Iran's killing moves to the field

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.