Rifles for volunteers, executions for protesters, and a currency in free fall

Two pictures of Iran were published within 48 hours of each other last week, and both are accurate.

In the first, hundreds of thousands of people filled central Tehran on Friday for a government-organised demonstration, the largest since the war began in February. The Revolutionary Guard commander Hassan Hassanzadeh said more than 600,000 had registered for a civilian weapons-training scheme called Janfaday-e Iran, “ones who sacrifice their lives for Iran”, and that the figure was expected to pass a million. Hossein Taeb, the new head of the Basij militia, said volunteers would be ready for a “full-fledged defense” and would be a “nightmare” for Iran’s enemies. A 24-year-old participant, Marzieh Afaghi, told the Associated Press: “I am here to tell Trump that we Iranians have no fear about his threats.”¹

In the second, published two days earlier, Amnesty International named 62 commanders of Iran’s security forces whom it says should be investigated for crimes against humanity, and concluded that the suppression of the 2025 and 2026 protests bore the same hallmarks as the crackdown on the Mahsa Amini demonstrations, on a larger scale.³ A week before that, Human Rights Watch described an ongoing unlawful execution campaign against protesters.²

Neither picture cancels the other. A state can put a very large crowd on the street and be executing the people who were on the street eight months earlier.

The rally happened and was witnessed. The Associated Press reported hundreds of thousands present; state television said more than 300,000 on Friday morning.¹

The enrolment numbers are different in kind. They come from the Revolutionary Guard, describe a programme the Guard runs, and have not been independently verified. The training itself is described as limited instruction, including with assault rifles, positioned as a layer behind the Guard and the Basij.¹ We label the figure claimed, not because it is implausible, but because the only source for it is the institution it flatters.

The number of people put to death in Iran this year is very large by any historical standard. Reported totals include more than 430 executions in 2026, at least 12 of them women, and 29 announced executions connected to the recent protests between 18 March and the end of August.² Several of those executed were teenagers.⁵

In July, Amnesty said it had identified 60 people, including three children, at risk of execution in connection with protests, and warned that many more could be, given that thousands were arrested after the January demonstrations.³ The organisation had already documented mass arbitrary arrests and political executions in May.⁶ UN experts separately documented alleged torture and enforced disappearances of Bahá’ís in July and of Kurds and Baluchis in August, and death sentences against 12 young men over the January protests drew condemnation for breaching fair-trial standards.⁷

The protests that preceded the war were themselves lethal on a scale that has been somewhat lost behind the fighting: the Associated Press reports more than 7,000 killed and tens of thousands detained.¹ The rights network HRANA continues to document arrests, death sentences and capital charges case by case.⁸

The pattern has continued into this week. Pre-emptive arrests of Kurdish political figures were reported on 18 September, the same day as the rally.⁴

The rial traded at about 2,311,000 to the dollar on 18 September.⁴ The International Monetary Fund has estimated the economy will contract by 6.1 per cent this year with inflation near 69 per cent, and food inflation has been running at roughly 64 per cent.⁹

Those are the conditions in which the government is asking a million people to sign up for rifle training. Iran has also faced nationwide electricity blackouts during summer heat, an industrial shutdown order, and acute water shortages in parts of the country, with outages in some areas lasting up to three days.⁹ Mahan Air announced it would suspend flights between Iran and Turkey from 21 September.⁴

All of this is happening under a leader nobody has seen. Mojtaba Khamenei was named supreme leader on 9 March, nine days after his father was killed in the opening strike of the war, in the first father-to-son succession in the Islamic Republic’s history. He was wounded in the same strike and has not appeared in public since.¹⁰

That absence is the largest unexplained fact about Iranian politics right now. A government mobilising civilians for ground defence, executing its domestic opponents and negotiating over its nuclear programme is doing all of it without a visible head of state.