Caught in the Grind: State-enabled Violence and the Limits of International Solidarity with Iranians

By Fatemeh Shams

In June 2025, Israel bombed the entrance and several sections of the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. The prisoners were caught between bombs raining down from above and the inhuman conditions inside. The sources of their ordeal could not have been more different, yet the consequences converged; each force, in its own way, proved equally destructive, and sometimes fatal, for those trapped inside. Keyvan Mohtadi, a former political prisoner whose wife, Anisha Assadollahi, was in detention during the bombardment, wrote about the predicament faced by political prisoners and their families at the time. In a piece titled “Prisoners Between Two Blades of a Scissors: Report on the Damage from Yesterday’s Israeli Strikes on Evin Prison,” Mohtadi captured the dire situation of prisoners caught between bombs and prison. [1] The vivid image of the two blades of the scissors has, ever since, become a widely used metaphor among prisoners, their families, and the public to describe their plight in facing an imperialist military-economic war of aggression and an oppressive regime that brutally suppresses dissent through mass incarceration, sham trials, forced confessions, and summary executions.

14 months later, on August 20, 2026, The Guardian published an open letter to Iran’s political prisoners, signed by renowned intellectuals, former detainees, abolitionists, scholars, and activists worldwide. The letter appeared against the backdrop of the same crisis in Iran. Foreign powers were waging war and tightening sanctions, while the Islamic Republic continued to tighten its grip on dissent through an unprecedented surge in mass incarceration, summary executions, a nationwide wave of repression, and a spike in the cost of living. The signatories drew on the prisoners’ words and used the two-bladed scissors as a core image. [2]

The metaphor quickly became the center of a larger dispute. Vijay Prashad, Ajamu Baraka, and others asserted that it imposed a false symmetry, placing the overwhelming military and geopolitical power of the United States and Israel on the same plane as a state defending itself against imperialist aggression. Prashad went further, arguing that in a war of aggression “neutrality or a third space does not exist,” and that this was a time for solidarity with Iran rather than any demands that might weaken it. Baraka made the hierarchy more explicit: “whatever internal contradictions exist, the necessity to resist the external aggressor takes precedence at this historical moment.”[3]

On September 3, more than a hundred Iranian former political prisoners, writers, academics, artists, labor, and women’s-rights activists, both at home and in exile, issued a statement backing the Guardian letter. More than twenty signatories publicly identified themselves as living in Iran, among them prominent former prisoners, union activists, writers, journalists, and people associated with literary and civil society organizations. For the signatories inside Iran, putting their names to the statement was itself a consequential political act in a climate that, according to Iran’s hardline parliamentarians, contact with foreign universities, media, organizations, and dissidents abroad must be punished as espionage and “foreign infiltration.” By signing together, members of Iran’s opposition inside and outside Iran briefly occupied the same political ground that decades of repression have made increasingly dangerous to inhabit. [4]

Their unwrapping of the core image of the scissors’ two blades, referencing multifaceted forms of external and internal oppression that could bear down on the same lives, was precise. “The Iranian people must not be forced to choose between external military and economic aggression and state repression,” they wrote. In a statement published by Feminists for Jina Global Network in support of the Guardian letter’s core principle, the same argument was made even more succinctly: “The two blades of the scissors are not identical, but they do come together to cut and to destroy.”[5]

The force of the metaphor lies in the fact that geopolitics looks first at the blades, their size, origin, military capacity, and historical responsibility. In contrast, for political prisoners and their families, the story begins elsewhere, with their bodies caught between them. They are locked inside the Islamic Republic’s prison system while fearing that the prison itself could be hit by US-Israeli bombs, as it happened in June 2025. A prison and a bomb might represent separate forms of repression, rooted in separate histories. But for the person caught between them, those distinctions make no difference; the danger is just as real.

Following the metaphor’s logic, I argue that for many Iranians, the two blades are part of a wider machinery of intersecting pressures. Distinct forms of power can operate simultaneously, reinforcing one another without becoming identical. This was clearly visible in the first week of September. Niloufar Mojaver was twenty-seven years old and lived with her mother and two brothers in Piranshahr, a Kurdish city in northwestern Iran. She had recently begun working to help support her family. According to her relatives, she met Seyyed Ezzatoddin Seyyed-Taheri, who promised her a better future if she married him. Her mother opposed the marriage. By late August, Niloufar had disappeared.

