A New Wave of Violence Against Opponents and Protesters in Iran Returns?

The announcement of a death sentence for an "Mossad agent" by Abbas Jafari Dolat Abadi, the public and revolutionary prosecutor of Tehran, comes one day after Mike Pence's speech on October 23 in Washington, marking the 34th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. This indicates an acceleration and expansion of actions and reactions expected from the consequences of Donald Trump's speech on October 13 regarding Iran and the nuclear agreement. No previous U.S. administrations have commemorated the anniversary of the October 23, 1983, Beirut bombing, which killed 241 U.S. Marines, and the accusations of the Islamic Republic of Iran's involvement in that explosion and another major bombing in April of the same year that destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, resulting in 58 deaths, have only been raised in the form of court rulings issued by local U.S. courts in favor of the victims' survivors and not as formal accusations by political officials and members of the U.S. government. The Beirut suicide bombings, the bombing and explosion of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait in 1983, the kidnappings of American and European citizens, and the hijacking of a Jordanian airline in 1985, which ended with the intervention of Hashemi Rafsanjani for the release of the passengers and the explosion of the plane at Beirut airport, are part of the accusations attributed to "Hezbollah Lebanon." The Islamic Republic has never denied its close relations with that group. The accusation against the individual for whom the Tehran prosecutor announced a death sentence on Tuesday was "providing addresses and some details of thirty prominent individuals involved in research, military, and nuclear projects to Mossad intelligence officers." The details provided by the Tehran prosecutor match the accusations against "Ahmadreza Jalali," an Iranian researcher residing in Sweden, who traveled to Iran at the invitation of educational centers and was arrested on charges of espionage by the Islamic Republic's intelligence sources, and has been in prison since May 5 of last year. The Islamic Republic executed Majid Jamali Fashi in May 2012 on similar charges. The practice of "suspicious executions" by the Islamic Republic in retaliation for the killing of personnel at Iran's nuclear and missile facilities during terrorist actions, suspected to involve foreign agents, as well as increased violence against the people to instill fear domestically, is a pattern that the Islamic government has followed in the past with varying degrees of intensity. It is not unexpected that, as a result of new confrontational and punitive U.S. policies and changes in the nature of foreign relations and the internal situation in Iran, a new wave of violence may return to the country. A recent official report by Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, which addresses the crisis resulting from human rights violations in Iran, contains her concerns regarding "the number of executions and torture, executions of minors, the trial and harassment of human rights activists, restrictions on freedom of expression, and the status of women's rights and ethnic and religious minorities." In the past, the Islamic Republic has responded to internal and external crises with harsh measures, particularly by launching waves of executions. The first wave of executions at the beginning of the revolution continued until 1984, with some unofficial statistics indicating that up to six thousand people were executed during that period in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. The second wave of executions in 1988 led to the loss of up to 15 thousand opponents of the Islamic Republic in prisons, the assassination of over a hundred opponents of the Islamic Republic abroad, including Shapur Bakhtiar, the last prime minister before the Iranian revolution, Shahriar Shafigh, a senior officer in the Imperial Navy, General Gholamali Oveisi, artist Fereydoun Farrokhzad, and Sadegh Sharafkandi, the secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and the implementation of the "chain murders" plan, which was mainly executed during Rafsanjani's presidency and was officially revealed during Khatami's presidency, with Dariush Forouhar being one of the most well-known victims. The trend of regional developments, the announcement of the new U.S. administration's foreign policy lines regarding the Iranian government, which Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Secretary of State, emphasized on Wednesday in New Delhi, targeting the "malicious behaviors" of the Islamic Republic, and the prediction of new sanctions that could return the country to the financial and economic situation of 2012 to 2016, are precursors to a new crisis threatening the Iranian religious government.