In the weeks since Iranian security forces killed thousands of civilians during protests that erupted across the country in late December, the Islamic Republic has launched a sustained campaign of violent post-protest repression. It is not defined by crowds and gunfire but rather by nighttime raids, enforced disappearances, and mass secret detentions. Across Iran, especially in smaller cities and towns where information cannot easily reach the outside world, entire communities are being terrorized long after the demonstrations have been crushed.
According to more than 30 eyewitness testimonies directly gathered by the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), security forces launched mass arrest operations almost as soon as the killings ended. Armed agents began conducting violent nighttime house-to-house raids, often without warrants, breaking into homes, strip-searching family members to identify wounded protesters, and dragging people away in front of their families.
In the weeks since Iranian security forces killed thousands of civilians during protests that erupted across the country in late December, the Islamic Republic has launched a sustained campaign of violent post-protest repression. It is not defined by crowds and gunfire but rather by nighttime raids, enforced disappearances, and mass secret detentions. Across Iran, especially in smaller cities and towns where information cannot easily reach the outside world, entire communities are being terrorized long after the demonstrations have been crushed.
According to more than 30 eyewitness testimonies directly gathered by the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), security forces launched mass arrest operations almost as soon as the killings ended. Armed agents began conducting violent nighttime house-to-house raids, often without warrants, breaking into homes, strip-searching family members to identify wounded protesters, and dragging people away in front of their families.
Those taken were not only protesters. They included teenagers accused of chanting slogans, bystanders wounded during demonstrations, doctors and nurses who had treated the injured, lawyers who had attempted to provide legal assistance, and citizens who had posted supportive statements on social media.
In city after city—Kerman, Khorramabad, Andimeshk, Qorveh, Mahabad, Gorgan, Arak, and others—the same pattern has emerged. Detainees are held incommunicado, denied access to lawyers and family members, and often not registered in official prison systems at all. Many have been transferred to unofficial holding sites: warehouses, container units, abandoned buildings, and other facilities operating entirely outside Iran’s legal detention framework.
These black box detention sites, where tens of thousands of Iranians are now being held, are among the gravest concerns documented by CHRI. When detainees are removed from the formal prison system, there is no paper trail, no judicial oversight, and no way for families to confirm whether their loved ones are even alive. The risk of torture, coerced confessions, sexual abuse, and death in custody in such facilities is extreme.
Traumatized parents spend days outside courts and prisons that deny holding their children. Some are threatened with arrest if they continue asking questions. Others are warned that speaking publicly will worsen their loved one’s fate. In most cases, families receive no information at all, according to testimonies.
Hospitals have become extensions of the security apparatus. CHRI has documented repeated cases in which security forces stationed themselves inside emergency rooms, arrested wounded protesters, or pressured medical staff to report patients. As a result, many injured people avoided hospitals. Some later died from untreated wounds, unseen and uncounted.
The repression is especially intense in Iran’s provincial and smaller cities. These communities are easier to seal off and surveil and far less visible to the outside world. In towns where everyone knows one another, arrests are meant not only to remove individuals but to send a message to the entire population: Dissent will be punished retroactively and relentlessly.
Life after dark in many of these cities remains oppressive. Armed patrols, checkpoints, drones, and plainclothes agents dominate public space. People are stopped and forced to show their phones. Even standing in one place for a few minutes can invite interrogation or arrest. The goal is unmistakable: to ensure the protests will not reemerge and that no one dares try.
This ongoing campaign meets the legal threshold for crimes against humanity. Mass killings, enforced disappearances, and secret detention are not isolated abuses; they are elements of a coordinated state policy. The fact that much of this violence is now happening quietly, away from cameras and headlines, makes it even more dangerous.
Yet international attention has already begun to drift. As policymakers turn back to nuclear negotiations with Tehran, there is a growing temptation to treat the crackdown as a closed chapter, an unfortunate but past event. Yet any engagement that brackets off crimes against humanity as a separate issue sends a clear signal to Tehran: You may gun down thousands of your citizens, disappear your critics, torture detainees in secret facilities, and terrorize entire communities with impunity.
At a minimum, governments engaging with Iran should demand the immediate release of all detainees held in connection with the protests as well as long-standing political prisoners. Targeted sanctions should be expanded to all officials, judges, and security agents responsible for mass arrests, enforced disappearances, torture, and unlawful killings, and prosecutions of responsible officials should be pursued through universal jurisdiction. International efforts to document evidence and preserve survivor testimony must be supported before such evidence is destroyed. Access to uncensored internet inside Iran and emergency protection pathways for threatened activists, medical workers, lawyers, and families must be prioritized.
The lives of the people being held in Iran’s black box detention sites depend on sustained international scrutiny, pressure, and action now, not expressions of concern after forced confessions are aired and death sentences carried out. History will judge this moment not by how quickly diplomacy resumed but by whether the world recognized the massive and ongoing atrocities committed by the Islamic Republic and chose not to look away.
