Country of Origin Report – Iran Islamic Republic

Valka-Mir
2 days ago
26 min read

Iranian Regime's Psychopathology of Control via the Intentional Inducement of Trauma

Our research over the past 10+ years into the Iranian regime illustrated that it is obsessed with the psychosocial control over its own population and over the populations of its surrounding Arab neighbours. Regardless of the directions of Iranian elections in any given electoral cycle, the deciding issue is always the dogma that “Human beings are inherently sinful and must be carefully guarded and/or controlled by [Shi’a] Islamic jurisprudence.” After a decade of studying the Shi’a pedagogy of victimisation-control-guardianship-oppression, its logic does not follow normal political rationale of human governance. The Judaeo-Christian-Muslim intellectual concept of human-kind’s struggle between good and evil has been malformed to create a structural argument for absolute repression of human agency. To say this differently, the regime works to coopt one segment of the population to actively work against and suppress all other segments of the population, providing them with intellectual and emotional reasoning (however weak) for their success at the expense of others.

We found a regime (Islamic clergy and its protective IRGC and Quds Force) that operates with a psychological pathology of victimization against metaphysical enemies that plays out against fantasies of end-of-the-world ideas of its role in the world. This makes the Regime and its defenders extraordinarily dangerous because they are operating in a half reality – half fantasy decision making process. Our research for UK, US, and NATO governments suggests that this irrationality of pathological thought and decision making create behavioural patterns by the IRGC and Islamic theocracy that appear rational only in the context of a pathology of victimization. Victim pathology is a form of psychosocial trauma that is intentionally inflicted to create specific psychological ideas that result in predictable and useful behaviours. Such pathology constantly seeks recognition of the individual and collective victimhood, and in the case of the IRGC and Theocracy, that victimhood establishes a psychological righteousness of suffering that allows for the most aggressive of responses to even the slightest provocations. We created the graphic aid in figure 1 to assist NATO allies in understanding how the Iranian regime is able to sustain itself in the face of extreme sanctions and the unrelenting resistance of their own population segments. The model depicted here is derived from data collected from the Iranian population segments over the past several years.

Generally, this pathology would be a normal psychological response to trauma. Experiencing trauma tends to “shatter our assumptions” about the world as a just and moral place. Recognition of one’s victimhood is a normal response to trauma and can help re-establish a person’s confidence in their perception of the world as a fair and just place to live. In the case of Iran’s theocracy and its IRGC/Quds Force, the pathology has morphed into ideas that the world is not and will never be, a just and moral place, and everyone in it who is against ‘them’ (theocracy) is an enemy and should be punished until they repent. Again, a very dangerous psychological group construction.

Over the past 40 years, the regime’s efforts have deformed and malformed the Iranian society into a monstrous version of human life that is filled with dread, hopelessness, helplessness, and a willingness to self-sacrifice in the faint hope of a better life for the next generations. The next several sections describe the phenomenological lived realities of the Iranian population under this malformed reality of Iranian Shi’a theocracy. All real power is held by the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah) who is nominally appointed by the 86-member Assembly of (Shi’a) Experts, who themselves are drawn from three overlapping but closed political parties. The oldest, founded in 1961 by the first Ayatollah Khomeini, controls the other two. As the graphic aid in Figure 2 illustrates, the three authorized political organizations in Iran are mirror images of each other, with slight variations in governing practices.

