The Deliberate Execution of Iran's Brightest for Media — and the World's Silence — Mithra — Iran Lion and Sun Stichting

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An editorial on the Islamic Republic's deliberate execution of Iran's brightest minds — athletes, scientists, and students — designed as public spectacle to terrorize a nation into silence.

By Khodanoor Afkari (Penname)

The Islamic Republic does not execute people at random. It selects symbols for public spectacle and media broadcast.

It hangs wrestlers, karate champions, aerospace researchers, elite students, and technology experts because their deaths are designed to terrorize a nation into silence.

Erfan Shakourzadeh was an aerospace researcher, a graduate of Iran University of Science and Technology, and a brilliant student shaped by Iran’s elite (nokhbe) Sampad school system [1]. The regime accused him of espionage, extracted forced confessions under torture, and sent him to the gallows after months of solitary confinement. Before his execution at dawn, after the Islamic call to prayer on May 11th, Erfan wrote that he had been forced to confess to crimes he never committed [2].

Ehsan Afrashteh was an IT and network expert connected to Iran’s scientific and elite academic circles, executed by the regime only days after Erfan [3]. This is all unfolding following the horrid Massacre of January 2026 (#IranMassacre). Iranians like Erfan and Ehsan should have been building the future of our country. Instead, the state devoured them. The same loss echoed in the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 shootdown by the IRGC in 2020, when tens of brilliant Iranian students and researchers aboard Flight PS752 were killed [4]. Young people of a generation that should have helped rebuild Iran towards prosperity has instead been erased by the regime ruling it.

This violence is intentional.

Authoritarian regimes have always understood that to break resistance, they must first destroy the people who inspire society. When fused with absolute ideologies — whether Islamist theocracy or Soviet Marxism — repression expands into industrial-scale terror. Joseph Stalin orchestrated purges, forced famines, executions, and labour camps that led to the deaths of millions, targeting scientists, intellectuals, decorated military officers, engineers, and anyone capable of independent thought [5][6][7]. The Khmer Rouge genocide murdered roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s population while systematically exterminating students, teachers, professionals, and educated citizens because education itself threatened totalitarian control [8].

The Islamic Republic follows the same script.

It targets athletes because athletes embody pride, discipline, and national identity. Sasan Azadvar, a 21-year-old karate champion, and Saleh Mohammadi, a teenage wrestling champion, became victims of a regime that turns human beings into public warnings [9][10].

One of the most haunting cases was Navid Afkari, the Iranian wrestling champion executed in 2020 after participating in protests [11]. Before they killed him, Navid sent a final voice message from prison:

They are looking for a neck for their rope.

He knew innocence meant nothing.

Executions in Iran are not hidden crimes carried out in darkness. They are ideological theatre. Senior clerics and regime officials have openly defended mass killings of those accused of “waging war against God” (moharebeh), arguing on state television and in public sermons that executing thousands is justified to preserve the Islamic state [12].

The world has seen this before.

In the 1930s, many claimed they did not know what authoritarian regimes were becoming until it was too late. That excuse no longer exists. Today, forced confessions, prison letters, torture testimonies, and final voice messages travel across the world in seconds. Every execution leaves a digital trace. Every hanging is witnessed.

Silence is no longer ignorance. Silence is a choice.

The world must stop treating these executions as isolated headlines buried beneath the endless flow of media. Governments, universities, athletes, journalists, and ordinary people must speak the names of those being erased. They must refuse normalization. They must refuse indifference.

Because history has already shown what happens when the world watches authoritarianism tighten the noose around students, intellectuals, artists, athletes, and dissidents — and chooses to look away.

The Deliberate Execution of Iran's Brightest for Media — and the World's Silence

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