The Regime Fears Its People More Than the Bombs
Executions surge, digital surveillance tightens, the diaspora watches from Berlin. Iran wages two wars at once, and the one against its own citizens is the one it refuses to lose.
In Tehran, a woman stands in a hallway deleting three months of phone conversations before she steps outside. The bag in her hand holds insulin for her mother, if the pharmacy has any left. The phone in her other hand holds something the state considers more dangerous: evidence of dissent. She is navigating two threats simultaneously, air strikes from above and security forces at street level, and the regime that claims to protect her from the first is the source of the second. This is the defining condition of life in wartime Iran: the state has less fear of foreign bombs than of its own people, and it is using the war as cover to tighten a system of control that was already among the most comprehensive in the world.
This dossier examines Iran's internal repression during the 2026 war through seven articles that move from the street level to the surveillance architecture to the historical pattern and outward to the economic and regional consequences.
Daily life in wartime Tehran operates under compounded dangers. Medicine shortages have become routine as sanctions, war logistics, and currency collapse converge on supply chains. At checkpoints, Basij officers conduct phone inspections that take ninety seconds but sit at the end of a technical pipeline stretching back two decades. The surveillance infrastructure behind those inspections receives detailed examination. Iran's National Information Network, built with Chinese equipment from ZTE and Huawei, enables deep packet inspection across the country's internet traffic. The post-2022 upgrades after the Mahsa Amini protests added the SIAM tracking system, facial recognition under the Noor plan, and the criminalization of VPN use. What began as morality policing has evolved into total digital control, and the war has provided both the justification and the cover to accelerate the rollout.
The execution data tells its own story. Iran executed at least 975 people in 2024 and over 1,900 in 2025, roughly doubling the rate year on year. Ethnic minorities bear a grossly disproportionate share: Baloch citizens make up an estimated 2-5 percent of the population but account for roughly 20 percent of executions. Kurdish citizens, similarly overrepresented, face charges that blur the line between criminal and political. The wartime acceleration follows the pattern of the 1988 mass executions, when the end of the Iran-Iraq war triggered a killing spree against political prisoners rather than the amnesty that typically follows a ceasefire.
That pattern is not unique to Iran. A comparative historical analysis traces the dual-front phenomenon across Argentina's Falklands War, Russia's domestic crackdowns during the Ukraine conflict, and Egypt's post-2013 repression under Sisi. Five recurring mechanisms emerge: legal expansion of emergency powers, media capture, criminalization of opposition, judicial acceleration, and population atomization. What distinguishes Iran is the IRGC's dual mandate as both external military force and internal security apparatus, which makes the transition from foreign war to domestic repression institutionally seamless.
For the roughly 300,000 Iranians living in Germany, the war creates an impossible bind. Diaspora activism risks triggering retaliation against family members back home. The family telephone call has become the primary tool of transnational intimidation: a relative calls to say that someone has asked questions, or simply stops answering. German security services have documented IRGC intelligence operations on German soil, but awareness has not translated into protection for individuals caught between their political convictions and their families' safety.
The economic data frames the repression within a triple crisis. The Rial has lost over 97 percent of its value since 2018, falling from roughly 42,000 to 1,600,000 per dollar on the free market. Shadow oil revenues, estimated at $30 billion in 2025, arrive at steep discounts and are now further disrupted as war conditions complicate ghost fleet operations. The IRGC controls an estimated 20 to 50 percent of the economy, which means that economic collapse structurally enriches the security apparatus even as it devastates ordinary citizens. Bread prices and insulin availability become instruments of control when the institution managing scarcity is the same one conducting arrests.
Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the crackdown reverberates through the Gulf. Khuzestan's Arab minority faces the harshest measures, and cross-border tribal ties make this family news rather than foreign news for communities in southern Iraq and the Gulf states. Refugee flows head primarily toward Iraq and Turkey, and Gulf governments navigate a difficult position between opposing Iranian aggression and avoiding precedents that could constrain their own domestic authority.
What emerges from these seven perspectives is a regime that treats war not as a crisis to be survived but as an opportunity to be exploited. The surveillance infrastructure was built before the bombs fell. The execution machinery was already accelerating. The economic collapse was already enriching the security state. The war simply removed the last constraints on a system that had been preparing for this moment since 2022.