In Iran, protestors and particularly militants are being targeted in a really violent crackdown with shooting aimed toward their eyes. Blinding an enemy who dares to dispute these powers is the most recent act of repression to go down within the country’s long history.
During the Iranian dissent in recent times, and throughout the nationwide movement in 2022 Frequency of eye injuries on protesters has come under public scrutiny. Women, youth and students, often even by passers-by, literally lose an eye fixed, or their sight, from buckshot or close-range projects. A Security Forces Tactic We’re Now Revisiting: Lawyer and 2003 Peace Nobel Laureate Sherin Ebadi January 9 is estimated “At least 400 people have been hospitalized in Tehran with firearm-related eye injuries because the protests began originally of the yr.
Such brutal use of force reveals greater than just police slips. These actions are a part of a political rhetoric that echoes throughout Iran’s long history, through which the aim of the eyes symbolically signifies the stripping of 1’s personal, political capital.
Power is in the attention of the beholder
In ancient Iranian political culture, power and eyes are inseparable. I see, subsequently I do know; I see, subsequently, I resolve. I see, subsequently I rule. This concept runs through the literary and political circles of Iran. For example, I () By Ferdowsi (10Th century), blindness constitutes a narrative marker of political and cosmic decline: exacerbating the lack of (divine) glory, the principle of the legitimacy of power as an everlasting, symbolic inability to exercise sovereignty. Blindness is synonymous with falling.
I, where to pass Rustam crossed with an arrow There is a vital scene for Iran’s political sphere: targeting the eyes, the story ultimately links the lack of vision with the disqualification of power and the elimination of all grounds for asserting sovereignty.
San Diego Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images
Historically, blindness was used as a political neutralizing weapon. It was a technique to eliminate a rival – a prince or dignitary – without spilling blood, which was considered nefarious where the nobility were concerned. Blind people weren’t executed, they were eliminated from the political arena.
King of Persia Abbas the Great (who ruled from 1588 until his death in 1629) blinded several of his sons and grandsons whom he suspected of plotting against him or opposing the succession to the throne.
In 1742, Nader Shah For his son, then Reza’s heir to the throne, was ordered to blind Reza Qavili Mirza, a symbolic act of political silence in Persia.
From blinding rituals to maintaining security, why are protesters’ eyes so often within the firing line of Iranian security forces?
The Islamic Republic doesn’t claim blinding as a punishment, however the widespread repetition of eye injuries during contemporary repression shows a symbolic continuity.
Once rare, targeted and acknowledged, blinding is now widespread, denied by authorities, carried out using so-called “non-lethal” weapons and infrequently sanctioned.
Yet its political role of neutralizing without killing, attacking the body and stopping further dissent remains to be comparable.
In contemporary Iran, eyes have turn into a political weapon. The protesters film, document and expand their horizons. Images flow into, reach across borders and undermine the regime’s narrative. When the eyes are targeted, you can’t see or show others, stopping for filming, identification and witnessing.
A goal is just not just a person’s perspective. It is that this broader vision that connects Iran’s streets to international public opinion.
Unlike the practice of blinding in precedent days which today was reserved for the male elite Eye-related violence is mainly targeted at women And young people. The female gaze, freed, free of all ideological control, becomes physically unbearable to see the world as what else ought to be seen for a regime founded on defining the body.
A continuation of visible brutality
Ongoing oppression After mass protest motion in late December 2025, it intensified thereafter A nationwide internet blackoutsought to cut back exposure to acts of violence against protesters.
Independent medical reports and witness accounts are described Hospitals are being overwhelmed Casualties—especially eye-related—have been accompanied by a rise in crowd control, in addition to firearms with live bullets, documented in several Iranian provinces. These injuries confirm that the body, and specifically, the flexibility to see and report, remains to be a primary goal of oppressive rule.
Beyond the statistics, women’s first-hand accounts tell a special story of those contemporary practices. While the Iranian society has observed Women offer worker mobility Since the 2022 Mehsa Gina Amini murders – a few of which Willfully blinded during protest -, such injuries are symbolic of each the crackdown’s try and nullify the gaze of independent women who pose a political threat to the establishment. And the resistance of those wounded, yet disfigured women with mutilated faces, evidence of Iranian oppression.
History is just not limited to the distant past of political neutrality: it’s coloured by women’s personal bodily experiences today, where the trauma of the attention might be interpreted as an emblem of exploitative violence and a political struggle that revolves across the field of regard.
The body becomes ‘capital’: the last word autonomy
The Islamic Republic could have departed from the sanctity of the monarchy, but the traditional principle by which the body possesses personal power still stays. While kings resort to blinding their subjects to guard their families, security forces use mutilation to make sure their survival.
This strategy creates a paradoxical effect. In Persia, blinding was used as a weapon of political destruction in precedent days. Today, it makes the federal government’s brutality visible to all. As the mutilated faces flow into, the victims turn into symbols and the eyes they’ve lost turn into testimony to Iran’s deep crisis of democratic legitimacy.
History doesn’t repeat itself however it lives on through gestures. By shooting on the eyes, the Iranian regime revives the old rulebook for hegemony: take away a person’s ability to see and also you eliminate them politically.