Hengaw recorded four Kurdish detentions across northwestern Iran on Saturday 16 May1: Kurdish singer Seyed Ali Qoreishi held incommunicado in Bukan, Shahram Pasupish arrested in Piranshahr with whereabouts unknown, Hadi Abbasian transferred to prison in Shirvan, and Mohammadreza Faryadi held incommunicado in Ilam Province. English teacher Forouzan Eslami was arrested in Urmia on Friday 15 May.
The geographic spread, across Bukan, Piranshahr, Shirvan, Ilam and Urmia, concentrates in Kurdish-majority provinces that Hengaw monitors most closely through its diaspora network. The pattern continues the documented sequence since the conflict began on 28 February, running in parallel with the judicial cluster of the same week and the seven-execution day. The security and judicial pipelines appear to be operating on independent tempos rather than as coordinated wartime measures.
Counter-perspective: Iranian state media frames northwest-province detentions as routine counter-terrorism operations against PJAK and Komala affiliates, and the Intelligence Ministry has previously released named arrest manifests through Tasnim and IRNA. Hengaw's diaspora network and the state's official disclosures rarely overlap by name; the structural disagreement is over which detentions count as conflict-related and which are pre-existing internal-security operations.
Hengaw's diaspora pipeline depends on connectivity from inside Iran, and that connectivity is degrading by the hour as the nationwide blackout pushes deeper into its third month. State-attributed figures such as the 3,468 wartime-death claim will become harder to cross-check once the in-country source network falls below threshold bandwidth; the named-individual reports Hengaw produces today are the empirical baseline against which any later state aggregate must be measured.
