The Islamic Republic has once again brought the gallows back into public squares and streets. The public execution of two detainees arrested during the January uprising is not merely the killing of two prisoners; it is a calculated display of state power designed to restore fear as a tool of public control. A regime that gunned down thousands in the streets during the January protests now seeks to turn those very streets into a stage for the public spectacle of death.
Street massacres, mass arrests, torture, security trials and public executions are all links in the same chain. They form a single strategy aimed at breaking society’s will and preventing the return of mass resistance.
The Islamic Republic knows that popular anger has not subsided. Poverty, soaring prices, unemployment, the collapse of living standards and the burden of war have only deepened the social conditions for revolt. Beneath the fear of war and the silence imposed by repression, the anger of workers, women, youth, pensioners, teachers, students and the families of those who were killed remains alive. That is why the Islamic capitalist regime has once again erected the gallows in the public square.
The Objective Is Not Simply to Kill – It Is to Manufacture Fear
For years, fearing organised workers’ movements and mass uprisings, the regime carried out most executions behind prison walls. Today, under the cover of war and militarisation, it has revived public executions as an instrument of terror.
A public execution is not simply the taking of a human life. The regime wants everyone to witness these gruesome scenes. It wants the city square to become not a place of assembly and protest, but a stage on which the state displays its power and punishes those who dare to resist.
The message of the gallows is unmistakable: anyone who returns to the streets, anyone who stands against poverty and dictatorship, may face bullets today and the noose tomorrow.
Yet this display of power is simultaneously an admission of fear. A government that does not fear its own people has no need to turn public squares into execution grounds.
The gallows are not a symbol of the strength of the Islamic Republic; they are a symbol of its fear of seeing the people return to the streets.
Foreign War Is the Cover for the Regime’s War Against Society
The Islamic Republic seeks to conceal domestic repression behind the smoke of war. It speaks of “wartime conditions,” “national security” and “fighting the enemy,” while filling prisons, accusing dissidents of espionage, handing down death sentences and hanging people in public squares.
For this regime, war is an opportunity to militarise society, suppress protest, impose silence and tighten authoritarian control. It seeks to portray every workers’ protest as a threat to national security, every political opponent as an agent of the enemy, and every act of social resistance as treason.
But the Islamic Republic does not defend the people. It is this very regime that kills workers and protesters, diverts society’s wealth into its military and security apparatus, and forces working people to bear the costs of war, sanctions and reconstruction.
Nor are the governments of the United States and Israel a force for the liberation of the people of Iran. Their bombs and threats bring neither freedom nor an end to the Islamic Republic’s machinery of repression. On the contrary, foreign war provides the regime with precisely the conditions it needs to militarise society further, intensify repression and brand its opponents as collaborators with foreign enemies.
The people of Iran must not be forced to choose between the bombs of foreign powers and the gallows of the Islamic Republic. Their war is not our war.
The Courts of the Islamic Republic Are Centres of Organised State Killing
The judiciary of the Islamic Republic seeks to portray those it executes as “mohareb” (enemies of God), “murderers,” “terrorists,” or “agents of foreign powers.” But courts operating under the authority of the very regime that massacred thousands in the streets cannot be instruments of justice or truth.
Confessions extracted under torture, summary trials, and predetermined death sentences are not due process. The judiciary is nothing more than the judicial arm of the same machinery of repression that shoots protesters in the streets and tightens the noose in the prisons.
The regime first targets protesters with bullets in the streets. It then arrests the survivors, tortures them in prison, condemns them behind closed doors and finally hangs them before the public. This is not justice. It is organised state murder.
The Prisons Have Not Fallen Silent
In the face of this new wave of executions, prisoners have risen in resistance. Hunger strikes, collective protests and prisoners sewing their lips shut demonstrate that even within the darkest chambers of repression, resistance lives on.
Those sentenced to death must not be left alone. Their families must not be abandoned to intimidation and silence. The struggle against the death penalty is an inseparable part of the broader struggle of workers, women, students, teachers, pensioners and all forces fighting for freedom and social justice.
Organise Against the Regime of War and Execution
The Islamic Republic massacred thousands in the streets during the January uprising. Today it seeks to transform those same streets into stages for public executions. It wants to exploit the climate of war to impose silence upon society and to recreate, through the gallows, the terror that bullets alone failed to establish permanently. But a people who stood their ground in the face of bullets will not disappear before the spectacle of the gallows.
No regime can rule forever through mass murder. No executioner’s rope can extinguish humanity’s determination to free itself from poverty, exploitation and repression. The protest movement will neither wait for intervention by the United States or Israel nor surrender before the executioners and tyrants of the Islamic capitalist regime.
For another round of workers’ struggles and nationwide uprisings, for the overthrow of the regime of war and executions, for liberation from a system built upon murder and exploitation—
Unite! Organise! Resist!
No to the wars of states!
No to the slaughter of the people!
Long live the independent struggle of the working class and all the oppressed!
28 July 2026
Internationalist Workers Organization (IWO)
