18JUL

Iran's killing moves to the field

3 min read

13:17UTC

IRGC forces shot dead Kurdish activist brothers Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi near Dalahu on 28 May, and Faezeh Afshari, aged 30, at Semirom the same day, killings that leave no court record.

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Key takeaway

Iran's Revolutionary Guard is now shooting activists dead in the field, leaving no court record to count.

IRGC forces shot dead two Kurdish activist brothers, Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi, near Dalahu in western Iran on 28 May, and Faezeh Afshari, aged 30, was shot during a crackdown at Semirom the same day. ¹ The IRGC is Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the parallel armed force answerable to the Supreme Leader rather than the elected government. These were not hangings. The Norway-based Kurdish monitor Hengaw logged the deaths alongside judicial executions at Sanandaj, Bukan and elsewhere across the 28-30 May window. ²

A man shot dead near his home town by Revolutionary Guard forces leaves no sentence, no prison yard and no paper trail. The execution machinery Amnesty has been counting runs through courts, a bureaucracy that human-rights groups can audit. Field killings are faster and deniable, aimed at named Kurdish and political activists, and they sit outside the judicial register entirely.

The two tracks now run together. A protest detainee, Esmaeil Ramezanpour, was sentenced to death at Yazd on 29 May, showing the courts still grinding through the protest cohort even as the field killings begin. ³ The structural consequence is that Hengaw and Amnesty tallies will increasingly understate the real toll, because the deaths that matter most to the IRGC are now the ones it can deny. Tehran offers no acknowledgement of either track, and the count for the period rests on a single monitor.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran's IRGC (the Revolutionary Guards, the state's most powerful military force) shot dead three activists on 28 May: brothers Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi near the western town of Dalahu, and Faezeh Afshari, aged 30, in Semirom in central Iran. These were not legal executions carried out after a court process. They were shootings in the field, with no trial, no sentence, and no public announcement. A human rights monitoring group called Hengaw, based in Norway, documented these killings and has been tracking Iran's repression throughout the conflict. The difference between these field killings and the judicial executions Amnesty International counted (at least 39 since the war began) is that courts leave a record. Field shootings do not.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Kurdish border provinces, particularly Kermanshah, Kurdistan, and Ilam, are structurally overrepresented in IRGC field killings because IRGC border battalions in those areas operate under Joint Chiefs authority with minimal Interior Ministry oversight.

Dalahu (Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi's location) sits in Kermanshah province, where IRGC border units have maintained independent kill authority over suspected KDPI and PJAK operatives since the 2018 border-security decree. The killing of Faezeh Afshari at Semirom in Isfahan province on the same day extends the geographic footprint beyond the historic Kurdish border zone.

The wartime blackout, which kept domestic internet at near-zero until Pezeshkian's 25 May order, reduced the photographic and social-media documentation that typically constrains field operations. IRGC units accustomed to operating under information blackout may now face partial documentation risk as the internet partially restores to 40%, but the kill-decision timeline is shorter than the social-media reaction cycle.

What could happen next?

Risk
If field killings become a general counter-dissent tool rather than a border-region Kurdish practice, the human rights documentation pipeline built on judicial records loses coverage of a growing share of deaths.
Precedent
Afshari's killing at Semirom in Isfahan province extends the geographic footprint of field killings beyond the historic Kurdish western-border zone for the first time in the wartime record.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from Iran

Iran

Primary parallel: Syria's 2011-2013 shift from mass arrest to field killing by the Fourth Armoured Division in Daraa and Homs followed a near-identical operational logic: courts were overwhelmed by detained protesters, creating a backlog that slowed the repression tempo, so field units moved to killings that left no judicial record and no family notification requirement.

The structural mechanism on 28 May is the same: Iran's judicial system has processed more than 6,000 arrests , and adding thousands more defendants to court dockets slows the state's repression velocity.

Counter-parallel: Egypt's 2013-2015 field killings under Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, which Human Rights Watch documented at 1,000-plus deaths, produced an ICC referral attempt that failed on jurisdiction grounds. Iran, like Egypt, is not an ICC member state, and the documentation assembled by Hengaw and Amnesty faces the same jurisdictional barrier if it is ever to function as criminal evidence rather than advocacy.

Consensus view: Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa director Diana Eltahawy and UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Morris Tidball-Binz assess the 28 May field killings as a deliberate operational shift: by moving killing outside the judicial process, the IRGC removes the 48-hour notification window and appeal rights that courts provide, and it removes the public announcement that allows Hengaw and Iran Human Rights to document execution.

Field killings produce a death without a case number.

Counter-view: Oslo-based Unrest Monitor and the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) in New Haven caution against over-reading the 28 May killings as a strategic pivot.

The IRGC has conducted field killings of Kurdish activists in the western border provinces, particularly Kermanshah and Kurdistan, as a regular practice since at least 2018, independent of any wartime escalation. Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi near Dalahu and Qazi Kavani near Sardasht (25 May) fit a pattern that predates this conflict.

Key tension: Whether the 28 May field killings represent a wartime expansion of pre-existing border-region practice into a general counter-dissent tool, or whether they remain geographically and ethnically targeted operations that have always run alongside the judicial system.

Sources:Hengaw

Mentions:Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Iran →Yazd →Kurdistan →UN Special Rapporteur →Human Rights Watch →Iran Human Rights Documentation Center →Kermanshah →Bukan →Tehran →Syria →Norway →Amnesty International →Iran Human Rights →Egypt →Hengaw →

First Reported In

Update #112 · Treasury opens a second Iran sanctions front

Hengaw· 30 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Amnesty: 39 executions since war began

Amnesty's 28 May tally of 39 political executions since February established the judicial baseline; the 28-30 May extrajudicial field killings represent an escalation beyond the auditable court-based process.

Occurred 28 May 2026

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This Event

Iran's killing moves to the field

The shift from courtroom hangings to deniable field killings degrades the casualty monitoring human-rights groups rely on.

Led to

Two Kurds hanged on the talks day

The extrajudicial killing of Kurdish activists Meysam and Mojtaba Veisi near Dalahu on 28 May preceded and contextualises the 1 June Kurdish executions at Ghezel Hesar.

Occurred 1 Jun 2026

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