories and images

"After finishing this conversation and receiving the text to review, I thought a lot about what to call it.

To me, executions are like a contagious disease. Just as we speak of “the years of cholera” or “the time of the plague,” we could call our own era the time of executions, at least until the death penalty is abolished. 

This conversation was long and full of pain. It will probably continue in the future." 

- Golnoosh

The issue of executions in Iran is not an abstract political debate. It is a living presence, a constant shadow that seeps into people’s daily lives, their language, their memory, and even their imagination, often without them realizing it. In some cities, there are even places named after it, like "Execution Square" in Mashhad.

For anyone who grew up under the Islamic Republic, state violence is not distant or abstract. It is part of the daily flow of life, as ordinary and unavoidable as changes in the weather. Those who remember the 1979 revolution probably also remember the images of public executions, the “revolutionary” ones. But the decades after were no better. Executions have always stayed continuous, unending.

To understand the effects of executions, we spoke with someone for whom it has been a lifelong concern, Golnoosh.

* * *

Marjane Satrapi, the author of the graphic novel Persepolis, tells the story of her uncle Anoosh, a man who used to visit their home and then one day vanished. Later, she found out he had been executed. Golnoosh’s story begins in almost the same way.

“There was a young man who used to come to our house sometimes, kind and familiar. Then one day he just stopped coming. Later we found out he had been executed. Nobody said much, but I knew he was gone. I still can’t get his image out of my mind. I was a child then, but I always pictured his head separated from his body.”

Almost every family, every generation, every community in Iran has somehow been touched by execution.

If it has not happened to a relative, then to a friend, a neighbor, a classmate, or maybe the construction worker who once came to fix the roof.

“Now it feels like execution is something I have seen, and I can’t pretend I haven’t.” 

When confronted by something painful, you can turn away from it or act like it is not there. But Golnoosh could not look away.

As a teenager, she once met a quiet girl with heavy makeup at a party. Someone whispered that both of the girl’s parents had been executed in the '80s.

“I was still a kid, but I kept wondering, what does life look like for a child after both parents are executed?”

Golnoosh’s experience is like a mirror for a generation that slowly realized execution is not just an event, but part of the structure of the system itself, like military parades, school uniforms, or the morning call to prayer.

For her, this understanding deepened after the executions of two men following the 2009 Green Movement protests, accused of being monarchists.

Then came other names, carrying both grief and anger: Farzad Kamangar, Shirin Alam-Houli, Zanyar and his brother, Loghman Moradi, Navid Afkari, Reyhaneh Jabbari, Atefeh, Delara, Shahla...

“I remember them all. Each time, groups of people, at least online, tried collectively to save them. And each time, we failed. Every execution brought back a wave of shared despair.”

When the Women, Life, Freedom movement began after Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s death-in-custody, Golnoosh felt the nightmare returning.

“It was like I had been waiting for it. When they executed Mohsen Shekari and Majidreza Rahnavard, I knew it had begun again.”

She says the regime has always used executions as a language of threat.

“Every time people protest, public executions increase. Execution means warning. Back then [at the time of the revolution], the headlines proudly said: ‘Members of SAVAK shot by firing squad.’ It was never about justice, it was about fear and showing power. The execution of Farrokhroo Parsa, a woman, doctor, and minister, in 1980, was deeply symbolic: a warning, and a display of what this system stands for, a fight against gender, identity, modernity, equality, and education.”

“And that has not changed. Even now, they choose who and when to execute as a show of power, to intimidate specific groups. And of course, what we see is only what the regime wants us to see. The rest, the hidden part, may or may not reach us through witnesses. Many people disappear in silence and anonymity.”

Most executions in Iran are for drug-related charges, about half of them. The rest are for murder, political, religious, or so-called “security” crimes. The highest numbers are among the Baluch, the most disadvantaged and marginalized population in Iran. Many of the drug-related executions are also rooted in poverty, where someone takes the blame for another’s crime in exchange for money to feed their family or to protect someone higher up.

In one case, a father and son were executed for drug charges in southern Iran, twenty years apart, the clearest symbol that executions do not stop crime or prevent anything.

International research has shown that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent for committing violent crimes.

So many images remain, like that of a teenage boy sentenced to death for “sodomy,” who, just minutes before his execution, rested his head innocently on his executioner’s shoulder.

Every execution releases poison into the air. Its violence spreads like a toxin, touching the guards, the hangmen, the families, the onlookers.

Each of them carries a fragment of that violence inside, a mark that will never truly fade.

"I often think what would happen if news agencies had to write exactly what happens during every single execution. To describe that a living person, someone who breathed and had cellmates, was taken away from the others, led to solitary confinement, and then brought by several guards to the gallows. 

To say whether they blindfolded and handcuffed them or just handcuffed them, and that someone slipped the rope around their neck.

To write that each time, someone has to kick the stool from under their feet, and that the rope snaps the bones in their neck."

Recently someone told me that saying no to the death penalty is just a kind of reformism. But execution is not just a policy, it is one of the main pillars of this regime. Without executions and gender discrimination, what would the Islamic Republic even be?

The Islamic Republic will not stop executing because someone politely asks it to. But when people take away its control over the story, when they tell what happens, killing becomes harder.

For months we knew that two men, Mehdi Hassani and Behrouz Ehsani, had been sentenced to death for political reasons.

But when Mehdi’s daughter, Maryam Hassani, publicly announced that her father and Mr. Ehsani had been taken to solitary, the news spread quickly across social media. Prisoners protested inside, and people outside filled the online space with outrage, and as a result, the two were returned to their ward.

It took the authorities eight months, under strange and costly conditions, to isolate them again, move them to different wards, and finally prepare for their executions.

Eight months.

The executions were deeply heartbreaking. None of us will forget Maryam Hassani’s voice and face when she confirmed her father’s death. But those eight months were also a kind of collective act, born from people’s unity and persistence.

Maryam later spoke about it in an interview with activist Fariba Balouch.

When it came to the young men from Isfahan, people went to the prison gates for two or three nights. But on the final night, a weekend night, people did not go, and the executions went ahead.

"You asked why, when a violent crime happens, some people rush to comment, “Execute them immediately.”

I think part of it comes from years of manipulative education, from being taught that justice means execution, that facing violence must involve killing in return. Even the laws are designed that way, as if execution is the only possible punishment, placing the emotional burden entirely on the victim’s family."

These are not two separate societies.

We have to remember what is allowed and what is costly, what the system rewards, and what it fears. 

This is a bitter and exhausting conversation. Living consciously in an era of executions comes with a price.

"I understand that price, and I pay it, but I will not look away. It is the way I have lived for years, and a promise I have made in my heart, to the six Arab prisoners, and to Saman Mohammadi. Each time someone whose name I already know is executed, I mourn.

Over time, I have learned to hold small private rituals for myself, ways to pass through the grief and return to daily life."

The six Arab men, Ali Majdam, Mohammadreza Moghadam, Moein Khanfari, Habib Daris, Adnan Ghabishavi, and Salem Mousavi, and Saman, were all killed just days before the World Day Against the Death Penalty.

"I still have not finished my mourning ritual for them. All these executions, this endless stream of death, is not normal."

Execution is never normal.

And we have to pay the cost of making sure it never becomes something ordinary.

To resist execution is to defend humanity, to refuse to look away, to speak their names, to mourn, and to remember.

So that one day, we may be able to see each other again.