Urgent Statement from the Ahwazi Prisoner Network Regarding the Execution of Six Ahwazi Youth

In a grave escalation of systematic violations against the Arab Ahwazi people, Iranian authorities executed six young Ahwazi men by hanging at Sheiban Prison in Ahwaz city on Saturday morning, October 4, 2025. The executed Majdam, Habib al-Dris, Moein al-Khanfari, and Sayed Salem al-Mousawi, who had been detained since 2018 and subjected to entirely secret trials without any transparency or adherence to international legal standards were Sayed Adnan al-Ghabishawi, Mohammad Reza al-Moqadam, Ali al-.

The Ahwazi Prisoner Network condemns in the strongest terms this heinous crime, which represents a continuation of the Iranian regime's terrorist approach to targeting Arab Ahwazis through arbitrary executions based on fabricated charges bearing no relation to truth.

 These six young men were detained for over seven years without their families being informed of trial proceedings or execution dates, in flagrant violation of the most fundamental principles of fair trial and the right to life enshrined in international human rights conventions.

According to information received by the Network from credible sources inside Sheiban Prison, conditions for political prisoners have reached catastrophic levels that can only be described as systematic crimes against humanity. The prison, located twelve kilometers outside Ahwaz city, has become a human slaughterhouse where over one hundred and twenty-five political prisoners are crammed into Ward Five, designed to accommodate only one hundred inmates.

The Network has documented testimonies from released prisoners describing Sheiban Prison as worse than death itself, with deliberate medical neglect, accumulation of contaminated water and sewage in the sixty-square-meter courtyard where cooking takes place, and temperatures exceeding forty-nine degrees Celsius with broken air conditioning systems.

Prison Director Khosro Tarafi regularly tells Arab political prisoners they should have been executed years ago, while guards systematically destroy prisoners' belongings and subject them to brutal attacks and torture methods including the coffin technique, where prisoners are bound and placed in iron boxes less than fifty centimeters high until they lose consciousness.

This execution occurs amid a documented surge in Iranian executions targeting ethnic minorities, with international organizations reporting over one thousand executions in Iran during 2025 thus far, the highest number recorded in at least fifteen years. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly confirmed that minorities including Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, and Baluchis are disproportionately affected by executions, with Arab Ahwazis representing sixteen percent of those executed on political charges between 2010 and 2024.

The Ahwazi Prisoner Network emphasizes that these executions constitute crimes against humanity and systematic ethnic cleansing against the Arab Ahwazi people. The Network calls upon the United Nations Security Council to immediately intervene and refer the situation in Ahwaz to the International Criminal Court and demands the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights dispatch an urgent fact-finding mission to visit Sheiban Prison and investigate torture allegations.

 Further calls upon the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation to break their shameful silence and take concrete action to protect Arab Ahwazis from ongoing genocide, demands international human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launch urgent campaigns to expose conditions in Iranian prisons, and appeals to the International Committee of the Red Cross to immediately visit Sheiban Prison and provide humanitarian assistance to political prisoners facing imminent execution.

The Ahwazi Prisoner Network warns that international silence and inaction embolden the Iranian regime to continue its systematic murder of Ahwazi youth. The blood of these six martyrs and hundreds of others before them demands justice and accountability.

The international community must act now before more lives are lost to this criminal regime's reign of terror against the Arab Ahwazi people.

Time is running out, and urgent action is not merely a moral imperative but a legal obligation under international law to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity

Ahwazi Prisoner Network

Samir Yassin. 

October 5, 2025