Iranian security forces absorbed losses in two separate border provinces this week. A Tehran jury convicted one of Iran’s most prominent reformist academics for questioning one-sided coverage of the war on state media. And the country’s sociologists are working overtime to explain how society is still holding together despite myriad stresses. Also in this edition: a fresh wave of executions.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
You always have a one-sided indictment against America. That is, the ugly things that the Americans did…. You never looked at what we did.
— Political scientist Sadegh Zibakalam on live television – the sentiment for which he was convicted by a Tehran court on Monday.
TOP OF THE NEWS
Security Forces Absorb Losses in Two Border Areas
IRGC members take part in a military exercise in southern Iran. Reuters/WANA.
Gunmen have struck twice in two of Iran’s border provinces in the past few days.
In Paveh, a Kurdish-majority city in Kermanshah province near the Iraqi border, attackers opened fire on the front door of a home late Monday, killing two local IRGC personnel and wounding two others. Hours later, an IRGC ground force said it had destroyed a group of six armed men in the mountains between Mahabad and Piranshahr, two more Kurdish-majority districts roughly 150 miles away in West Azerbaijan province. It said it had recovered the bodies of four people while giving no account of the other two, and spoke of “the entry of a team of hostile and separatist groups into the country’s northwestern borders for sabotage and terrorist acts.”
Meanwhile, in Saravan, a Baloch-majority district in Sistan-Baluchistan province on the border with Pakistan, a gunman opened fire on a family’s car near an IRGC post. The father was killed at the scene, and his wife later died of her wounds, leaving a child orphaned and wounded, according to official accounts.
Iranian state television described the Saravan attack as a random shooting on a civilian family. There is, however, a competing account. It claims that gunmen opened fire on the car of IRGC member Amirhossein Arbabi as he was leaving Guard headquarters, killing him and his wife Fatemeh Bamaripour. If true, this would make it a targeted killing of a Guard member rather than an indiscriminate attack. That account makes no mention of a child.
It is the latest in a recurring pattern for the district. In April, three security personnel were shot dead on patrol in Saravan. In February the IRGC said it had killed six members of Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni Baloch militant group that has carried out repeated attacks on security forces along this stretch of border, near the same area.
The two provinces sit at opposite ends of Iran’s periphery. In Kurdish areas the IRGC blames separatist groups, while in the southeast it blames a mix of Baloch militancy and Jaish al-Adl activity.
Neither province’s violence is new. Kermanshah’s Kurdish districts and Sistan-Baluchistan’s Baloch districts have absorbed attacks on security personnel at a fairly steady clip for years, independent of whatever is happening in Tehran or Washington. With the string of incidents in Saravan since February, the district has lost personnel to militant attacks at least three times in five months. It’s not yet clear whether the tempo is picking up with two attacks on the same day, in two different provinces, against the same target set of IRGC personnel.
Political Scientist Convicted Over Wartime Remarks
Sadegh Zibakalam Mofrad, a political science professor known for his outspoken views, was transferred to Evin Prison.
Political scientist Sadegh Zibakalam was found guilty by a jury sitting at Branch One of Tehran’s Criminal Court One, which hears political and press cases, on a charge of spreading false information. Formal sentencing is still pending.
The case traces back to a May 13 live interview on a broadcast affiliated with Islamic Azad University, in which Zibakalam questioned the one-sided way Iranian media characterize American conduct in the war. In that interview he went so far as to say, on air: “You always have a one-sided indictment against America. That is, the ugly things that the Americans did…. You never looked at what we did.”
The Tehran prosecutor’s office filed a complaint over the remarks and placed Zibakalam under a judicial supervision order barring media activity for three months. He gave a further interview anyway, which triggered a second complaint and a tightened supervision order. An indictment followed.
At Monday’s hearing, presided over by judge Ebrahim Torabi-Golsefid, Zibakalam said that the case against him amounted to an attempt by ANA and the court to prove he was defending American crimes.