Roughly ten days later, her alleged suitor brought her, barely alive, to a medical center outside Piranshahr. He reportedly said that she had been injured in a car accident. Her body told a different story. Family members, medical personnel, and Kurdish human-rights groups described days of starvation, beating, torture, sexual assault, and rape. Bruises covered her body. Her jaw and ribs were broken. The back of her head had sustained catastrophic injuries. By the time she reached the hospital, she was brain-dead. [6]

It would be easier if the story could be reduced to the pathology of a male perpetrator. What emerged in the aftermath of Niloufar’s killing, however, made that explanation difficult to defend. Another woman came forward and described an earlier ordeal at Seyyed-Taheri’s hands. She too endured nearly two weeks of confinement, starvation, rape, and beatings severe enough to require weeks of hospitalization. Photographs, medical records, and other documentation of her injuries confirmed her claim. Seyyed-Taheri’s brother also stated that more than a decade earlier, his brother had killed his wife in Naqadeh and served six years in prison. [7]

Seyyed-Taheri’s criminal record raises issues that go beyond what the category of “private violence” can explain alone. Criminal law, sentencing practices, negligence in considering the previous record of violence, women’s economic precarity, lack of safe shelters, and the failure of intervention organizations all contribute to such tragic events. Most critically, the male perpetrator frequently benefits from gendered privileges embedded in the legal system, while women’s options before violence occurs, such as whether their fears are taken seriously, their access to safe shelters, and the consequences of earlier experience of gender violence, are influenced by broader political and organizational factors. The Islamic Republic’s criminal code still sets a woman’s diya, or blood money, at half that of a man’s. In cases of intentional murder, her family may need to pay the difference before qisas can be enforced against a male perpetrator. These provisions do not cause femicide on their own, but they include the unequal value of women’s lives in the law and help sustain a climate of impunity around gendered violence.

The “Stop Femicide in Iran” organization has documented at least 187 femicides in 2025, representing nearly a 9% increase from the previous year and roughly one woman every two days, though the true figure is probably higher. This highlights how state-enabled gendered violence operates, with the state not directly using violence but creating the conditions through protection, impunity, credibility, and escape avenues that facilitate such violence. [8]

During the week in which Niloufar was killed, another form of state-enabled violence unfolded more quietly. On September 3, Aida Heydari, twenty-five, took her own life. Eight months earlier, her fiancé, twenty-seven-year-old Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti, had been shot and killed during the January protests in Zibashahr, Qazvin Province. Their wedding was supposed to take place in September. She could no longer endure the pain and trauma caused by the state’s repeated use of mass violence to repress dissent. Three days after Heydari’s death, Danial Karimi also took his own life. His nineteen-year-old son, Amir-Mohammad Karimi, a former member of Iran’s national junior taekwondo team, had been shot dead during the January 9 protests in Marvdasht. [9]

These tragic incidents are not isolated. In November 2022 and in the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, nineteen-year-old Yalda Aghafazli died five days after her release from detention, where she endured severe beatings and mistreatment. A month later, nineteen-year-old Abbas Mansouri committed suicide six days after being released from twenty days in detention; relatives described him as “profoundly changed” after his release and reported signs of physical assault. Sixteen-year-old Arshia Emamgholizadeh Alamdari likewise ended her life shortly after eleven days in detention, having told friends that he had been beaten and tortured in prison. [10]

To call these suicides “state killings” in the same sense as the shootings would be misleading. Suicide resists simple explanation, and politics cannot reconstruct the private pain that leads to such an end. But removing these deaths entirely from the massacre, torture, and mistreatment that preceded them would be equally misleading.

Mass violence and state repression radiate outward. It pours into families with traumatizing effects; cancels pre-planned marriages; turns birthday and wedding anniversaries into rituals of grief and vanishes hopes and dreams never to be fulfilled. In Iran, mourning itself has often been subject to surveillance and intimidation; families have faced pressure over funerals, burial site choices, commemorations, and the public account of their loss. The original act of violence may last seconds, but its presence in a family lasts for years, if not forever.

