Iranian security forces used mosques across Tehran to deploy personnel, monitor protesters and support operations during the January crackdown, evidence obtained by Iran International shows.
Intercepted radio communications, video footage and eyewitness accounts point to security forces operating from several mosques in and around the capital on January 8 and 9, when protests drew large crowds and authorities launched a deadly crackdown.
In one intercepted exchange, security personnel discussed deploying forces and equipment inside Imam Hossein Mosque, which Iran International geolocated to the intersection of Sattari and Mokhbari in western Tehran.
Witnesses described security operations around the mosque as electricity was cut in the area and surveillance drones flew overhead.
Other locations identified through footage and witness accounts included mosques along Andarzgoo Boulevard and Qolhak Grand Mosque.
Witnesses also described security personnel positioned outside some mosques engaging protesters before forces inside emerged to beat and arrest them.
Taken together, the evidence suggests some mosques served not simply as gathering points but as bases from which security forces monitored and confronted protesters.
Shooting from rooftops
Several eyewitnesses described mosque rooftops being used as observation or firing positions.
One witness described several people positioned on the roof of a mosque near Kashani Boulevard in western Tehran on January 8.
“The sound of a stun grenade could be heard,” the witness said. “Once the crowd scattered a little, they started shooting from above.”
In Naziabad in southern Tehran, another witness described protesters coming under fire from elevated positions.
“They were being shot at from the rooftops of mosques and Basij bases,” the witness said.
Witnesses in the area described security forces firing directly at crowds and from elevated positions, with a number of protesters wounded or killed.
Video footage obtained by Iran International also showed surveillance drones flying above crowds during the protests.
Other witnesses described security personnel monitoring protesters with cameras from inside mosques. Some said windows at mosque buildings had been broken to create positions from which weapons could be fired and described seeing weapons fitted with laser sights.
In several areas, witnesses also said security forces pursued protesters who sought refuge in residential buildings or private parking garages, beating some of those sheltering inside and preventing injured protesters from leaving to seek medical treatment.
Iran International was not able to independently verify each of those accounts or determine who was responsible for individual shots seen or heard in footage.
Allegations of fires
Some witnesses alleged that security personnel themselves damaged or set fire to mosques that authorities could subsequently portray as having been attacked by protesters.
One witness also said security forces left gas valves open at a mosque before departing, creating the risk of a fire or explosion.
Iran International could not independently verify those accounts or establish whether any fires at the sites were deliberately started by security forces.
The allegations are significant because Iranian authorities repeatedly portrayed damage to mosques and other religious sites during the January unrest as evidence of violence by protesters.
Civilian sites used in crackdowns
The apparent use of mosques as operational sites in Tehran follows evidence that security forces used other civilian buildings during the January crackdown.
A separate Iran International investigation in neighboring Alborz province found security forces using a public library as an ammunition store and staging point, schools and mosques as gathering places for armed personnel, and the roof of a cinema as a firing position.
There is also precedent for security forces operating from or around religious sites during earlier protests.
Human Rights Watch documented security forces firing on protesters and bystanders from rooftops around Zahedan’s Grand Mosalla prayer hall and Makki Mosque during the September 2022 crackdown known as Bloody Friday.
The United Nations separately documented the use of live ammunition, tear gas and metal pellets against protesters following Friday prayers in Zahedan, with footage analyzed by the UN appearing to show security forces firing from rooftops.
The evidence gathered in Tehran suggests some mosques became part of the security apparatus during the January crackdown: used to assemble personnel and equipment, monitor crowds and, according to multiple eyewitnesses, confront protesters.
The judiciary accused Majid Adineh of taking “operational action” for Israel, the United States and hostile groups and cooperating with them against Iran’s security and national interests.
Adineh was put to death at dawn. A Revolutionary Court in Karaj had also ordered the confiscation of all his property.
He was arrested with another person on January 9 near Karaj by intelligence forces of the Revolutionary Guards' Alborz provincial branch.
Adineh’s case included charges of “enmity against God through deliberate arson, collusion against internal security, propaganda against the Islamic Republic and unauthorized possession of weapons.”
