The Butcher of Iran: Who was President Ebrahim Raisi?
A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi crashed on Sunday while navigating mountainous terrain in heavy fog, according to Iranian state television. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other officials were also aboard the helicopter with the President. There were no survivors.
But who is Raisi and what did he stand for? Perpetrating some of the worst human rights abuses I have ever documented…
It is the stuff of wild nightmares.
It was a sweltering July afternoon in 1983 when more than a dozen Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps members knocked down Farideh Goudarzi’s aunt’s door, guns drawn. At nine months pregnant, the twenty-one-year-old could barely run, let alone walk. Under surveillance for her opposition endeavors and distribution of anti-regime leaflets, all Goudarzi could do was wait.
“I was taken straight away into an interrogation room about three by four meters with just one table in the middle used for flogging prisoners,” she said. “The floor was covered with blood. I did not know then that a lot of that fresh blood was from my husband, who disappeared two days earlier.”
Despite being days away from giving birth to her first child, Goudarz remembered being barbarically lashed with electric cables across almost every inch of her quivering body and slapped so voraciously across the face that she still suffers now with jaw arthritis and bouts of shooting pain.
“About eight men were standing there to flog me. But I remember one man most of all – he was young, maybe 21 or 22, with a dark shirt over his pants. He was standing in the corner watching the other men flog me and flog me,” Goudarzi said. “He seemed to enjoy it. That man was Ebrahim Raisi.”
Even after giving birth, Goudarzi remained with her wailing, malnourished son in solitary confinement for more than six months before being slapped with a death sentence. As it turned out, Goudarzi served six years behind bars in Hamedan, listening every day as familiar faces were taken out into the dead of night and executed—including that of her husband. He was hanged using a rate in a prison courtyard.
However, Goudarzi is hardly alone in nursing painful memories connected to Raisi. For many, the torture and trauma of life inside an Iranian regime prison is still raw.
“I was a university student, almost seven months pregnant, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came,” Kobra Jowkar, in her early sixties, noted softly. “They raided our home at midnight and were very ruthless.”
That ruthlessness, she claimed, included kicking her around like a soccer ball — and walking on her bulging belly. The worst would come later, behind bars in Tehran’s Evin Prison, when guards mauled her raw flesh with cables and sticks in front of her husband, knowing he could do nothing but watch, unable to protect his young wife and unborn first child.
Their crime? Suspicion of supporting the anti-Iranian regime Mojahedin-e-Khalq organization.
Jowkar’s husband was soon executed in the dilapidated prison courtyard. She gave birth inside a filthy, infested cell with the help of a fellow prisoner around her mother’s age.
The trauma she suffered is seemingly generational.
“My son is a grown man now, an engineer, in Sweden, but he has had to undergo an operation for his pelvis, and one leg that was growing shorter than the other,” Jowkar explained, adjusting her neatly tied silk headscarf, shifting uncomfortably like a little girl herself.
Her baby boy was hardly the only child to grow up in the confines of political imprisonment in Iran during the tumultuous decade following the 1979 revolution. There were dozens of newborns, Jowkar says, cared for by malnourished mothers who could not produce milk. She took other infants to breastfeed them with whatever excess she could produce.
No matter what one thinks of the opposition outfit, its brutal treatment at the hands of the regime only adds to the pile of evidence of gross human-rights abuses inside the country.
The accounts of prisoners, now in exile, show the other side of a government whose representatives are typically seen in formal settings, alongside other dignitaries, presenting the cleanest image of the regime.
Hengameh Haj-Hassan, now 70, worked as a nurse in Tehran during the rise of the new religious regime. Although a devout Muslim and scarf-adorned herself, she recalls taking to the streets in protest of new hijab mandates in 1980.
“If a woman did not observe the veil, [authorities] splashed acid on them or cut their face with razors,” Hassan claimed. “Some even received a thumbtack through the forehead to make sure the scarf was kept on their head.”
Soon, religious police wielding clubs also dragged the young medical professional into Evin, she says. Within the notorious gulag, still considered one of the worst in the world, guards took Hassan for interrogation, where the beatings immediately began.
“There were many women, and I saw they all had calves lacerated,” she recalled. “I thought they had been shot in the leg. But I later found out everyone had been flogged with cables. I couldn’t believe my eyes — that a Muslim government was doing this to other Muslims.”
Over the course of their long and arduous years behind bars, detainees describe being routinely transferred from prison to prison, from the horrifying to horrendous. But the most gut-wrenching moment buried deep in Hassan’s graveyard of memories was when a six-month-old baby was taken away for “medical help” and never returned.
“The mother was crying and asking for her child,” Hassan continued, her voice cracking. “It took them a long time, but eventually guards finally told her that her child had died, but nobody knew how.”
“The cables all came with different thicknesses—these guards knew exactly which ones would shock you, which ones would induce a burning sensation. They were extremely skilled at what they were doing,” Royaie said, noting that he was eventually issued a ten-year prison term at a “kangaroo court.” “The moment I arrived in jail, authorities shaved my head and eyebrows and forced me to eat it. This was all under Ebrahim Raisi.”
Born in the once-prized Silk Road northeastern city of Mashhad in 1960, Raisi began studies to become a cleric in the holy city of Qom at just fifteen years old, joining the regime’s judiciary wing as a teen. And in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution at just nineteen, he began serving as an assistant prosecutor in Karaj, on the edges of Tehran, despite having no university education. The ultra, hardline conservative rose rapidly through the ranks during the 1980s, holding positions such as chief prosecutor of the clergy, earning membership into the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, and as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Tehran revolutionary court during the 1980s.