In 2022, after the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom) became the single political slogan of the uprising that followed. Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, had been detained by the morality police. A U.N. fact-finding mission later found that she had been subjected to violence leading to her unlawful death. The uprising quickly moved beyond compulsory hijab. Its Kurdish roots and the scale of repression in Kurdistan and Baluchistan placed gender alongside ethnicity, geography, poverty, and the unequal distribution of state violence. The U.N. identified as many as 551 deaths, among them forty-nine women and sixty-eight children, alongside mass arrests, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence.[11]

For intersectional feminists, the movement’s importance reached beyond mere inclusion. It disputed the idea of “women’s oppression” as a standalone category. Factors such as family authority, marriage customs, sexual norms, and monetary dependence were intertwined with gender norms, discriminatory laws, incarceration, and policing. These influences affected Kurdish, Baluchi, Arab, Baha’i, queer, impoverished, and other marginalized communities in distinct ways.

Similar to the current controversy around the Guardian letter, the international response to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement exposed the difficulty of sustaining a politics that can hold multiple truths at once. Woman, Life, Freedom inspired an extraordinary wave of feminist solidarity across much of the world. Yet parts of the international Left approached the uprising through the familiar suspicion of “color revolution,” regime change, and foreign manipulation. That suspicion has a long history. Iran’s experience of foreign intervention runs deep enough that Western claims of solidarity often meet understandable skepticism. Still, vigilance toward possible appropriation can begin to surpass the movement one claims to be protecting from appropriation. [12]

The distinction matters because Iranian dissent has long been delegitimized in precisely these terms. When it comes to Iran, protest often becomes foreign conspiracy; feminists become instruments of Western cultural warfare; workers and dissidents become agents of hostile states. Skeptics on the international Left did not cause the repression that followed Woman, Life, Freedom. That responsibility belongs to the state that carried out the acts of violence. But when every Iranian movement must first prove that it has not been contaminated by Western interest before its claims can be heard, anti-imperialist suspicion begins to reproduce a language already familiar from the state’s own arsenal.

Sanctions complicate this situation even further. They do not produce patriarchy, compulsory veiling, torture, or the criminalization of dissent. Nor can they serve as a universal explanation for Iranian suffering. But economic warfare strikes a society already divided by class, gender, ethnicity, and various forms of state-enabled violence. Its effects, therefore, are refracted through existing inequalities. For a woman trying to leave a violent household, a feminist organization struggling to remain open, or a family already pushed toward poverty, economic pressure can narrow whatever margin of autonomy existed before. Domestic repression and sanctions may arise from different sources, yet one can still make survival under the other more precarious. [13]

Black feminist thought offers a language for precisely this kind of political entanglement. The Combahee River Collective described racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression as “interlocking.” bell hooks refused to isolate patriarchy from capitalism, racism, and imperialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw later named the analytic problem created when structures intersect, but political frameworks can see only one axis at a time. [14] This approach does not erase differentiation; on the contrary, the differences among these structures matter enormously. What it refuses is the demand that those differences be converted into hierarchy, that one form of oppression must be treated as primary before the others can be acknowledged.

Seen from this angle, the scissors metaphor gains rather than loses force. Its insight is vividly corporeal: forces with different histories can meet upon one person. Follow that logic outward and Iranian life begins to resemble a prismatic network of domination, in which domestic and international forms of power intersect and refract through one another. Patriarchal authority, prisons, ethnic and religious marginalization, economic precarity, sanctions, and foreign warfare have different origins indeed. They do not need to become one thing to close around the same life. A multi-bladed machine may be the more accurate extension of the original image. Its blades differ in size, speed, origin, and destructive capacity. Some are vastly more powerful than others. The body caught inside the machinery nevertheless encounters them all at once.

