Beaten, Blinded, Imprisoned: The IRGC’s Reign of Terror Against Iranian Women

Watch the footage closely. On an Iranian street, a man in a Vladimir Putin T-shirt kicks a young woman to the pavement and beats her with the butt of an assault rifle. There is no hesitation in his movements and no fear of consequence. To outside observers, it is a shocking burst of street brutality. To many women in Iran, it is Tuesday.

For decades, the world has framed the struggle of Iranian women around a piece of cloth, a cultural or religious dispute over modest dress. That framing misses what is happening. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its paramilitary arm, the Basij, are not enforcing a moral code. They are running an institutionalized system of control over half the population, designed to keep a political order in power.

Let me be precise about who this is about. It is not about Islam, and it is not about women who choose to wear the hijab. Many Iranian women do, and they live under the same apparatus. It is about a armed force that claims the right to decide, by violence, what every woman may wear, say, sing or study.

In September 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini died in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Officials attributed her death to a medical condition. Her family and millions of Iranians did not accept that account, and her death set off the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. Women removed their headscarves in public, and the state understood that this was more than a rejection of a dress code. It was a challenge to the authority on which the system rests.

The response was force. Iranian doctors and rights groups documented hundreds of protesters, including young women, blinded in one or both eyes by metal birdshot fired at close range. Later that winter, a wave of suspected poisonings struck girls’ schools across dozens of cities, sending thousands of students to hospitals. No independent investigation has established who was responsible, and the regime’s own inquiry, which announced more than 100 arrests, delivered little public accountability. The pattern is hard to ignore: the targets were girls; in the one place a society promises to keep them safe.

The most lethal chapter came this past January. Nationwide protests that began in late December were met with live fire. Iran International and Iran Human Rights have documented a crackdown that killed thousands of people across the country, with hospitals overwhelmed and bodies piled in basements and corridors. At one Tehran hospital, Alghadir, a staff member described about 150 wounded people and 36 bodies arriving in a single night, in a morgue built to hold five. In Mashhad, a cemetery official reportedly counted more than 400 bodies arriving on the night of January 9. Families were pressured to bury their dead quietly, under security restrictions.

The dead were not abstractions. Setareh Rafiei was killed in Tehran’s Tehranpars district on January 8. Sahar Bayat was killed the same evening, as she returned from protests with her husband and friends. Both were women, and both are names the world should know.

For those who are arrested, the danger continues. United Nations fact-finding investigators have documented sexual violence against detainees, including women, and concluded that the crackdown on the 2022 uprising amounted to crimes against humanity. [Cite UN Fact-Finding Mission, March 2024; confirm exact wording.] Detainees have been forced to read scripted confessions on camera. Deaths in custody have repeatedly been attributed by the authorities to suicide or illness.

The intent is not hidden. Last October, Hassan Hassannia, a former IRGC commander, said on the record that “the sentence for someone who does not accept the hijab is execution.” He added that women who chant the movement’s slogan will not be won over by dialogue, and that the martyrs, were they alive, would flay them. He is a former commander, not a serving one, but he speaks in a register that the system’s defenders have not disowned. Meanwhile, the pressure has not eased. This August, authorities sealed dozens of businesses in a renewed hijab crackdown, including cafés in Mashhad, Bojnourd and Birjand.

This is not driven by ideology alone. Monitoring groups, including the Iran Human Rights Monitor, allege that IRGC-linked networks profit from the traffickinghij of vulnerable women and girls, using temporary marriage arrangements as cover, and that survivors who return to Iran can face prosecution for “moral corruption” or adultery. [Corroborate the IRGC link with UN, State Department or other independent sources before publishing.] Iran has long been ranked Tier 3, the lowest category, in the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons reports. If the allegations hold, the state that punishes women for their dress is also profiting from their exploitation.

Some readers will hear a case for war, and skepticism of foreign military adventures is earned. But accountability is not invasion. Sanctions, enforcement and prosecution are instruments of law, and the case here rests on them.

Washington designated the IRGC a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019. The question now is whether that designation has teeth. That means going after the financial networks and intermediaries that move the Guard’s money, pressing allies that have not followed suit, and supporting the documentation of evidence, including the names of commanders, for eventual prosecution in international and national courts.

Iranian women are not waiting to be rescued. They have kept appearing unveiled in public in major cities despite years of threats, arrests and violence. They are not asking for pity. They are asking the world to stop treating the force that beats, blinds and jails them as a conventional military, and to hold its leaders to account.