The ongoing military conflict in Iran has the potential to reshape the country, not least for its diverse range of religious and ethnic minorities. While Iran has a deep and ancient history of religious and ethnic pluralism, the 1979 revolution set in motion almost five-decades of systematic persecution against the country's minority communities and Iranian women in the name of the Islamic Republic.
Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has imposed a theocratic order subordinating all of Iran's diverse communities to an extremist interpretation of Shiism.
Iran's Jewish population fell from approximately 80,000 to fewer than 10,000 following the 1979 execution of community leader Habib Elghanian on fabricated espionage charges, as well as decades of discriminatory laws and state antisemitism that drove successive waves of emigration.
The Baha'i community, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, has been a target of what the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has called "systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom." Over 200 Baha'is were executed in the revolution's early years and holy sites were destroyed. A secret 1991 memorandum signed by former Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered their systematic exclusion from education, employment and commerce.
The Zoroastrian community, followers of Iran's oldest faith, saw their numbers decline from 60,000 to roughly 15,000. They have been subjected to forced Islamic curricula, conversion pressure and, during the Iran-Iraq War, forced military conscription for suicide missions.
Christian converts face imprisonment and death for apostasy, with cumulative prison sentencing of Christians surging sixfold between 2023 and 2024. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that Iran carried out over 900 executions in 2024 and issued scores of death sentences for religiously based charges.
Kurdish, Baluch, Arab and Azeri communities have suffered decades of cultural suppression, economic neglect and disproportionate executions. The UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at least 108 Baluch and 84 Kurdish prisoners were executed in 2024, together accounting for roughly 20 percent of the 975 recorded executions that year, despite representing a fraction of Iran's population.
Iranian women have faced sustained repression under the Islamic Republic's enforcement of mandatory hijab and other discriminatory policies. In 2022, Mahsa Amini died in custody after her arrest by the regime's "morality police" for allegedly violating hijab rules, triggering nationwide protests under the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom."
The Islamic Republic also projected its sectarian ideology beyond its borders through proxy networks, contributing to instability that has affected minority communities across the wider Middle East, and as far away as Latin America, where Jewish communities have been exposed to both antisemitic propaganda and terrorist attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies.
Through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite Quds Force, Iran built and sustained a network of allied militias stretching from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen.
In Lebanon, Iran founded, funded and armed Hezbollah, which the Council on Foreign Relations has described as "a state within a state.” Hezbollah became the dominant military force in the country, drawing Lebanon into regional conflicts and deepening sectarian divisions in what was historically a pluralist, multi-confessional society.
In Iraq, the IRGC-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have been widely documented as targeting religious minorities in the Nineveh Plains, the country's only Christian-majority region. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found that the growing power of militias affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its paramilitary forces are "the single largest threat" to the security and existence of minority communities in Iraq.
The UK government reported that PMF militias "attempted to induce demographic change" in Nineveh governorate by preventing displaced Christians from returning to their homes and encouraging Shia settlement. Iraq's Christian population, which numbered 1.5 million before the 2003 invasion, has fallen to between 150,000 and 250,000.
In Yemen, Iran-backed Houthi forces – whose flag includes the phrase “A Curse on the Jews” – replicated the Islamic Republic's persecution of religious minorities. The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief stated in 2017 that "the recent escalation in the persistent pattern of persecution of the Baha'i community in Sana'a mirrors the persecution suffered by the Baha'is living in Iran." The Baha'i International Community reported that multiple independent sources confirmed Iranian authorities were "advising or directing efforts to persecute Baha'is in Yemen." The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that religious minority life in Houthi-controlled areas "faces near-total extinction," with Baha'is, Christians and Jews all targeted. Houthi leader Abdel-Malek al-Houthi has publicly targeted Baha'is in speeches, citing a 2013 fatwa issued by Iran's former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
As the current conflict unfolds, the future of Iran's diverse communities remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Islamic Republic's record, both within its borders, in the region and across the globe, has been one of systematic repression of religious and ethnic pluralism. Any political order that emerges will be measured in part by whether it restores the rights and protections that the regime spent nearly five decades dismantling.