“Raisi is the protégé of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, who trusts Raisi to protect and extend his own revolutionary legacy,” Jim Phillips, Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at The Heritage Foundation once told me. “He is a serial human rights abuser who was involved in mass killings of political dissidents in 1988 when he played an important role on a panel that sentenced thousands of political prisoners to death.”
In 1988, he was one of just four persons—later dubbed the “death committee”—selected by the then-Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to carry out the chilling fatwa to massacre and summarily execute more than 30,000 political prisoners like Goudarzi and Royaie, mostly connected to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), which Tehran continues to deem a terrorist organization for its long-standing rebellion against the government.
During the 1990s and into the 2000s, the devout regime loyalist was delegated to several influential posts, ranging from head of the General Inspector’s Organization to Iran’s Attorney General. In 2016, Raisi became leader of the robust religious foundation Astan Quds Razavi, which is the shrine of Imam Reza—the Prophet’s eighth successor according to the Duodecimal Shiites.
Raisi ran for the presidency in 2017 under Khamenei’s faction but suffered a surprise loss to Hassan Rouhini. The next time around, however, observers stressed that all potential contenders were eliminated from the pool.
In March 2019, Khamenei selected Raisi to become Iran’s Judiciary Chief and is believed to have ordered more than 500 executions in his first two years alone. Iran is second only to China in reported total numbers of capital punishments carried out per year. Still, critics say many more likely fall into the shadow of darkness without documentation. Iran also remains one of just seven countries known to inflict the death penalty on children.
“As a hardliner, Raisi is dedicated to upholding the Islamic Republic’s repressive, Islamist ideology,” Jordan Steckler, Research Analyst for United Against Nuclear Iran told me at the time of his ascendance. “Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution and still carries out the death penalty for minors. The regime further denies the Iranian people freedom of expression, of assembly, and of the press. It has brutally cracked down on every major protest movement since the founding of the Islamic Republic. At every stage, Raisi has been a party to Iran’s systemic human rights abuses.”
Meanwhile, when the topic of sexual violence is brought up, a group of five female survivors huddled together in uniform-like blazers with knotted navy and red headscarves seem to drift into dream-like states. One victim slowly stands up and begins pacing aimlessly around the room, unable to stay still as the stories are brought back to life.
Hassan described an incident in which a young woman threw herself out of the cell window after allegedly being raped. Another girl, in a fit of rage, threw her clothes against the wall, she recalls.
“Another time, 15 or 16 guards took one very beautiful girl into a room, and you could hear her screaming,” Hassan told me, a hint of bitterness creeping into her gentle voice. “They wanted to make sure she didn’t die a virgin. So then she was executed.”
Often, torture victims recount the modes of torment they endured with a kind of distant stoicism, as if talking about a life that isn’t really theirs, perhaps to blunt the twinge of muscle memory. In Hassan’s case, she chronicles the brutality of being blindfolded and summoned inside “the cage” — a narrow enclosure just big enough for her body to curl into with her head hung low.
She said that she remained there for eight months, allowed to shower only on rare occasions, and let out just long enough to pray.
The men also speak of horrors that are hard to imagine that humans could inflict on other humans.
Mahmoud Royaie, 62, was born to a middle-class family in Tehran in 1963. Just fifteen when the Shah was overthrown, he quickly found himself immersed in opposition politics. On August 30, 1981, authorities were dragged by authorities while walking down the street and taken immediately to the torture and interrogation room without any semblance of due process.
“We were made to stand in the hallway, and all you could hear were the screams of those being tortured—I remember the screams of the women being severely flogged and raped by their captors,” he said. “I had never heard anything like it. All I could do was wait.”
Royaie, also under the direction of Raisi and his comrades, recalled being shoved facedown onto that bench of torment with his hands and feet stretched and bound, his eyes covered with a thick black blindfold. When the cable lashings became too excruciating to bear, he said a foul-smelling, blood-soaked cloth was shoved inside his mouth.
“The first day I arrived, they shaved my head and eyebrows and forced me to eat them,” alleges.
Again, these people point to one individual, Ebrahim Raisi — when he was a top Iranian legal official in the 1980s and 1990s — as the architect of the “kangaroo courts,” which resulted in countless people being shot or being taken to the gallows within minutes. The inmates dubbed him “The Butcher.”
Raisi is also the subject of a 2022 lawsuit just filed by a related Iranian opposition group on behalf of victims who allege the now-president “personally ordered” their torture in 1988.
The torture, both physical and psychological, is a constant in the accounts of those who lived through this period. I am told of the ominous “corridor of death,” a hall where prisoners lined up, bloodied and blindfolded, waiting for their execution orders. Akbar Samadi, now 57, believes he survived after a face-to-face encounter with Raisi only because his death-sentence mandate was left on the table, and his name was never called.
“Every half an hour, they would call a group of names and take them. One time, they read a name, and the guard became very anxious because the person did not answer, and they realized they had executed a person with a similar name by mistake,” Samadi says.
“Because my name wasn’t there, and they did not know what to do with me, I was sent to solitary confinement instead.”
Asghar Mehdizadeh claims to be one of the few known survivors to have passed through the corridor, and then the “final will and letter-writing room,” before being dragged to the dark gallows called “the final stage” as a means of psychological suffering. Bloated corpses piled up on the floor, and twelve blindfolded men waited with nooses around their necks, he tells me.
“They started chanting and were kicking the chairs themselves,” Mehdizadeh whispers, emphasizing that the men would not allow the guards to determine the timing of the final moment on earth. “I started feeling dizzy, and I fainted.”
Mehdizadeh claims he was yanked out, having been shown the room as a warning.
“It is a war over human dignity,” asserts another member, Hossein Farsi. “When I was released, I could not convince myself to go and have an ordinary life.”
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