Iranian authorities have long used broadly worded charges such as espionage, acting against national security, armed rebellion, enmity against God and corruption on earth to crush dissent and remove political opponents. Human rights organizations say these labels are routinely applied to protesters, dissidents and political prisoners to portray them as security threats and provide a legal pretext for execution.
Executions accelerate
Adineh's execution came one week after Shahram Sadeghi, another January protest detainee.
An Iran International review shows about 60 political prisoners have been executed since the beginning of the Iranian calendar year in March, while dozens more have received death sentences on political charges.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said on August 5 that at least 56 political prisoners were executed since March 19, including 27 whose cases were connected to the January protests. More than 100 others faced execution, Türk added.
Türk called the lack of fair-trial guarantees "deeply troubling," citing reports of confessions obtained under torture and cases in which only weeks separated arrest from execution.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN experts have documented repeated cases in which such convictions were issued by revolutionary courts after grossly unfair or highly expedited proceedings, with defendants denied meaningful access to lawyers and verdicts based on torture-tainted forced confessions. Rights groups therefore describe many executions carried out under these charges as arbitrary and politically motivated, warning that the authorities’ allegations should not be treated as independently established facts.
Marzban said she was arrested on May 17, 2023, while walking in a park, when two men and a woman approached her and told her she was being detained. After she resisted, two more men arrived and forced her into a vehicle, she wrote.
She said she was blindfolded and driven for about an hour to a location she later learned was an Intelligence Ministry detention facility.
According to her account, a female officer took her to a room for a search and ordered her to remove all her clothes. She said she was then wrapped in a chador while naked and taken by force to a basement cell.
Less than 10 minutes later, Marzban wrote, a masked man entered the cell and raped her despite her resistance, screams and protests.
“Time felt like years,” she wrote. “I don’t know, perhaps half an hour; perhaps less or more.”
Marzban said she was left bleeding on the floor of the cell after the assault.
She said two masked women and another woman dressed as a nurse entered the cell several minutes later and treated her injuries.
Marzban said several men subsequently told her she would be released that night if she remained silent about what had happened. She was blindfolded again, driven away from the facility and repeatedly warned during the journey about the consequences of speaking out, according to her letter.
She said she was eventually left near her home at around 7 p.m.
Silence and a second arrest
Marzban said she initially told no one about the assault, including her spouse, who she said had lived for years with advanced Parkinson’s disease.
“After this incident, I became isolated, distanced myself from others and stopped going to the park for walks,” she wrote.
She was arrested again around midnight on January 14, 2026, and taken to the same Intelligence Ministry detention facility, according to the letter.
Marzban said the greatest source of torment during the 22 days she spent there was the fear that she would be sexually assaulted again.
She said she repeatedly objected to men entering the women’s detention area and was met with hostility from officials.
Marzban, who converted to Catholic Christianity, was later transferred to Evin prison. She was sentenced by a Tehran Revolutionary Court in June to nine years and eight months in prison on charges including “propaganda against the system” and “assembly and collusion against national security.”
She said she tried several times during her later detention to file a formal complaint over the alleged 2023 assault, but officials prevented her from doing so and threatened her into silence.
Seven months after her latest arrest, she wrote, the sight of men still causes her anxiety.
Previous allegations of sexual violence in detention
Marzban’s account adds to years of allegations by political prisoners and protesters who have described rape, sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence in Iranian prisons and detention centers.
Iran International reported in February that several women and girls detained during January’s protests said they had been sexually assaulted or raped in custody. Among them were a young woman and a 17-year-old girl who said they were raped at an unofficial detention facility operated by the Revolutionary Guards.
Twenty-two female political and religious prisoners at Evin also wrote that year demanding an investigation into what they described as sexual abuse during body searches.
A year-long Iran International investigation published in 2024 found evidence that security forces had used sexual violence against protesters across several provinces during the 2022 demonstrations.
Victims have often said fear of retaliation and distrust of Iran’s judicial system deterred them from filing complaints, while those who did pursue cases frequently said their complaints went nowhere.
Marzban said she was speaking publicly in the hope that others who had suffered similar abuse would feel able to tell their stories.
“I hope that one day the seeds of our suffering will sprout,” she wrote, “and the tree of our demand for justice will grow strong.”