While slight, these ideological variations were thought to create differences in the number of lives lost to torture, execution, imprisonment, and overall oppression. Ultimately, however, the most progressive or regressive tendencies or decisions are acquiesced to or overturned by the Ayatollah who reigns with absolute authority. The Ayatollah controls all major policy decisions either directly or through a network of groups appointed by him. He oversees the military and has the power to remove the president. He appoints six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council who determine eligibility for running for any elected office. Iranian law makes it a crime to disagree with, attempt to supervise, or refuse directions of, the Ayatollah. This authoritarian national governing structure is protected, and its decisions are enforced by, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp or IRGC. While the country has a police force and regular military, in practice they are under that tight control of the IRGC and do not play an independent role in internal security for the regime. The Commander of the IRGC (Internal defence and control) and the IRGC Quds Force (external expansion) both reports directly to the Ayatollah and are subject only to their own internal supervision. The IRGC’s principal purpose is the control of the Iranian resources and population groups as part of their protection of the theocracy. The IRGC and its Quds Force are not accountable to the Iranian president or Majles (parliament). They and the Ministry of Intelligence (Ettala’at) report only to the Supreme Leader. The offices of the Ayatollah, the IRGC, and Ettala’at, constitute a ‘government-within-government’ and a ‘closed economy’ that hides in plain sight under cover of Bonyads (non-profit foundations). This closed economy self-funds the operations of the Ayatollah, the IRGC and Ettala’at. The single most expensive portion of the IRGC’s budget is its Quds Force, once led by Major General Qasim Soleimani, killed by a missile strike ordered by US President Trump. The IRGC’s Quds Force, in their role as the external arm of the Ayatollah, accounts for potentially as much as 35% of IRGC revenues spent building, training, organising, and directing five separate organised military-political organisations across the Levant, Arabian Peninsula, and southwest Asia. The Ettala’at spends the majority of its classified budget hunting down threats to the regime and assassinates them, including current or former citizens domestically and abroad. Iran has assassinated dozens of its enemies across four continents — in Asia, Europe, North America and South America — over the four decades since the 1979 revolution.

“Terrorism is an important instrument of Iranian foreign policy, used both to promote national interests and to export the regime’s revolutionary ideals…”

The import of this reality is that regardless of the number of lives it costs the Iranian government, there is no possibility of change from within, absent a collapse of the Theocratic Regime. This absolute power is achieved only by the effective control over the population & resources to include wealth creation and distribution. Both are required for the Ayatollah and his Quds Force to build the Shi’a Crescent that surrounds Shi’a Iran’s ultimate competitor – Sunni Arab’s influence over the Muslim world. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the regime in Tehran has been forging a psychosocial-political "land bridge" that surrounds the Arab centre of Islam – Saudi Arabia. This encirclement connects Iran through Shi’a minorities & majorities in Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. This is what MENA scholars refer to as the “Shia Crescent” illustrated in figure 3.

Iran leads the global Shi’a Islamic community, but that ummah only comprises just 10 percent of the world's Muslim population, against the remaining 90 percent Sunni led by Saudi Arabia. The centre of the universe for the 100 billion or so Muslims is Arab controlled Mecca and Medina, which the Saudi Arab Kingdom holds in safekeeping. Because society, politics, law, and religion are so closely fused in Islam, the political state that controls Islam, wields outsized influence over all Islam. The import of this is to establish the clear focus and purpose of the Ayatollah and IRGC’s regime and the lengths to which this structure will go to maintain its control over its population and resources. The graphics in figure 4 strips away the sheer amount of precious financial and national resources the regime spends and allows us to more accurately estimate the regime’s current and future trajectory. The clerical structures, the resource extraction, and the Revolutionary Guards operations are all protected by a man from the Iranian shadows, Esmail Khatib, Ayatollah Khamanei’s former office security chief. For the past 43 years, Khatib has been linked to the deaths of clerics, intelligence agents, and guards who posed threats to the reign of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his heir. Khatib has worked closely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence unit. At the end of the day, these are the men in Iran who matter.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ;iŶ Faƌsi: ͚Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Eslami-e IƌaŶ͛Ϳ Iran's elite military force responsible for protecting the Islamic regime from internal and external threats. The IRGC's role is enshrined in the constitution, and it answers only to Iran's supreme leader, endowing it with an enormous range of legal, political and religious powers. The IRGC itself is a somewhat decentralized system, with ten regional headquarters, defending the regime against both high-intensity warfare and low-intensity internal challenges such as insurgency. The IRGC Intelligence Service has largely taken over domestic security, though Ministry of Intelligence shares responsibilities for actively preventing internal unrest. Iran’s regular military forces are mostly conscripts who are not trusted by the regime to turn against them, confining them to bases and only arming them for parades and ceremonies.

Iran: a Parastate Kleptocracy.

