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The United States on Wednesday sanctioned 12 Iranians with ties to the Islamic Republic’s continued repression of its citizens in and outside Iran.
Those sanctioned include members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and officials from Iran’s Prisons Organization who played a role in suppressing the widespread protests that followed the death of a young Iranian woman in September 2022.
“Two years have now passed since Mahsa Amini’s tragic death in the custody of Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police,’ and, despite the Iranian people’s peaceful calls for reform, Iran’s leaders have doubled down on the regime’s well-worn tactics of violence and coercion,” said a senior Treasury official on Wednesday.
Top on the new sanctions list are four senior IRGC personnel who supervised crackdowns in four of Iran’s provinces. Hamid Khorramdel (Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad), Mustafa Bazvand (Mazandaran), Ali Malek-Shahkoui (Golestan) and Saeed Beheshti-Rad (Kermanshah).
“In cities all over Iran, IRGC units have used lethal force against protestors, arrested people for political expression, and attempted to intimidate the Iranian people through violence,” reads the press release by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Also on the list are two IRGC and intelligence officials with a “key role” in targeting critics of the Islamic Republic abroad, according to the US treasury, followed by four prison officials from three major provinces of Isfahan, Khuzestan, and South Khorasan, where dozens of prisoners have been executed for drug offenses other than those that would allow the death penalty.
The new measure has been coordinated with Canada and Australia, and builds on multiple rounds of U.S. sanctions since the 2022 protests in Iran.
