Iran testing advanced surveillance tech to enforce hijab, says watchdog

A report by the Revolutionary Guard's outlet Fars News says Hamid Hosseinnezhad Heydaranlou helped a team of terrorists kill several Iranian border guards enter and exit Iran's borders in November 2017.

However, Hosseinnezhad's daughter Ronahi says security agents forced her father to make a coerced confession under torture.

Born in 1985 and a father of three, Hosseinnezhad worked as a border porter in the Chalderan region to support his family, according to Kurdpa human rights organization.

He was arrested in April 2023 by border guards near Chalderan, interrogated for several hours, and then transferred to the Urmia Intelligence Detention Center.

Hosseinnezhad had previously been moved to solitary confinement on April 15 for the planned execution on April 17. However, the execution was halted that morning amid widespread public protest on social media and the presence of his family and other people outside the prison.

In a brief phone call with his family, Hosseinnezhad confirmed being held in the Urmia Intelligence facility and urged them to follow up on his case.

On the same day, his daughter released a video saying that her father was tortured in prison and forced to confess under duress.

Hosseinnezhad was tried in July 2024 by Reza Najafzadeh, head of Branch 1 of the Urmia Revolutionary Court, and sentenced to death on charges of “rebellion through membership in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).”

According to Kurdpa, he endured 11 months and 10 days of psychological and physical torture aimed at extracting forced confessions of participation in armed clashes between the PKK and Iranian border forces.

In recent months, a rise in executions and death sentences for political prisoners in Iran has sparked widespread condemnation from rights groups and Western governments.

“Teachers across the country will not allow schools to be turned into military barracks,” reads a statement by the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers' Trade Associations, which condemned the move on Monday.

The pact, signed between police chief Ahmadreza Radan and Education Minister Alireza Kazemi, grants security forces a role in shaping school policies in the name of cultural guidance.

“This is a degrading and alarming stance,” said Mohammad Habibi, the council’s spokesperson. He criticized the minister for calling himself a soldier of police and accused him of surrendering civilian education to military influence.

“The education ministry is not the minister’s private estate or a parade ground for security forces,” Habibi said.

Teachers and rights groups say the agreement violates students’ rights and threatens the safety of schools. “Any intrusion of police into the secure space of schools is blatantly illegal, repressive, and a violation of both student and teacher rights,” Habibi added.

Kazemi defended the agreement in a televised ceremony, calling hijab “one of today’s challenges that requires cultural efforts.”

Radan, who is under US, EU, and Canadian sanctions for human rights abuses, said cooperation between police and schools must go further.

"While this memorandum of understanding and the militarization and policing of schools is very painful and aims to exert pressure on our teenagers, it also reflects a kind of acknowledgment of the regime's failure in enforcing compulsory hijab," Roghayeh Rezaei, a member of the IranWire website editorial team said in an interview with Iran International.

The Council’s warning follows mounting pressure on students and teachers since the 2022 protests that were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. The young woman was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly.

In recent months, pro-government outlets such as Tasnim News have called for surveillance cameras in classrooms and tighter controls on student behavior.

“Schools are no place for batons or coercive forces. Don't entrust cultural matters to colonels. The consequences will come back to haunt you,” Morteza Beheshti Langroudi, a teacher and former political prisoner wrote on X.

The Iranian government said in January that the implementation of the controversial hijab law has been postponed due to the potential unrest it may spark.

The law was due to impose harsh penalties on women and girls who defy veiling requirements, including fines, prison terms, flogging and even the death penalty.

Many women now refuse to wear the compulsory head covering, long tunics, and trousers as dictated by the country's Shariah law. They are also now often seen singing and dancing in public in defiance of the religious establishment.

The Haft-e Sobh paper cited market data showing a 32 percent year-on-year increase in opium prices in April, bringing the average cost to around 1.64 million rials per gram—equivalent to roughly $2.

The rial fell sharply after the start of Iran-US nuclear negotiations, trading at 820,000 to the dollar. Based on this rate, the current opium price range of 1.3 to 2 million rials per gram translates to $1.58 to $2.44.

“The price hikes in the past two years have been astronomical,” one user told Haft-e Sobh. “People can’t afford opium or its derivatives like opium extract anymore. Many have switched to industrial drugs instead.”

Over the past five years, the average price of opium has more than doubled. In 2020, it stood at around 750,000 rials per gram ($0.91), rising to 1.2 million rials ($1.46) in 2023 and now averaging 1.64 million rials ($2).

For much of the last decade, black-market opium prices had risen more slowly than Iran’s official inflation rate. But that gap has now narrowed considerably. Official inflation in the past year was 33.4 percent, nearly mirroring the 32 percent jump in opium prices.

The shift in affordability has triggered a broader change in consumption. A February 2025 field report by the Etemad newspaper found that the use of traditional narcotics like opium has declined sharply in the past seven years, with heroin and methamphetamine becoming more prevalent.