The Supreme Leader Appoints and Controls Board Chairs and Chief Executives. Bonyads operate as giant private monopolies that guarantee cash flows into the office of the Supreme Leader and funds his priorities. The Bonyad-e Mostazafen va Janbazan (Foundation for the Oppressed and Disabled) for example, employs 200,000 Iranian employees and shares management with the IRGC. This tax-free entity “controls 20% of the country’s production of textiles, 40% of soft drinks, two-thirds of all glass products and a dominant share also in tiles, chemicals, tires, foodstuffs.” Yet another significant bonyad, the Martyr's Foundation (Bonyad-e-Shahid), continues to be subject to U.S. sanctions under Executive Order 13224 for alleged funding of groups that conduct acts of international terrorism. Iran’s Bonyads employ as many as 5,000,000 Iranians and control as much as 20% of Iran’s GDP. One prominent bonyad is EIKO or Setad, (Headquarters for Executing Imam Khomeini's Order) and is run by the office of the Supreme Leader. Formed with assets taken over after the Shah fell, EIKO controls or holds stakes in at least 70 Iranian companies across the spectrum of Iranian industry, with assets of nearly $100 billion. In October 2016, Iran's Oil Ministry awarded $2.2 billion in contracts to an EIKO subsidiary under Iran's new model of energy sector development called the Iran Petroleum Contract. Before his appointment as Chief Justice by Khamenei, Raisi served as the Supreme Leader’s chief executive officer of the multi-billion USD valued Astan Quds Razavi Foundation, whose primary purpose is the manage the Imam Reza Shrine. Since the revolution the Astan-e-Qods bonyad has grown from a "modest concern" into a conglomerate employing 19,000 people and running auto plants, agricultural businesses, and many other enterprises.

These Bonyad foundations are intimately associated with; often familial connected with; and/or even part of, the Majles Legislature, the religious assembly of experts (or the religious parties they are drawn from), the president’s cabinet, and the IRGC.

These parastates appear to be familial in ownership and closely tied into government members and the political parties and interest groups that they are part of. The organizations are both commercial ventures and powerful charitable foundations that seem to control the bulk of the available capital flows and surviving industry in economically sanctioned Iran. The visible Iranian beneficiaries of these economic parastates have become something of a nemesis-fascination for the target audiences in my research as they illustrate the outlines of a modern kleptocracy. The respondents I interviewed, watched the elites’ purchases of wristwatches, choice of cars, clothes, vacation destinations, and even the fresh fruit available to them that is otherwise unavailable to the public. Implicit in the government and Bonyad messaging is that equal socioeconomic opportunity does in fact exist but that failure to achieve is based on good or poor bloodlines (remember, these foundations are mostly family entanglements which help the regime maintain discipline over them. For the rest of the Iranian population, the resulting psychological dynamic of alienated frustration was/is expressed in both the conscious and subconscious and is the result of the mind’s inability to attain a goal or objective that the individual has or is putting significant effort into accomplishing. The more that the subconscious and conscious mind is presented with the implied and expressed messaging from both government and elites of the possibility or likelihood that the failure to achieve their goals is the fault of its own inadequacy (as demonstrated by the public behaviour of the elite segment of peers who are blessed with “good genes”), the greater the feelings of alienation, shame, and left unintegrated, rage. Victim fantasies of aggression are a useful defence mechanism at first, because they allow the subconscious mind to repair its ego-self-esteem and continue to function, albeit more aggressively focused than before. Fantasies of aggression release creative energy to construct and then play out scenarios of passive revenge against the objects of their alienation: the “aghazadeh” (noble born) ‘elite’ who have succeeded where the ‘ordinary’ have failed, justified by the spectre of enhanced DNA.

The Political Means of Population Control

The physical means of the regime’s control of the population is most directly asserted by Ettala’at, IRGC, Basij, Faraja, & Morality Police through the intrusion into every aspect of human life in Iran – physical and psychological. The Ettala’at is the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence & Security (MOIS) and its minister reports directly to the Supreme Leader. The regime goes to great lengths to insert the power of the Ettala’at into all parts of social, political, economic, religious, and social life of the family and of the individual. Their goal is to create a mental object of terror at the thought of coming to their attention. The authority of the Ettala’at is absolute and only the Ayatollah Khamenei can overrule the MOIS, Esmail Khatib. Minister Khatib’s Ettala’at employs terror, torture, & extra-judicial killings to enforce the regime’s social order in Iran. The UK Home Office’s Independent Advisory Group on Country-of-Origin Information (IAGCI), under the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration at Globe House in London, publishes relevant and timely information on many of the countries where serious threats to the health and survival of vulnerable minorities. The most recent published report was version 4, released in May of 2022. This IAGCI report describes an ongoing pattern of extra-judicial killings, torture, executions, and generalized terrorizing of Iranian families that is far outside of acceptable United Nations treatments of any citizens. This UK IAGCI report is laden with number and statistics regarding the brutality that Iranians face daily, however there is little about the plight of women. Even amongst families who are unconnected in any way to anti regime activities, there is anxiety and dread. In part, this is because Iranian societies (Kurdish, Persian, Azeri, Balochi, and Arab) are tightly knit with family and clan/tribal relationships remaining close through multiple generations removed; nearly everyone in these population segments has a sibling, cousin, uncle, or aunt, however distantly removed, that they know are in one of the many resistance movements. Regime security forces hold families of socio-political and militant activists’ hostage, threatening them with arrest and imprisonment or forcing them to trick their family members into returning to arrest and execute them.

