Executions and Invasions

Welcome back to a special edition of the MBN Iran Briefing.

The regime is starting to hang January’s protesters while it’s drawing on Persian history to claim it will defeat its enemies. Find out more below.

ICYMI: Check out the latest MBN Iran Briefing podcast. Last week I was joined by Dr. Amin Tarzi, Middle East Studies Chair at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia and my colleague Leila Bazzi. Listen here or watch here. And stayed tuned for another MBN Iran Briefing podcast later this week.

Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the newsletter, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship Alhurra Arabic-language and English-language news sites.

Quote of the week

“Today, in Iran, in the middle of a war, the regime executed a 19-year-old national wrestling champion for the crime of joining January protests. After signaling to the world, including President @realDonaldTrump, that they would halt executions of protesters, the regime has done the exact opposite.”

–Masih Alinejad, Iranian journalist and activist, on X, on Mar. 19

 

TOP OF THE NEWS

It’s day 24 of the war. We know the news of the conflict. But there’s more happening that isn’t making headlines. 

After a bit of a lull for cosmetic purposes, the regime has revved up its killing machine again.

Last Thursday, it executed three people in Qom, ostensibly for participating in the killing of two policemen on Jan. 8. They’d been charged with moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” as stipulated in article 279 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code. The four possible punishments for article 279 are enumerated in article 282: hanging, crucifixion, amputation of the right hand and left foot, and banishment (which in this case means the individual must be kept under continuous surveillance, and is prohibited from having any contact with other people). It is worth noting that these punishments are so-called hadd punishments, meaning they are fixed in religious law and cannot be reduced or commuted to another sentence.

The Iran Human Rights NGO tells us that the three hanged last Thursday had been sentenced solely based on confessions extracted under torture, with no other evidence presented.

Saleh Mohammadi, 2007-2026. Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/C53xmNwrKfY/?igsh=MWJ0amY3cjNiMmtyZw==

One of the three, Saleh Mohammadi, had turned 19 just eight days before he was hanged. In addition to the shockingly young age at which he was killed by the state, his hanging also attracted a level of international attention because he was a star wrestler who had competed internationally. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights notes that exculpatory evidence, such as CCTV footage that failed to show him at the scene, was dismissed before he was hanged in Qom Central Prison.

Some have compared his execution to the case of another wrestler, Navid Afkari, who was executed following the protests in 2018.

Wrestling occupies a singular place in Iranian culture, rooted in pre-Islamic Persian tradition. It carries connotations of honor, strength, and national identity that go well beyond sport. Executing a national team member sends a deliberate message. The regime regards proximity to that cultural prestige as no shield against the security apparatus.

The participation of prominent athletes in protests seems also to be leading to a regime focus on killing them.

All this harks back to the Dec.-Jan. protests. The Jan. 8-9 crackdown was itself the culmination of an execution surge that had been building throughout 2025, a year in which Iran put to death more than 2,600 people. That was more than double the figure recorded in 2024, and the highest total since the late 1980s. When security forces massacred protesters in the streets, rights monitors documented between 7,000 and 36,000 killed in the space of days.

Judicial executions linked to the protests were a different matter.

Back in January, when executions of protesters appeared imminent, the White House said that “all options are on the table if the regime executes protesters,” with the president saying “if you hang those people, you’re going to be hit harder than you’ve ever been hit.”

Executions did appear to slow in January and February, possibly because of the U.S. president’s comments.

Once U.S. and Israeli strikes began on Feb. 28 and deterrent threats no longer had currency, the regime got moving. The three hangings in Qom four days ago were the first protest-related executions that have been acknowledged by the government. It’s entirely possible that additional executions may have taken place earlier, given the communications blackout and the regime’s documented pattern of concealment.

Kourosh Keyvani. Photo: https://hengaw.net/en/news/2026/03/article-47

Running parallel to the protest-related executions is a separate but related killing campaign targeting people the regime labels as Israeli spies. Since last June’s 12-day war, Iran has executed a number of people on espionage charges, with the pace accelerating alongside the current conflict. The day before last week’s Qom hangings, the regime hanged Kourosh Keyvani, a dual Iranian-Swedish national convicted of passing photographs of sensitive locations to Mossad. The espionage cases follow the same template as the protest cases, with convictions resting on confessions, no independent evidence, and trials that bear no resemblance to due process.

The regime has a 47 year history of killing its own people in shocking numbers. As I’ve noted in other editions of the MBN Iran Briefing, the Islamic Republic is continuing a long-running killing spree.

Illustrated Shahnameh, the Persian “Book of Kings.” Photo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p7dcv

PLAYING GAMES WITH HISTORY

On the evening of Nowruz, March 21, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted a photograph to X. It showed a stone relief carved into a cliff face near Persepolis: a Persian king on horseback, a Roman emperor kneeling before him in submission. The caption noted it was the only time in history a Roman emperor had been captured. The text was brief: “Our ancient civilization has three millennia of history of defending Iranians and the region from outsiders. We are now writing a new chapter in that story.”

