Majid Karimi

Majid Karimi is a Kurdish writer who was detained in Tehran on 19 May 2026 when intelligence forces raided his home. His detention was documented by Hengaw, the Kurdish human rights organisation based in Norway that monitors arrests and executions of Kurdish political prisoners inside Iran. Karimi's case is part of a wider pattern of targeting writers, lawyers and civil society figures that Hengaw has documented throughout the Iran-conflict period.

The timing places the detention during the same 48-hour period in which Hengaw also documented that the families of two secretly executed Kurdish prisoners, Naser Bakrzadeh and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, were denied the return of their bodies. The clustering of these actions in a single news cycle reflects the Iranian security apparatus's sustained pressure on Kurdish civil society alongside the ongoing conflict with the United States and Israel.

Kurds represent roughly 10 per cent of Iran's population and are concentrated in the western provinces. Kurdish cultural and political expression has historically been tightly restricted. Karimi's detention, as a writer rather than an armed activist, falls within a recurring pattern of criminalising Kurdish intellectual and literary work.