Behind the high concrete walls of Farzanegan Boulevard in Isfahan, a former detention center has been transformed into one of the most brutal laboratories of torture against Iranian women. New accounts smuggled out of Dowlatabad Women's Prison—paired with today's 146th consecutive week of the "No to Executions Tuesdays" hunger strike across 66 Iranian prisons—reveal a regime relying on medieval torture chambers and daily political executions to terrorize a generation that refuses to submit.
600 Women Crammed Into Cells and the Horror of the "Dark Room"
Following the closure of the women's ward at Dastgerd Prison, authorities transferred female detainees from across Isfahan province into Dowlatabad Women's Prison, where at least 600 women are now held under the joint oversight of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), State Security Forces, and the Morality Police. In rooms originally built to hold 24 inmates, between 60 and 67 women are crammed together with only two toilets and a single sink, forcing more than 40 women in each room to sleep on the bare floor.
Yet the true epicenter of terror inside Dowlatabad lies in its IRGC solitary confinement cells—designed so the screams of beaten women echo through air vents into neighboring cells—and a segregated torture chamber known to inmates as the Tarik-khaneh ("The Dark Room").
Inside the Dark Room, guards bind a woman's hands behind her back to another prisoner, forcing them to sit on the floor with their knees pressed tightly against their chests for hours or days at a time without food, water, or access to a restroom. Forced to relieve themselves inside their clothes on the contaminated floor, starving women who begged for food had a few sugar cubes thrown onto the filthy ground by IRGC guards—who then forced the bound women to pick the sugar cubes up from the floor with their mouths. Before being returned to the general ward, detainees are forced to sign written statements claiming they were never tortured.
Twin Sisters Taraneh and Romina Rahimi Beaten Beyond Recognition
Among the young women subjected to the horrors of the Dark Room are Taraneh and Romina Rahimi—twin sisters arrested during the January 2026 uprising in Isfahan who turned 20 years old behind bars. Tried in the collective "Shohada Square" case, 20-year-old Taraneh Rahimi has been sentenced to death and 11 years in prison while denied urgent surgery that prison doctors warned she needs to avoid losing her ability to walk, and her twin sister Romina has been sentenced to 25 years in prison alongside teenage co-defendant Setayesh Saedi.
Newly confirmed reports from inside Dowlatabad reveal that both twin sisters have been subjected to such relentless beatings to their faces and bodies in the solitary cells and Dark Room that their own family members could not recognize them during the opening moments of a prison visit. Inside the ward, Fatemeh Asgarian, head of the women's section at Dowlatabad Prison, directly threatened 20-year-old Taraneh with imminent execution, telling her: "We will string you up on the gallows."
Week 146 of "No to Executions Tuesdays": One Political Prisoner Killed Every Day
The torture inside Dowlatabad is unfolding alongside an unprecedented wave of state killings across Iran. On Tuesday, November 10, 2026, prisoners across 66 facilities—including the women's wards of Evin, Qarchak, Sepidar, Adelabad, Zahedan, Yazd, and Lakan Rasht—entered the 146th consecutive week of the "No to Executions Tuesdays" hunger strike.
In their joint statement marking the 146th week, the striking prisoners warned that over the past seven days alone, the regime has murdered an average of one political prisoner every single day: hanging January 2026 protesters Amirhossein Maleki and Amirhossein Ebrahimi in Isfahan, executing Baluch prisoner Mohammad-Aref Shahbakhsh, hanging political detainees Hassan Divband, Hamid Kazemi, and Reza Zanganeh in Karaj after subjecting them to mock executions, and torturing detainee Hedayat Lalarizadeh to death in an Ahvaz intelligence center before dumping his body in the desert of Khuzestan. At least 15 new political death sentences—including for 20-year-old Mehdi Zanganeh in Sheiban Prison—were issued or communicated in a single week.
As UN Special Rapporteur Dr. Mai Sato warned the United Nations General Assembly, Iran's serial executions of protesters echo the dark shadow of the 1980s political massacres—making urgent international intervention the only barrier standing between Iran's youth and the gallows.