The image is from the third century AD. The Sassanid king Shapur I defeated Rome at the Battle of Edessa and took Emperor Valerian prisoner. Valerian died in captivity. As a statement of Persian imperial power, it doesn’t get much more compelling than that. (For a deeper dive on the Romans vs. the Persians, Adrian Goldsworthy’s 2023 book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry is worth your time.)

But Araghchi’s “three millennia of resistance” doesn’t stand up under even mild scrutiny. Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BC and ended the Achaemenid Empire outright. Greek successor states ruled Iranian territory for nearly two centuries. The Mongols arrived in the 13th century and their footprint was not symbolic: They destroyed cities and massacred populations on a catastrophic scale. Britain and Russia divided Iran into spheres of influence in 1907. Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran jointly in 1941. When the war ended, the USSR refused to leave, backing puppet states in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan that Moscow only abandoned in 1946 under American pressure.

What Persian civilization actually demonstrates is not unbroken resistance but the capacity to absorb conquerors, outlast them culturally, and persist. That is a different argument from the one the foreign minister is making.

No one understood this better than Ferdowsi, the tenth-century Persian poet who spent thirty years composing the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” completed around 1010 AD. Recording the myths, heroes, and kings of pre-Islamic Persia in 50,000 verses, he deliberately purged Arabic loanwords in an act as political as it was literary. The Shahnameh ends exactly where the Arab conquest begins.

Which brings us to the invasion Araghchi cannot name.

Arab Muslim armies defeated the Sassanid Persian Empire in 636 AD. The last Sassanid emperor was dead within fifteen years. Islam, the religion that arrived with those armies, became the ideological foundation of the state Araghchi serves. The entire architecture of the Islamic Republic, the clerical supremacy, and the fusion of religious and political authority, is a direct product of that conquest. The stone relief he chose to post belongs to the civilization his government’s founding ideology replaced.

Araghchi posted Sassanid imperial imagery on Nowruz to represent Persian permanence. But the Islamic Republic is not Persia’s defender. The religion that underpins the state he serves, its legal architecture, its claim to legitimacy, its entire ideological foundation, arrived with the Arab armies that destroyed the Sassanid Empire. When the Islamic Republic invokes three millennia of resistance to foreign domination, it is papering over the foreign conquest that ultimately helped create it.

And the historical record doesn’t support the narrative anyway. Persepolis was burned. The empire fell to Alexander, to the Arabs, to the Mongols. What survived was culture, language, and memory, not armies, not states.

That is the real three-thousand-year story. A civilization that survived by outlasting its conquerors, not by defeating them. The Islamic Republic is not the guardian of that story. It is one of the chapters it has had to survive.

Strait of Hormuz. Photo: Reuters

ESSENTIAL READING: THE HORMUZ CRISIS

One Battle After Another: No Easy Way for the US to Open the Strait of Hormuz — The Soufan Center, March 23. Detailed analysis of the military and diplomatic dimensions: Iran’s selective access regime, China and India cutting their own deals with Tehran, and the 22-nation joint statement that stopped short of commitment.

What the Closure of the Strait of Hormuz Means for the Global Economy — Dallas Fed, March 20. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s energy economics team, whose research mandate covers oil market disruptions, runs the numbers on what a prolonged Hormuz closure means for global GDP. The quantitative model: A one-quarter closure knocks 2.9 annualized GDP points off global growth in Q2. Dry but authoritative.

War Leaves Cargo Ship Crews Trapped in the Gulf — Foreign Policy, March 23. A ground-level account of 20,000 seafarers stranded in the Gulf, ships broadcasting “Chinese crew” and “Indian ship” to avoid Iranian attack. A different and vivid angle on Hormuz.

The Hormuz Minefield — Foreign Affairs, March 14. A detailed breakdown of Iran’s Hormuz toolkit: mines, drones, midget submarines, and unmanned surface vessels. The key argument is that clearing mines during a full-blown war while simultaneously facing shore-based missiles, drones, and fast-attack craft is a categorically different challenge from peacetime mine clearance.

Iran War: Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Squeezing China’s Oil Supply — Foreign Policy, March 17. China’s oil intake via Hormuz has dropped from 5.35 million barrels a day to 1.22 million. Tehran is reportedly offering yuan-denominated passage to Chinese tankers. The geopolitics of who gets through and who does not.

The Strait of Hormuz: It Must Be Open for All or Closed to All — Richard Haass, March 18. The former CFR president argues that the U.S. should announce that no Iranian tanker will reach its destination until Iran stops attacking commercial shipping. His logic: Iran cannot pick and choose who gets the region’s oil and who does not.

Correction

In Foreign Policy’s Iran Reading List, Alex Vatanka at the Middle East Institute recommends Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce’s The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei: Out of the Mouth of the Supreme Leader of Iran, which he calls a “rare window into the worldview of the man who dominated Iran’s political system since 1989.” Last Thursday’s Iran Briefing mistakenly identified a different book.