“Close family members, such as spouses, children, parents, or siblings are more likely to be subject to arrest. In some cases, the authorities have arrested extended family members, because they were in touch with the politically active individual outside of the country.”

“The Iranian government relies on extracting information from family members, in order for the family members to put pressure on the political party member or supporter. One source stated that if the authorities are aware that a person is a family member to a political party member, s/he is at risk of being subjected to torture.”

Even the types of charges that activists and their families are charged with appear designed to incite terrorizing dread. The charge of Efsad-e fel-arz involves the nebulous allegation of ‘spreading corruption on Earth.’ The charge of Baghy, or rebellion against the State, can be anything that the regime says it is. IranWire reports that there is an increase of pressure tactics on the families of civil and human rights activists in the Iranian border provinces of Kurdistan. In recent weeks, the parents of Iranians whose children are living in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan have been summoned by the regime’s security agencies and told to contact their children and convince or trick them to return home to Iran, where they are arrested. A New Generation of Basiji. Iran has stepped up its operations to recruit young people to protect the Islamic Republic, many of them children, using some of the country's most powerful resources, including sophisticated propaganda campaigns. Significant work to bring in young fighters is done by the Students’ Basij Force, and Iran's leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has praised young students willing to put themselves on the frontline, and the teachers who have encouraged them. He and other senior officials have publicly said that students should be regarded as a vital part of Iran’s able fighting force. But statistics reveal that more than half of the student population are of elementary-school-age and are less than 12 years old.

Physical Control of the Population & Resources.

The Ayatollah’s need to for ideological control over the population requires financial and resource control as described above and the organisational means to physically control unwilling members and segments of the population. The Ayatollah and his organisations employ Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) to maintain control over both populations and resources in an ever-increasing hold. The IRGC uses several organisations that it controls to affect its control over the population, such as the notorious Basij (people’s militia), the Faraja (260,000 strong Disciplinary Police Force), and the equally notorious Guidance (morality) Patrols. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (Vezarat-e Ettela'at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran) complements the IRGC’s efforts and also reports directly to the Ayatollah to maintain control of the population. What is mostly left unrealised by observers both inside and outside of Iran is that the efforts at controlling the population are principally a result of the Ayatollah and IRGCs need for absolute control of the national economy and national resources to fund their ongoing war efforts as illustrated in figures 3, 4, & 5. Organised protests such as the one depicted in figure 10, threaten the regime’s hold over resources that are daily drained into the Ayatollah and IRGC coffers by the myriad of Bonyads that are deeply embedded within the social and economic fabric of Iran. For these Bonyads to function as effectively as they have, the elite segment of the Iranian population had to be coopted, or the regime would simply not have the expertise, manpower, and knowhow to drain a national economy. These economic parastates called Bonyads can be vast and complex, requiring economic, trade, banking, across multiple states. Ideologically, the regime and the elites refer to these parastates as a ‘resistance economy’ that implies victimisation and authorises the necessary actions to survive, even at the expense of the general population. The poverty and deprivation of the population segments in Iran is not a byproduct of its diversion of resources to regional conflict. It is an intentional product used to physically control an otherwise unwilling public. At the centre of the regime’s resistance economy is the transformation of suffering into sacrifice and the transformation of sacrifice into sacredness of purpose and personal/familial memorialisation. The expression of this intentional pathology is the central ingredient used to recruit and employ the notorious Basiji organisations. These part-time volunteer organisations offer members outlets for psychological alienation and emotional shame in the form of mostly unrestrained power over others in a society where few have power. Officially, the Islamic constitution calls for the Basiji forces to number as high as 20,000,000 volunteers, calling them a ‘people’s militia’ charged with defending the Theocracy. The IRGC, which controls the Basiji and Morality Police, only accepts recruitment applicants from the ranks of the Basiji and morality police, which offer the IRGC recruiters a ‘past performance’ prior to accepting them. The Basiji routinely attack and brutalize fellow Iranian citizens, purportedly to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic. At times, because of how their psychosocial pathology manifests in different individuals, Basiji members have been filmed committing extreme violence outside of orders, which generally try to prevent extra-judicial wet work from being filmed. The inner trusted organisations of Basij under the IRGC and offices of the clerical regime are led by talented diehard members of the established order and are usually closely connected to neighbourhood clerical leaders appointed by the Ayatollah’s councils. Much of what we know about the Basiji as people is derived from extensive interviews with Iranians who have had contact with the Basiji.

