THE HORRORS of Ayatollah Khomeini Mass Execution Methods *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

In the summer of 1988, inside the prisons of Iran, something was happening that the outside world would not learn about for decades. Men and women were being led into rooms and groups. They were asked a single question. Based on their answer, they were taken in one direction or another. One direction led back to a cell. The other direction led to a rope. Within weeks, an estimated 4,000 to 30,000 people had been killed. No trials, no appeals, no announcements. The Islamic Republic called it justice.

Survivors called it something else entirely. This is the story of how Ayatollah Ruhola Kmeni built a system of execution and what that system looked like from the inside. To understand the methods, you must first understand the man who ordered them. Raul Kmeni was born in 1902 in a small town in central Iran. From an early age, he was immersed in Islamic theology, studying under clerics and eventually becoming one himself. For decades, he operated within the religious establishment of Iran, largely out of the political spotlight.

That changed in the 1960s when he began openly criticizing Muhammad Resa, the westernbacked ruler of Iran. Kmeni’s opposition was rooted in a specific ideology. He believed that Islamic jurists, religious scholars trained in Sharia law should hold direct political power over the state. This concept known in Persian as valate fak or the guardianship of the Islamic jurist was not traditional Islamic doctrine. It was Kmeni’s own theological innovation and it would become the foundation of the

Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1964, after a particularly sharp speech against the sha, Arakmeni was arrested and then exiled. He spent the next 15 years outside Iran. First in Turkey, then in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, and finally in a small village outside Paris. During this time, he continued to preach, distribute cassette tapes of his sermons, and build a network of followers inside Iran. When the Iranian revolution came in 1979, Kumeni did not lead it in the streets. He was 76 years old and living abroad. But his ideology

had saturated the revolutionary movement. When the sha fled and the old government collapsed, it was Kmeni who returned to Thran on a chartered Air France flight to a crowd of millions. Within months, he had consolidated power, eliminated rivals, and established the Islamic Republic. He would rule it until his death in 1989. The execution machinery did not appear overnight. It was constructed piece by piece in the months and years following the revolution. In the spring and summer of 1979, just weeks after the Sha’s fall,

revolutionary courts began operating out of a rooftop in Thran’s Refa. The head of these [clears throat] courts was Saddali, a cleric who would earn the nickname judge blood from Iranian journalists. Kalcali conducted trials that lasted minutes. Defendants were often given no lawyer, no opportunity to present evidence, and no formal charges. Execution orders were signed the same day the verdict was delivered. Among the first to be executed were generals and officials from the Shaw’s regime. Men

accused of crimes ranging from corruption to direct involvement in the suppression of dissident. Some had genuine blood on their hands. Others were convicted on the basis of their rank alone. But the courts did not stop there. Within the first year, the executions expanded to include Kurdish political leaders, leftist organizers, and members of ethnic minority groups who had sought autonomy in the post-revolutionary chaos. Kalcali personally oversaw some of these operations, traveling to Kurdish regions

to conduct summary trials and immediate executions on location. Kmeni was aware of all of this. He did not intervene. In several recorded statements from this period, he explicitly endorsed the speed and severity of the courts, arguing that showing mercy to enemies of the revolution was itself a form of treachery against God. What made these early executions significant was not just their number, but their speed, which the revolutionary court system was built to process people faster than any legal challenge could be mounted. By the

time families had located a lawyer, by the time any appeal had been drafted, the executions had already been carried out. The system was designed to be irreversible before it could be questioned. By the early 1980s, Iran’s prisons had become a world into unto themselves. Eban prison in northern Thran was the most notorious. Originally built under the Sha to house political prisoners, it was inherited by the Islamic Republic and expanded. At its peak in the early 1980s, Evan held thousands of detainees. Many of them

members of leftist organizations like the Mojahedina Kulk known as the mek or MKO as well as the two-day party and Fidian. Conditions inside were documented by survivors who later managed to leave Iran. When a cells designed for two or three people held 10 or 15, interrogation sessions lasted for days without sleep. Prisoners were blindfolded for weeks at a time. Physical punishment was administered within a religious framework. Lashes were counted out according to specific numbers derived from religious rulings

carried out by guards who sometimes prayed between strokes. The psychological dimension was equally calculated. Prisoners were isolated from family. Information about other detainees was used to extract confessions and force denunciations of former comrades. The system was designed not simply to punish but to break down individual identity and force a public declaration of loyalty to the Islamic Republic. Survivors describe a world of complete uncertainty. You did not know when you would be called and you did not

know what you were accused of on any given day. You did not know whether the person in the next cell was still alive. Outside Tehran, similar facilities operated in cities across Iran. Mashad, Isvahan, Tabre, Avas each had its own interrogation units and its own execution schedules. The system was not improvised. It was institutional. The single largest episode of mass execution under Kmeni occurred in the summer of 1988. And for many years, it remained one of the most suppressed events in modern Iranian history. In July 1988,

