Iran has executed two men allegedly affiliated with an ISIS cell, the judiciary and monitoring groups based outside the country have said.
Mohiuddin Abdullahi and Hossein Palani were hanged on Tuesday morning in Kermanshah Central Prison after being charged with “baghi”, the judicial term for armed insurgency against the state, the Norway-based Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights said.
The men had been detained since 2018, when they were arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence division, Hengaw said.
The executions come as Iran accelerates executions in the country and against a backdrop of the disintegration of a ceasefire deal with the US.
According to the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organisation, at least 370 people have been executed in Iran this year alone.
Use of the death penalty “accelerated further following the ceasefire in early April, culminating in at least 101 executions in June alone”, the organisation said.
Mizan news agency, operated by Iran’s judiciary, confirmed the executions of Mr Abdullahi and Mr Palani but did not say where they took place. It said they were members of “a cell affiliated with the ISIS terrorist group” that was formed with the aim of rebuilding the organisation after its collapse in Iraq and Syria.
Mizan said this took place in the mountainous area between Iraq and Iran, where militants began to “recruit and equip themselves” to carry out attacks in Iran. They were arrested following an operation by Iranian military and security forces.
The men’s sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court after their trial, in which their defence statements were taken into account. Hengaw and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre, a US-based rights group, said no independent details about the trial process, case documents or access to lawyers were available.
Human rights organisations have long documented grave violations of international standards in Iranian court proceedings, including denial of access to lawyers, coerced confessions and a lack of notice given to families and legal representatives before capital punishment sentences are meted out.
According to the Iran Human Rights Organisation, two others have been executed this year on charges of being affiliated with ISIS. Most of the other death sentences were over murder and drug offences.
The surge in executions this year includes for people sentenced over involvement in widespread anti-government protests in January, as well as members of banned political organisations.
Between March 18 and June 16, a total of 20 people charged over demonstrations in January were executed, including 18-year-old Amirhossein Hatami and Saleh Mohammadi, a former member of Iran's national wrestling team.
The protests were the largest anti-government unrest in the Islamic Republic’s history, and their suppression by security forces left at least 7,000 people dead, many of them from shotgun wounds to the head and back, human rights monitors outside the country said. Some reports put the death toll many times higher.
At the time of Mr Hatami’s execution, Amnesty International condemned Iran’s use of the death penalty “to eradicate dissenting voices and further terrify people”.
Other executions in recent days include that of Shouresh Sattarzadeh, whose sentence was carried out on July 1 in Sanandaj Central Prison in western Iran, after he spent 20 years on death row for an accidental death when he was 18 years old.
Abdolreza Heydari, 59, from Bandar Abbas in southern Iran, and Mehdi Latifi, 27, from Tabriz, were executed at dawn on Monday, at Tabriz Central Prison in the country’s north-west on drug-related charges.
There will likely be a “further escalation” in executions in the coming months, the Iran Human Rights Organisation said in its report last week. It called on the international community to include the human rights situation in the country in any talks with the Iran.
“Any agreement with the Islamic Republic by states committed to human rights principles must make a moratorium on the death penalty a central condition, the organisation’s director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said.
US President Donald Trump said last night that a deal with Iran to end the war was still “possible”, despite the ongoing attacks and counter-attacks between US forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) around the Strait of Hormuz, which have spread to regional countries including Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
Iran executed at least 1,639 people last year, the highest number since 1989 and an increase of nearly 70 per cent from 2024, the Iran Human Rights Organisation and the Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty said in a report in April.