“I saw everything you can imagine, from the beating of an old man who could barely walk to the beating of a small child who couldn’t reach for his mother’s hand. It made no difference…even a child who couldn’t reach his mother’s hand. If there was an issue with killing, it was explained that the killing was for a cause and was a good deed.”

From a rational-agency perspective of governance, the Basiji organisation and its mission makes little sense outside of the clerics’ assertion that the Iranian government and its security agencies work to carry out the principalist ideology described above. This assertion, however, fails in that the regime opens and closes the Basiji authority to attack its citizens based not on theology, but rational self-interest of maintaining control. After the 2022 uprisings peaked, President Raisi reined in the Basiji, only to release them months later. An alternative explanation is that the violent enforcement of the universally despised morality laws on the main segments of society (pink collar, blue collar, bazaris, and university students) serves a rational useful purpose for the regime. The graphic in figure 11 helps to methodologically visualise the make-up of the Basij. While the membership of the Basij is drawn from all segments, we have learned from field research that Basij members in positions in government, university, small business, and pink-collar workers, join for the benefits and access while declining to participate in suppression of dissent or public enforcement of morality laws. Those Basiji that we interviewed who admitted to participating in the violent attacks and public intercession against morality law violations, were usually drawn from psychosocially vulnerable segments of society whose life and family circumstances oriented them for profound indoctrination. Some of the comments from the Basiji members we interviewed were as follows:

"From three or four months before the election we had attended classes on ideological and political thought and crowd control.” “I’m in complete turmoil all the time. I spent more than twenty years raised like this, and before me a household of martyrs. I keep thinking, which is right? What I’ve chosen now, or the path they’ve taken." “We are a prominent religious family – always there on the frontline, always with memories of war, frontline and revolution. Since these events I keep thinking, who is right?”

“We had received orders a matter of months before that there is Velayat Faqih, that there is the jurisprudence of the Imam Zaman, (the 12th Imam, who is expected to return like a Messiah) whose incarnation is Ayatollah Khamenei, and that he had announced that for the advancement and development of Islam and the development of the revolution…[various actions had been ordered in relation to the population].”

The willingness and capacity to act on their orders to employ violence to suppress dissent and enforce the morality laws corresponds to members’ weakness in their grasp of individual agency and their participation in sociocentric behaviour outside of the nuclear family. Families that perceive themselves to be oppressed transmit that reality to children in a generational transmission of trauma. Where the child-adult’s psychological (damaged) reality is that they are oppressed, organisations for the mobilisation of the oppressed speak to their ongoing need for individual agency and corresponding rise in self-worth. Other members’ motivation involved adult expressions to childhood traumas such as those listed under the alienation menu in the graphic in figure 1. Psychological and emotional pain of such childhood traumas are defended against by the child-adult through fantasies of power that deny or recreate the haunting events that have become memorialised in family discourse. The regime itself both causes/inflicts these alienation events in figure 1 - on their own population and then capitalises on the resulting psychosocial damage to turn one population segment against another. These are some of the underlying dynamics and mechanisms behind authoritarian control of large populations and are the core concepts behind psychological warfare.

The Guidance Patrol or morality police is an Islamic religious police force and vice squad in the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Guidance Patrol enforce Sharia–Islamic law—per laws in Iran; this is most often the enforcement of Islamic dress code, such as wear of the Hijab, and a myriad of other requirements.

Such psychological manipulation is only possible to accomplish with population segments that can be physically damaged via the use of violence, arrest, abduction, starvation, eviction, or other psychological acts that cannot be used on the elites without them refusing to cooperate with the regime in controlling and extracting the majority of the wealth to support internal control and external hegemony.

