Iranian government turns to internal crackdown with arrests, executions

The Iranian authorities pivot a cease-fire with Israel to intensify a repression of internal security across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, in particular in the Kurdish region carried out, according to officials and activists.

In the days following the air strikes of Israel from June 13, Iranian security forces launched a generalized generation campaign accompanied by an intensified street presence based on control points, sources said in CBC and Reuters.

A man in Tehran, who answered a CBC News call via WhatsApp but did not provide his name, said on Wednesday that security agents stop people at pop-up checkpoints in the city and asked them to show their phones and open their messaging applications.

“You will only need one tweet or a social network publication to arrest if the content is considered sensitive by the state,” he said.

Another man told CBC that he felt “a deep feeling of fear” that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime have assured their survival and turn their anger inside as they did in the 1980s, with repression on their own people and their mass executions.

Some in Israel and exile opposition groups had hoped that the military campaign, which targeted the revolutionary guards and the internal security forces as well as the nuclear sites, would arouse a mass uprising and the reversal of the Islamic Republic.

But Alam Saleh, speaking with CBC de Tehran on Wednesday, said that he knew many Iranians who criticized the regime and had changed the tone in recent days, now rallying around the flag in the face of what they consider as an unlike and unjustified war.

“What was the point, what is Israel and the United States achieved, in the bombing of Iran for 12 days?” Saleh said.

“The only thing they have probably done is to make Iran never trust these two countries again.”

There has not yet been a sign of important protests against the authorities.

However, a senior Iranian security official and two other senior officials informed internal security issues said that the authorities were focused on the threat of possible internal disorders, especially in Kurdish areas.

The paramilitary units of the revolutionary guard and Basij were put on alert and internal security was now the main objective, said the senior security official.

The official said that the authorities were worried about Israeli agents, ethnic separatists and the organization of the Mujahideen of Iran, an exiled opposition group which has already organized attacks within Iran.

The country’s activists are based low.

“We are extremely cautious at the moment, because there is a real concern that the regime could use this situation as a pretext,” a rights activist in Tehran told Reuters, who was imprisoned during mass demonstrations in 2022.

The activist said he knew dozens of people who had been summoned by the authorities and were arrested or warned against any expression of dissent.

Kurdish groups say they are targeted

The Iranian rights group said on Monday that it had recorded arrests of 705 people on political or security accusations since the start of the war.

Many people arrested have been accused of espionage for Israel, RNA said.

The Iranian state media reported that three had been executed on Tuesday in Urmia, near the Turkish border, and the Iranian Kurdish rights Hangaw said they were all Kurds.

Iran’s foreign and interior ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

One of the informed officials of security said that troops had been deployed at the borders of Pakistan, Iraq and Azerbaijan to stop infiltration by what the official called the terrorists.

The other official informed of security recognized that hundreds had been arrested.

The Kurdish and Baluch Muslim and Baluch minorities, for most Iran, have long been a source of opposition to the Islamic Republic, thwarting the domination of the Persian -speaking Shiite government in Tehran.

The three main Iranian Kurdish separatist factions based in Iraqi Kurdistan said that some of their activists and combatants had been arrested and described by military and security movements generalized by the Iranian authorities.

Ribaz Khalili of the Iranian Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDPI) said that the guards of the guards of revolutionaries had been deployed in schools in the Iranian Kurdish provinces within three days of the strikes of Israel and went to the house for suspects and weapons.

The guards had also taken protective measures, evacuating an industrial area near their barracks and closing the main roads for their own use to bring reinforcements to Kermanshah and Sanandaj, two large cities in the Kurdish region.

A framework of the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (Pjak), which gave it war name From Fatma Ahmed, said the party had counted more than 500 members of the opposition detained in the Kurdish provinces since the start of air strikes.

Ahmed and a Kurdish Komala party official, who spoke under the cover of anonymity, both described control points set up in the Kurdish areas with physical research of people as well as checks of their phones and documents.