Unlike opium, meth is often easier to manufacture domestically and does not rely on cross-border supply chains.

Much of the current scarcity is linked to the Taliban’s ban on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, enacted in early 2022. Taliban forces destroyed large swathes of opium poppy fields, disrupting regional supply and pushing up prices.

In July 2022, Iran’s Tejarat News website reported that prices had spiked nearly sixfold before partially stabilizing.

Meanwhile, as demand remains high, reports of poppy cultivation inside Iran have surfaced despite official crackdowns. Government-linked media recently aired footage of poppy fields being destroyed in southern provinces.

In one case from March, footage released by the Baloch Activists Campaign showed armed raids by Iranian forces on the village of Esfand in Sistan and Baluchistan province, aimed at destroying local poppy farms.

In 2022, the UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) reported that an estimated 2.8 million people suffer from a drug use problem in Iran. The country also has one of the world’s highest prevalence of opiate use among its population.

While reformist outlets welcomed what they described as swift progress and a move toward technical-level discussions, conservative dailies backed the negotiation team but renewed warnings against what they called US hostility and external opposition from diaspora critics.

On Sunday, Ham-Mihan, a reformist paper aligned with technocratic factions, described the shift to expert-level talks as evidence of agreement on core principles, such as Iran’s continued uranium enrichment.

It called this “a sign of rapid progress” but warned that it did not guarantee a final deal. “The stage reached suggests a framework is in place, but final terms will be decided in detail-oriented discussions,” the editorial said.

The paper also predicted the alleged indirect format of talks may soon shift to direct engagement, arguing that detailed negotiations are impractical through intermediaries.

Shargh, another reformist paper, featured interviews with four former officials and political figures. All welcomed the apparent momentum.

“If external spoilers are kept at bay, this can lead to tangible gains for the Islamic Republic,” said reformist activist Mohammad-Sadegh Javadi-Hessar, adding that European threats to trigger the snapback mechanism appear to have receded.

In contrast, the conservative Farhikhtegan focused on perceived foreign interference. Its lead story, titled “Lobbyists of Tension,” accused a range of organizations—including American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies—of undermining the talks.

It said, without evidence, that these groups, through “financial backing and intelligence ties,” aim to maintain pressure on Iran and shape US foreign policy against Tehran.

The paper also said that "Iranian dissidents abroad were spreading misleading information to derail the negotiations,” framing the process as vulnerable to outside manipulation.

The hardline Kayhan, viewed as reflecting the Supreme Leader’s position, struck a defiant tone. In a lengthy commentary, it warned that negotiations were historically a tool of colonial pressure and argued that only military and nuclear strength had forced the US to the table.

In another piece, Kayhan wrote that excluding Europe and regional states in the talks had allowed Iran to slow the pace and avoid compromise. The writer said “indirect talks humiliated the US, reinforcing Tehran’s standing.”

Saying that US enmity toward the Islamic Republic would persist regardless of the outcome, it added, “The world is watching a diplomatic clash between satanic and divine powers,” as resistance to diplomatic means continued.

In the days following the first round of indirect talks in Oman on April 12, which were followed by further discussions in Rome on Saturday, clerics, political figures, and media outlets compared a potential US-Iran agreement with a treaty the Prophet Muhammad signed with his adversaries in Mecca in 628 CE, showing a rare softened tone.

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah allowed for a ten-year truce and provided Muslim access to pilgrimage in Mecca the following year in exchange for several concessions to the Prophet’s enemies.

Ayatollah Kazem Nourmofidi, Khamenei’s representative in Golestan Province, said in a sermon that at the time, some Muslims saw the treaty as unjust and believed the Prophet should not have conceded.

“But that peace proved to be a clear victory,” he argued, justifying the talks which had initially received so much criticism from the country's hardliners who have long opposed negotiations with the US.

An article on the current talks with the US published by Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), similarly referred to the Prophet's negotiations with the enemies of Islam and the controversial Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, but argued that his strategic flexibility and concessions led to far greater conquests.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made no direct reference to the recent Muscat talks during a speech to senior military commanders after the first round of talks in Oman but adopted a tone of cautious pragmatism later. “We are neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic about these talks,” he said—before offering a stark caveat: “I am very pessimistic about the other side.”

Khamenei’s calibrated remarks reflect a blend of strategic openness to diplomacy and deep skepticism about American intentions, appeasing the hardliners.

This is not the first time religious symbolism has been invoked to justify shifts in foreign policy. In 2013, as Iran began talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), Khamenei referred to his shift as a “heroic flexibility”—a reference to Imam Hassan, the second Shiite Imam, who accepted a truce with a hostile ruler to protect himself and his followers from harm.

Today, Khamenei’s renewed openness to negotiation has again fractured Iran’s hardline camp. Some factions have moved to align with the Supreme Leader’s position. Others—particularly ultra-hardliners who cannot openly challenge Khamenei without facing political consequences—remain visibly frustrated.