There are specialised segments of the volunteer Basiji that are alleged to be highly trained and paid fulltime members of the organisation, used for most of the wet work (shedding of blood) against protestors and non-compliant citizens. Although relatively small compared to the overall Basiji organisation, the group has the complete trust of the state.

The Psychological Means of Population Control – Torture & Trauma.

Roya Heshmati was a 34-year-old social activist against the regime’s Shi’a social control. She was arrested and received 74 lashes with multi-tailed leather whip. Her epidermis and underlying dermis separated at each strike of the multiple leather tails, opening the underlying flesh. Not every strike broke through into capillaries, but sufficient numbers did so, leaving her back and buttocks a bloody caked black mass. Days after recovering, Roya was back on the street protesting. The regime’s physical means of controlling her behaviour did not work. Purely physical coercion does not work when the goal of the authorities is the surrender of the psychological agency of the targeted individual. Regimes such as Iran’s employ a combination of physical and psychological assault that we refer to as torture. The use of torture is an attempt by one human being to break or disable the individual agency and ability to resist of another human being who is under the physical, psychological, or social control of the person inflicting the damage. Torture is not a means of physical control. It is a means of psychological deformation through the infliction of overwhelming psychosocial-physical pain. The employment of torture tells us more about the torturer than about the tortured. Professor Peter Elsass is a Danish clinical psychologist specialising in the sequalae of torture, who writes that:

“Torture is among the most gruesome of human manifestations, particularly because it does not have its origin in animals, primitive man, or pre-culture. On the contrary, it is planned, and it stems from social order. It is a display of force, the aim of which is to break an individual’s judgement.”

Torture is an intentional infliction, rather than an accidental infliction. This distinction is what makes the practice so gruesome. It is the controlled intentionality of the inflicted pain and fear that helps to create the conditions of hopelessness, helplessness and overwhelmed psyche that makes it so devastating. The regime’s intentional violence, trauma, and social malformation work to weaponize Iranian society and keep it vulnerable to continued manipulation and control. As the graphic in figure 14 illustrates, the violence, arrest, torture, incarceration, and in a sufficient number of cases (between 250 to 350 per year), execution, need not be large numbers outside of suppression of protests. Rather, these actions need to be ruthless, but without undo malice that localises the monster into the inanimate government. Instead, the violence and torture are applied with calm deliberation, in the manner that a parent might administer corporal punishment. The regime interrogator/torturer’s goal in figure 14 with Taraneh Mousavi, was to break her family’s reality, not reinforce it by giving meaning. What breaks the human mind is not suffering, but suffering without purpose, without meaning This means that pain and torture become love and nurture. The utility of this creates a type of twisted interpersonal relationship between abuser and abused, captive and captor. The surviving victims of deliberate employment of violent coercion, eventually, suffer the effects of malformed personalities as their conceptualization of self and communal ‘other’ begins to deform and disintegrate.

The victims' psyches struggle to create meaning of the lingering pain, the cutting, the electricity, the near-drowning, or the deformation of their hands, feet, and face.

The regime’s perpetrators, on the other hand, devolve into self-hatred and corresponding hatred of others as their ego-progresses into enraged self-defence against annihilating guilt, and their self-regresses into shamed hidden silence. Most community members are affected by the ‘open secret’ that all refrain from talking about in open conversation, even as they tour the torture museums of the former Pahlavi regimes terrifying wax recreations of past torture, terror and death that is still whispered about in hushed voices. Together, the actual, the wax recreations in museums, and the dark imaginings in whispered conversations about the current regimes torture practices, creates an altered reality for the residents caught in the gritty urban interiors. This part real part imagined alternate reality underlays (and possibly competes with) their daily lives of keeping their jobs, navigating the crumbling infrastructure, and wondering when they will be the next subject of a corrupt Basiji or Ettala’at summons. These returnees face ‘difficulty’ because they are seen to be betrayers of the faith and must be punished as part of cleansing, prior to being returned into society. The lines of interrogation that arrested returnees were subjected to illustrate the types of rational/irrational concerns of the regime:

Intimate violence against the mind.