Zibakalam, 78, is a retired professor of political science at the University of Tehran and one of Iran’s best-known reformist commentators, with a doctorate from the University of Bradford in the UK and a decades-long record of clashes with the state. He was first jailed in 1975, under the Shah. In more recent years he has been prosecuted repeatedly for his commentary, most recently in May 2024, when he was detained on three separate cases and later released on medical grounds after a cancer diagnosis.
The charge, publishing false and untrue material, falls under provisions of Iran’s penal code that carry some combination of a fine, corporal punishment, or up to two years in prison, depending on which article applies. None of the domestic reporting on the case specifies which one the indictment cites. The judge will set the actual sentence now that the jury has returned its verdict, and Zibakalam can appeal once it does.
Given his age, his medical history, and the political weight of a public conviction, a lighter sentence or a suspended one is plausible, but so is a harsher outcome given his record of repeat offenses under supervision orders.
Iran’s Society Is Neither Collapsing nor Stabilizing, Experts Argue
Buses that were burned during Iran’s protests, in Tehran, Iran, Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS.
Iranian sociologists have been considering the question of how Iranian society is functioning under the multiple stresses it faces. Instead of asking whether society will collapse, they’re curious about the strange and uneasy equilibrium it seems to have settled into for the time being.
Abbas Naeimi Jorshari, who heads the sociology of law group at the Iranian Sociological Association, calls it “crisis-ridden endurance,” a state in which the political structure survives only by continuously generating more control and absorbing rising social and psychological costs. Drawing on Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy and authority, he describes Iran’s trajectory as a drift toward what he calls “defensive authoritarianism,” layered onto an increasingly precarious economy. As he puts it, “Iran today seems to be moving not toward immediate collapse but toward what I call a ‘critical continuum,’ a situation in which the structure remains intact but, in order to maintain stability, it must generate more control and bear increasing social and psychological costs.”
Citing Hannah Arendt’s writing on atomized populations in crisis-era societies, he warns that isolated, disconnected citizens are exactly the ones prone to sudden, radical reactions once a trigger occurs, because the institutions that would normally channel grievance into gradual politics have been weakened.
Maghsoud Farastkhah, writing two weeks later as the immediate shock of the war receded, strikes a different note. He describes Iran as caught in “suspension,” paired with what he calls a “density of time,” in which ordinary daily life still goes on beneath the surface even as people contend with inflation, rising unemployment, war damage to industry, and a widening gap between citizens and the state. Hamid Salehi, a political sociologist at Allameh Tabataba’i University, goes further still, arguing that war and sanctions pressure produced identity-based cohesion rather than fracture, and calling an economic uprising in Iran unlikely.
A narrower, more concrete analysis lends support to Naeimi Jorshari’s bleaker reading. Mehrdad Nazeri, a sociologist, points to layoffs spreading through beauty clinics, cafes, and small service businesses as evidence of something deeper than a routine downturn. He argues that Iranian unemployment has become a multidimensional crisis with cultural and psychological dimensions, not just an economic one.
It’s worth noting that even the most optimistic of the four, Salehi’s account of wartime cohesion, is still a theory of how Iran holds together in crisis.
Executions Continue at Pace
The notorious Evin prison, northwest of Tehran. AFP.
Iranian authorities executed at least 12 prisoners across multiple provinces in mid- to late June, including two Baloch men, Zahir Shahouzehi and Hossein Brahoui, hanged in Zahedan Central Prison on June 17, along with prisoners in Borujerd, Gorgan, Kermanshah and Karaj, on charges ranging from premeditated murder to drug offenses and armed robbery. None of the 12 executions was announced by state media.
The toll has also fallen on foreign nationals. Two Afghan citizens, Mirwais Khalilzad and Ibrahim Ahmadshahi, were hanged in Shiraz on June 21 on drug-related charges, bringing to 12 the number of Afghan nationals executed in Iran in under six months, days after another Afghan was executed on similar charges in Sistan and Baluchestan province.