The push is coming from figures with real leverage, including inside the judiciary, and it has two aims: harsher enforcement of the dress code now, and an end to the suspension of Iran's strict Hijab and Chastity law.
Tehran Prosecutor Ali Salehi said on Monday the judiciary was preparing to move against cafes, restaurants and clothing stores for "committing acts contrary to public chastity and selling unconventional clothing."
On Thursday he went further, ordering judicial authorities to identify and confront what he called "organized and networked actors" promoting unveiling, whom he accused of spreading corruption in public places and offending public sentiment.
The closures were already underway. In recent weeks authorities have shut cafes, restaurants, shops and sports clubs in more than 15 cities, including Tehran, over hijab violations by customers or staff.
Women have also been blocked from obtaining motorcycle licenses, despite a government decision sent to police in February.
The reformist daily Shargh wrote on Wednesday that the resistance appeared to have little to do with law or road safety, and everything to do with what women would be wearing on the bikes.
'Hijab is a flag'
The pressure is louder on the street and online than in the institutions.
Hijab has moved to the front of the placards and slogans at the nightly pro-government rallies, according to social media users who follow them. Those gatherings drew some unveiled women in the early weeks of the war. They are far smaller now, and the crowd is almost entirely hardline.
Their target is often President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has not submitted the Hijab and Chastity law to government bodies for implementation, and whom demonstrators accuse of letting unveiled women multiply.
Pezeshkian has not objected to the law itself. The decision to freeze it was taken above him, out of fear that enforcing it would set off a new wave of anti-government protests.
Female hardliners have held their own gatherings in cities including Isfahan and Mashhad. Outside the governor's office in Isfahan, one placard carried a line attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "Unveiled women are our free soldiers."
Online, hardliners have been circulating footage of women walking, exercising, dancing and singing in shopping centers, cafes and streets, demanding that the authorities act against women they call "naked."
"Do you see the widespread wave of hijab tweets? The message is completely clear: the authorities have made up their minds to put an end to this situation. I can't wait for the operational phase to begin as soon as possible," one hardline user wrote.
The argument they make for themselves is that the veil is not a rule but a banner. "Hijab is the flag of the Islamic Republic and must not be allowed to fall," runs a common formulation.
"Hijab is not merely a secondary religious ruling; hijab is a flag," a hardline cleric posted. "If there is leniency over it, it will lead to the destruction of the family and the weakening of other religious laws." His patience, he warned, and that of others like him, could run out.
Other users have been keeping score. One noted that the same voices who spent the war demanding control of the Strait of Hormuz, guaranteed revenues from the waterway and a seat at the table of global oil pricing had "returned to factory settings," their attention back on women’s clothing.
A law too dangerous to use
The Hijab and Chastity law, finalized in 2024, is harsher than anything before it, and includes provisions that would let civilian groups confront women over their clothing.
It has never been enforced. Implementation was suspended over fears it would set off protests on the scale of those that followed Mahsa Amini's death, and the Supreme National Security Council's decision still stands.
The freeze carries the late supreme leader's authority. Interior Ministry spokesman Ali Zeynivand said this month that it was decided under Ali Khamenei and has not changed, and that Pezeshkian, too, supports it.
Meanwhile, the streets have moved. Unveiled women are far more visible than a year ago, and many now dress in ways that would have been unthinkable in public not long before.
Women's rights activists warn against reading that as the end of compulsory hijab. Women employed in government offices and institutions are still held to the dress code, and unveiled women are still turned away from some buildings and services unless they cover their hair, arms and legs.
Some users see the easing as a product of the war rather than a change of policy, and expect it to end with the fighting. "If the situation becomes more stable, I doubt the authorities will refrain from bringing their repressive forces back onto the streets to enforce hijab on women," one wrote.
Even among those who support compulsory hijab, some think a crackdown now would backfire. Morteza Panahian, a young cleric who has also criticized the refusal to license women motorcyclists, wrote that anyone blaming the spread of unveiling on the law's suspension had evidently never read the law.
"This law is so impossible to implement that, if it is promulgated, the pace of unveiling will double," he wrote.