The regime’s interrogators are intimately interested in what the returnees think about the regime, said about the regime, and why they would want to leave the regime. This sort of questioning is driven by ideations of abandonment and betrayal, which suggest the existence of a relationship that is one sided in the minds of the captors, but not in the minds of the captives. The Danish Immigration Service has researched series of cases where Iranian citizens who had applied for asylum in European countries were arrested upon return to Iran. Some returnees were reportedly interrogated and tortured while in the custody of the authorities, including one person who was killed under torture. The perpetrators of rape and other forms of sexual violence included agents from the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basij force, and the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as different branches of the police force including the Public Security Police (police amniat-e omoumi), the Investigation Unit of Iran’s police (Agahi), and the Special Forces of the police (yegan-e vijeh).

State agents raped women and girls vaginally, anally and orally, while men and boys were raped anally. Survivors were raped with wooden and metal batons, glass bottles, hosepipes, and/or agents’ sexual organs and fingers. Rape took place in detention facilities and police vans, as well as schools or residential buildings unlawfully repurposed as detention places. Survivors detailed other forms of sexual violence such as state agents grabbing, groping, beating, punching, and kicking survivors’ breasts, genitals and buttocks; enforcing nudity, sometimes in front of video cameras; administrating electric shocks, inserting needles or applying ice to men’s testicles; forcibly cutting women’s hair and/or dragging them violently by their hair; and threats to rape survivors and/or their relatives.

Rape and other sexual violence are frequently accompanied by other forms of torture and ill-treatment, including beatings, floggings, electric shocks, administration of unidentified pills or injections, denial of food and water, and cruel and inhuman detention conditions. Security forces also routinely denied survivors medical care, including for rape-related injuries. Unsurprisingly, there has been no domestic path to justice for any of the victims, males or females. The overwhelming majority of survivors do not file complaints after release, fearing further harm and believing the judiciary to be a tool of repression rather than redress. In all of these types of torture episodes, the end purpose is not about the mere infliction of pain, but the breakage of the person’s psychological reality to create a condition called violent trauma. First, break the mind, then insert the message. All of the sequalae of psychosocial trauma as individual and collective expressions are present every day in nearly every one of Iran’s cities and towns. My daily research and reporting show high levels of violence without motives, extreme overkill by both state and non-state actors, casual violence, promiscuity to include extensive sexual violence, anesthetization through drugs and alcohol, hyper-vigilance, suspicion, betrayal, and more. The levels of social, political, and military violence in Iran over the past four decades has left both victims and perpetrators changed through the malformation of the ego-self identities that underlay their personalities. The perpetrators and victims of deliberately inflicted violent suffering (subconsciously) become malformed in their interior perceptions of themselves and the larger society that produces them. Eventually, perpetrators and victims alike begin reenacting scenes of violence within the public sphere, exposing that which should not be exposed.

“…they keep finding bodies here and there…these bodies are somebody’s siblings or children.” “There is also a lot of murder, like the severed heads they found in Sheykh Bahai Street…”

The underlying science behind how the Iranian regime operates to break, traumatise, and weaponize its population was discovered and organised by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to help build and repair societies, not to damage them for political and financial profit. Unfortunately, malign states and non-states have been employing this science in some version for the past half century as a low cost, deniable methodology of controlling populations and resources. This is why, with some trepidation, we must pull tools out of our treatment and therapy library to help explain what is happening and why.

The graphic in figure 15 was created by the American State of Maryland’s Coalition Against Sexual Assault and was adapted from the Power and Control Wheel created by Domestic Abuse Intervention Project at theduluthmodel.org. If you compare the major categories of the wheel to the routine abuses reported by those Iranian population segments in Iran and in exile, you can easily see the correlation. While we think in western psychology of individual offenders and individual victims, the type of psychological and sociological structure created by the regime’s founders and leaders (Figure 4) would naturally reflect their own inner malformed ideas of society, power, and control. Its authoritarian nature and the specific pathology of its stated national goals and objectives (Figure 4) prevent it from ever evolving through learning and experience in a regional collective of communities. The wheel in figure 15 can be applied to the model in figure 1 that illustrates the mechanics and dynamics of intentionally created psychosocial trauma.

The intent of the violence, torture, executions, is to create intended psychological and emotional effects that can be manipulated within and between the population segments that have already been set against each other.

Trauma & Weaponisation of the Iranian Population.