It is here that Prashad’s argument becomes most impossible to sustain. His insistence on the asymmetry of imperial power is necessary. Yet, the difficulty lies in the political timetable he attaches to it: “there is a time to make a demand, and there is a time to act in solidarity.” Essentially, he converts a simple power imbalance into a hierarchy of urgency, choosing not just which power is dominant but also which suffering can be postponed. [15]

For women, queer people, ethnic minorities, workers, and political prisoners, later has a history. Black feminism was shaped in part by resistance to the promise that sexism would be dealt with after racial liberation; gender equality after national liberation; women’s emancipation after the supposedly primary contradiction had been resolved. The difficulty with such sequencing is not merely theoretical. Some people simply do not survive long enough to reach the promised second stage.

Baraka’s formulation, “whatever internal contradictions exist, resistance to the external aggressor takes precedence at this historical moment”, makes the hierarchy even clearer. Prison, execution, gendered coercion, and minority repression become “internal contradictions,” serious perhaps, but temporarily subordinate. Yet the Black radical tradition itself contains a sustained argument against precisely this kind of postponement. Black feminism emerged partly because movements confronting racism and imperial domination could reproduce patriarchy and heteronormativity within their own ranks.[16]

    Abolitionist feminist scholarship poses the same question from the perspective of the prison. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Beth Richie, and Gina Dent have insisted, in different ways, that carceral power cannot be judged by whether the state exercising it is geopolitically friend or foe. A prison does not become less of a prison because the government running it opposes Washington. Nor does a bomb become an instrument of liberation because it falls on such a prison. The political isolation of those held within these institutions raises a related question: whether the very conditions that sever dissidents from transnational networks can be used to disqualify solidarity with them? [17]

     The danger in Prashad’s and Baraka’s argument lies in letting the diagnosis of isolation set the limits of solidarity. If a state succeeds in cutting dissidents off from international networks, their resulting isolation cannot be taken as proof that solidarity with them is somehow inauthentic. Repression would otherwise achieve an unusual victory: first destroying the relationship, then invoking its absence to invalidate political connection. Gaza offers a useful point of comparison without requiring the two situations to be treated as equivalent. Its borders have been subjected to extreme closure, yet enclosure has intensified rather than invalidated global solidarity with Palestinians. Physical separation makes solidarity harder, more uneven, and more vulnerable to appropriation, but it does not decide in advance where solidarity is ethically permitted.

The Iranian signatories who backed the Guardian letter highlighted an alternative perspective that must underpin any solidarity – not just with Iranians, but with all oppressed people around the world. By combining names from inside Iran with those of former prisoners, feminists, writers, and scholars abroad, they temporarily reestablished a political connection that repression sought to sever. They opposed foreign wars without abandoning anti-imperialism toward the Islamic Republic; they opposed the Islamic Republic without using Iranian suffering as a pretext for foreign intervention. This stance was also reflected in the principles of Woman, Life, Freedom, which emphasized that women will not delay their fight for gender emancipation; that life means the right to live a dignified life; and that Freedom rejects both missile-delivered liberation and the belief that sovereignty alone suffices.

Niloufar Mojaver’s tortured body, the wedding Aida Heydari never attended, the grief Danial Karimi carried after the killing of his son, young men and women awaiting execution, and political prisoners told that their demands must wait do not belong to one explanatory system. Patriarchy, authoritarianism, imperialism, sanctions, nationalism, and war remain distinct, and those distinctions matter because responsibility depends on them.

At the center of the scissors’ metaphor is the body caught between two forms of oppression. Extending the image beyond two blades allows us to follow that body into the wider machinery of Iranian life, where forces of different origins and magnitudes can bear down at once. Those caught between these blades should not be asked to silence one form of suffering to make another politically legible.

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Notes

[1] Keyvan Mohtadi, “Prisoners Between Two Blades of a Scissors: Report on the Damage from Yesterday’s Israeli Strikes on Evin Prison,”Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations (CCITTA), June 24, 2025: https://x.com/CoordinatingA/status/1937476477513252979

[2] “To Iran’s Political Prisoners, Trapped ‘Between Two Blades of a Scissors,’” The Guardian, August 20, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners.

[3] Vijay Prashad, “Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists an Illegal War of Aggression,” ZNetwork, August 24, 2026, https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/against-the-false-symmetry-of-the-scissors-an-open-letter-while-iran-resists-an-illegal-war-of-aggression/; Ajamu Baraka, “A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique of ‘An Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners,’” Black Agenda Report, August 26, 2026, https://www.blackagendareport.com/peoples-centered-human-rights-critique-open-letter-irans-political-prisoners.