the Iran Iraq war was grinding toward its end. At the same moment, the MEK launched a military operation across the Iraqi border into western Iran called Operation Eternal Light. The offensive was repelled within days by Iranian forces, but the political effect inside Iran was significant. He Kmeni used the attack as justification for what came next. He issued a fatwa, a religious decree, ordering the execution of all imprisoned MEK members who remain committed to their organization. A committee of three officials was

established in Thrron to carry out the process. Similar committees were set up in prisons across the country. The procedure was methodical. Prisoners were brought before the committee one by one or in small groups. They were asked a series of questions. MEK prisoners were asked whether they remain loyal to the organization and whether they were willing to publicly denounce it. Those who said yes that they remain loyal were taken to a separate area. Those who denounced the organization were sent

back to their cells at least temporarily. The ones taken away were executed. When they were hanged in groups, their bodies buried in mass graves at sites including Cavar Cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran. After the MEK prisoners were processed, the committees turned to prisoners from leftist organizations, Marxists, communists, atheists. These prisoners were asked a different question. Do you believe in God? Those who answered no or who identified as Marxists were categorized as apostates under Kmeni’s

interpretation of Islamic law. They were executed. The entire operation took approximately 5 months. Estimates of the total number killed range from 4,000 on the low end to 30,000 on the high end. Though most researchers and human rights organizations work with figures between 4,000 and 10,000. The Iranian government has never acknowledged the event officially. The mass graves associated with it were later partially bulldozed. One document directly connected to the order survived. In 2016, audio of a

meeting between Ayatollah Montazeri, then Kmeni’s designated successor, and members of the execution committee was made public. In the recording, Montazeri explicitly tells the committee that what they are doing will be recorded as one of the greatest crimes of the Islamic Republic. He was subsequently removed from his position as successor. Kmeni died in 1989 before he could face any consequence for the order. Execution in the Islamic Republic under Kmeni took several forms. Hanging was the most

common in Iranian practice during this period. My hanging was typically carried out by suspension rather than the long drop method. Meaning death came from slow strangulation rather than a broken neck. Cranes were sometimes used in public executions to lift multiple individuals simultaneously. In the prison context, executions were conducted on smaller gallows or from beams inside prison facilities. Firing squad was used primarily in the early post-revolutionary period and for military and political figures.

Execution by firing squad was often carried out at dawn with prisoners brought out in groups. In documented cases from the 1988 massacre specifically, the scale of the operation required adaptation. Survivors and researchers have described prisoners being hanged in groups from ropes tied to cranes or from rows of nooes strung from the rafters of rooms inside prison facilities. Guards worked in shifts. The process ran continuously through the night. The bodies of those executed during the 1988 period were not returned

to families. Families were in many cases not informed of the execution at all. Some learned only when they arrived at the prison for a scheduled visit and were told without explanation that their family member was no longer there. Others received bags of personal belongings with no further information. The location of burial was in most cases deliberately withheld, a practice that human rights organizations have documented as a form of ongoing punishment extended beyond the individual to their surviving relatives.

There was one additional element documented by survivors before the executions were carried out. Women prisoners who had not yet been married were by order of a religious ruling forcibly married to prison guards the night before their execution. The ruling was based on a theological position that a virgin could not be lawfully executed. This practice was documented in testimony to human rights investigators and is among the most widely cited elements of the 1988 operation when the events are discussed by survivors. Kmeni

never faced trial. He died on June 3rd, 1989 of heart failure, approximately 1 year after the mass executions of the previous summer. The Islamic Republic he established continues to operate. Several individuals who sat on the 1988 execution committees have held senior positions in the Iranian government in the decades since. Ibrahim Ricey, who served as a member of the Thrron Committee in 1988, went on to serve as chief justice of Iran and was elected president of Iran in 2021. We international efforts to document the

1988 massacre have been ongoing. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International have called for an independent investigation. The United Nations special raper tour on Iran has repeatedly raised the issue. The Iranian government has rejected all such calls. The mass graves at Cavar and other sites remain. Families gather there periodically, though such gatherings have at times been dispersed by authorities. The families have no official record of what happened. No death certificates were issued. No cause

of death was recorded. The state absorbed their relatives and returned nothing. What happened in Iran in 1988 fits the definition used by international legal bodies for crimes against humanity. A systematic and widespread attack on a civilian population. The man who ordered it died in his bed, mourned by millions, and is buried in a shrine that receives visitors to this day. The methods were not hidden from Kmeni. They were carried out in his name on his written order in accordance with his theological

reasoning. The fatwa existed. The committees existed. The graves exist. That is the history. What separates this from other episodes of political repression is the theological architecture beneath it. Kummeni did not order these executions as a political expedient and justify them afterward. He ordered them because his reading of Islamic law required it. The meek members were hypocrites, a category that in classical juristprudence carries the death sentence. The Marxists were apostates. The Shaw’s generals were

corruptors of the earth. Each category had a legal basis in his system. The executions were not a departure from his ideology. They were its direct expression. That is what makes the record so important to document. This was the story of the execution methods ordered by Ayatollah Kmeni. A system built over a decade ending in one of the most documented and least prosecuted mass killings of the 20th century. The records exist. The survivors exist. The graves exist. If this kind of history is what you come here for, subscribe. More

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