As depicted in figure 17, the intent is to place two population segments into opposition without the regime (Mullahs & IRGC) being demonised. The first population segment are the ‘victim-mentality’ social enforcers (Basij & Moral Police) who merely work to protect the people from their own sinful tendencies against God. The second population segment are the ‘victim-mentality’ populace who are trying to survive the ‘resistance-economy’, the complex laws of moral behaviour and speech imposed by the regime, and the intrusion of modernity brought in by the elites. Neither group can ever win against the other because the regime ensure that this steady state of aggressive tension continues to focus attention on this malformed intersocial relationship created by the regime. The girl in the graphic in figure 17 is Sonia Sharifi, a 16-year-old student protestor who was abducted beaten, and, after the second arrest, sentenced to death for crimes against God and Islam. As the graphic depicts, the father is placed in a lose-lose situation where his female family members risk arrest, torture, rape, and execution to escape the regime’s intentional social malformation. Ultimately, Sonia’s sentence threatened to become even larger than another murdered schoolgirl, Mahsa Amini, tortured and killed by the Morality Police and Basij. Her execution was stayed but the girl remained in captivity for weeks, receiving various sorts of physical punishment that her family is not willing to talk about. It is important to note the intuitive flexibility that the regime uses to ramp up the psychosocial pressure and ease it to deepen their control over the physical, psychological, sociological, and emotional lives of Iranians and their resources. Our research into the Iranian government’s theocratic governance structure and its IRGC internal protective force and external (Quds Force) projection force, strongly suggests that both the former and the latter harbour a pathological identity structure known as ‘victimhood complex’ that was introduced earlier. We find that generationally transmitted damaged realities cause some people, and some collectives of people evolve into an identity structure that is rooted in perpetual victimhood, often (but not always) from acute or chronic psychosocial trauma. Dr. Rahav Gabay and her colleagues define this tendency for interpersonal victimhood as “an ongoing feeling that the [subconscious ego] self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships. As a result, victimization becomes a central part of the individual’s [and communities] identity.” Those who have a perpetual victimhood mindset tend to have an “external locus of control,” otherwise known as sociocentric psychological organization or tribal hereditary social construction. They believe that one’s life is entirely under the control of forces outside oneself, such as fate, luck or the mercy of other people.

Based on clinical observations and research, the researchers found that the tendency for interpersonal victimhood consists of four main dimensions: (a) constantly seeking recognition for one’s victimhood, (b) moral elitism, (c) lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others, and (d) frequently ruminating about past victimization. One need not look too hard to see the depth of the Iranian regime’s victimhood identity construction. The takeaway of this realization is the dangerousness and ruthlessness of a collective of people who identify as victimized saviours who are beset by fantasy creations of evil; there is little moral restraint of actions against pure evil for the Iranian regime.

The IRGC and Ettala’at have been accused of stealing the bodies of victims to keep the body count low. 16-year-old protestor Nika Shakarami was abducted by the IRGC and Ettala’at, tortured and murdered. Her body was buried 40 kilometres away and her family was extorted by the regime to recover her remains.

While no one is really sure just how many women, girls, and males have been killed and incarcerated, the graphic in figure 18 offers some insight from just one organisation attempting to track the violence against girls in Iran. These mechanisms and dynamics at play are case study examples of psychological warfare, a growing form of violent control that breaks down a community making it easier to control and, in turn, weaponize for both internal and external employment. Iranian citizens in opposition to the regime, are understood by the regime as betrayers of the spiritual and metaphysical goals of the regime. The purpose behind the torture, imprisonment, and executions is not merely to punish, but to punish as a way of saving those who fail to understand their place in a physical and metaphysical society of would-be believers. This again illustrates the principalist ideology that human beings are inherently sinful and must be carefully guarded and controlled by Islamic jurisprudence. Iranian Islamic jurisprudence, however, deviates significantly from traditional western norms in a manner that creates significant confusion. The age of consent in Iran for boys and girls is a good example to illustrate how extreme these deviations can be Under Velayat Faqih, or Islamic Jurisprudence in Iran, girls mature emotionally and mentally faster than boys. A girl can be held criminally liable for her actions once she turns 9 years of age, while a boy must be 13 years of age to be held liable. This jurisprudence guidance explains how a 9-year-old girl can be executed for Moharebeh, the crime of "waging war against God" or Mofsede-fel-arz, the crime of ‘spreading corruption on earth’. Of course, if a 9-year-old girl can be executed for a crime, then she can also give consent to sexual relations at the same age.