[4] “Solidarity Beyond Ideological Camps: In Support of the Open Letter in Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Iran,” Global Movement to Free Iran’s Political Prisoners, September 3, 2026, https://www.freeiranspoliticalprisonersnow.org/global-mvmt-news/solidarity-beyond-ideological-camps-in-support-of-the-open-letter-in-solidarity-with-political-prisoners-in-iran; Maziar Motamedi, “Iran’s Hardline Parliament Raises Concerns with ‘Foreign Infiltration’ Plan,” Al Jazeera, August 19, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/19/irans-hardline-parliament-raises-concerns-with-foreign-infiltration-plan.

[5] Feminists for Jina Global Network, “Internationalism from Below: In Support of the Open Letter Published in Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Iran,” 2026, https://feminists4jina.net/archives/2130.

[6] Kurdistan Human Rights Network, “Young Woman Declared Brain-Dead after Torture, Sexual Violence,” September 7, 2026, https://kurdistanhumanrights.org/en/news/2026/09/07/young-woman-declared-brain-dead-after-torture-sexual-violence.

[7] Kurdistan Press Agency (Kurdpa), “Niloofar Mojavar; Details of Brain Death Following 10 Days of Torture, Rape, and Deprivation of Food and Water / Her Two Remaining Healthy Kidneys Donated,” September 5, 2026, https://kurdpa.net/en/news/2026-09-05-60995.

[8] Kurdistan Press Agency (Kurdpa), “Exposure by One of the Victims of ‘Seyed Ezzatoddin Seyed-Taheri’; Recurrence of Torture, Violence, and Rape,” September 8, 2026, https://kurdpa.net/en/news/2026-09-08-61013.

[9] Islamic Penal Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2013), arts. 382 and 550; Mohammad H. Tavana, “Three Decades of Islamic Criminal Law Legislation in Iran: A Legislative History Analysis with Emphasis on the Amendments of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code,” Electronic Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law 2 (2014): 36; Mai Sato, “Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/58/62, March 12, 2025, paras. 32, 34–35;

[10] Stop Femicide Iran, “At Least 187 Women Killed in Iran in Documented Femicide Cases in 2025,” Annual Report 2025, https://stopfemicideiran.org/at-least-187-women-killed-in-iran-in-documented-femicide-cases-in-2025/.

[11] “Fiancée of Slain Protester, Father of Another Die by Suicide in Iran,” Iran International, September 7, 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202609070282.

[12] United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Report A/HRC/55/67, February 2024, para. 22; see also “Update on the Situation of Women and Girls in the Context of the September 2022 Protests and the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” September 13, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/ffmi-iran/FFM-Iran-Update-13-September-2024.pdf.

[13] Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Suspicious Deaths of Released Protesters in Iran Should be Investigated by UN,” January 17, 2023; see also IranWire, “‘Defendant Did Not Express Remorse’: Suspicious Deaths of Young Protesters After Release from Prison,” March 2024.

[14] Wahid Azal, “A Feminist Revolution in Iran?,” CounterPunch, September 30, 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/30/a-feminist-revolution-in-iran/.

[15] Tara Povey, “The Impact of Sanctions and Neo-Liberalism on Women’s Organising in Iran,” Social Sciences 5, no. 3 (2016): article 26, esp. sec. 2.4 and conclusion, https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci5030026.

[16] Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 272–82, esp. 272; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (New York: Routledge, 2015), 16–17; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–67, esp. 140.

[17] Baraka, “A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique of ‘An Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners,’”

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About the Author:
Fatemeh Shams is an Associate Professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her expertise includes cultural production and authoritarianism, gendered historiography, and exile literature. Her first monograph, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under the Islamic Republic, was published by Oxford University Press. She is an internationally acclaimed poet with multiple collections. Her new collection of poems, NABOOD, will be published by Copper Canyon in spring 2027. She was an EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien during the academic years 2021-2024.

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Citiation: Fatemeh Shams, Caught in the Grind: State-enabled Violence and the Limits of International Solidarity with Iranians, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. 10.09.26, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=68539.

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