Qezel Hesar Executions and the Gulf Attacks: A Regime That Kills at Home and Strikes Abroad

Iran’s ruling clerical regime executed by hanging the two PMOI members, Vahid Bani Amerian and Abolhassan Montazer, on Saturday dawn in Qezel Hesar Prison. This new crime adds to a broader series of political executions carried out in recent days and weeks, including those of Mohammad Taghavi, Akbar Daneshvarkar, Babak Alipour, and Pouya Ghabadi, along with a number of young protesters executed after taking part in uprisings.

These executions should not be seen as isolated judicial acts of repression. They are part of a wider pattern in which the regime is trying to compensate for its growing internal weakness through a dual escalation: gallows at home and aggression abroad. The more it fears Iranian society, Resistance Units, and their growing presence inside the country, the more brutal it becomes in its prisons, while at the same time exporting its crisis toward neighboring states, especially the Gulf countries, through threats, attacks, and the targeting of regional security and vital infrastructure.

By executing Vahid and Abolhassan, the regime intended to send a message of fear to the Iranian people. But in reality, the message produced the opposite effect. When someone like Abolhassan Montazer is executed after spending decades in prison from the Shah’s era through the rule of the mullahs, and when Vahid Bani Amerian is killed after years of steadfast resistance, this does not reveal the regime’s strength. It reveals its fear. This is a system that fears ideas more than weapons, organization more than war, and the future more than the present.

What is happening inside Iran today is directly linked to what is happening outside its borders. The same regime that raises gallows for the Iranian people is the one attacking the Gulf states and threatening the region’s security. It is a mistake to treat these as two separate files. The source is one, and the mindset that manages domestic repression is the same one directing regional destabilization. This regime does not separate its survival in Tehran from the fires it ignites in the Arab neighborhood. External tension is part of its mechanism of survival, just as bloodshed in prisons is one of its internal tools of control.

For that reason, confronting this danger seriously does not mean only condemning the execution of political prisoners, nor only condemning aggression against the Gulf. It means seeing the full picture. We are facing a regime that treats internal killing and external expansion as two sides of the same coin. Any policy that ignores this reality will remain unable to grasp the core of the problem.

This is why Maryam Rajavi’s call for a special United Nations session to investigate the repeated executions and to take urgent measures to save prisoners at risk of execution carries even greater importance. The matter is no longer only a human rights issue. It has also become a political and regional one. Stopping the execution machine inside Iran, and stopping the policy of war and aggression against neighboring countries, both begin at the same point: ending impunity and ending leniency toward a regime that has made bloodshed its only method of survival.

Experience has shown that this regime does not change through politeness, does not calm down through appeasement, and does not retreat except under pressure. The question facing both the Arab world and the international community today is therefore unavoidable: how long will the Iranian people be left alone to face the gallows while the region is left to face missiles, militias, and threats?

The blood of Vahid, Abolhassan, and their companions is not only a symbol of a people’s suffering. It is a fresh warning that the Iranian danger does not begin at the border. It begins in the nature of this regime itself. Any serious approach to protecting the Gulf and preserving regional stability must therefore also include standing with the Iranian people and their organized resistance, which is paying the price of confrontation inside the country and carries a vision for a free, democratic Iran at peace with its neighbors.

The regime that kills its own sons at dawn is the same one that attacks its neighbors at night. In both cases, the problem is the same.