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In the week of the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Islamic Republic’s Minister of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism has had the temerity to claim that “the people of the world should know” that despite economic problems, the Iranian government still takes money that could be used to feed its hungry Muslim citizens to pay for the restoration of Christian churches.

“Despite the economic problems of the country, we use the chicken and eggs of the Muslim people – some of whom are in need of their nightly bread – to finance the restoration of Christian churches,” said Ezzatollah Zarghami, in comments widely publicised on Iranian state media this week.

The comments come in the wake not only of the anniversary of the closure of the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran, but also while dozens of other churches have been forced to close in recent years, and some later confiscated after years of slow decay, leaving Persian-speaking Christians with no place to worship.

“The churches the minister refers to are possibly those like Vank and Khare Kelisa, which are National Heritage sites that every year generate huge revenues for the government from the tourists who visit them, but these comments will cause outrage and disbelief among the many Iranian Christians who are denied the right to have a place to worship,” explained Article18’s advocacy director, Mansour Borji.

The Iranian regime regularly uses its recognised religious-minority groups, including ethnic Armenian and Assyrian Christians, for its propaganda.

The majority of churches in Iran today belong to the historic Armenian and Assyrian communities, and they are afforded some freedom to worship, but strictly monitored to ensure they preach only in their ethnic-minority languages – not the national language of Persian – and do not evangelise or speak out against the government.

Those churches that fail to adhere to this mandate are closed, and their pastors arrested, as happened 10 years ago in the case of the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran.

Other examples include the Iranian-Assyrian pastor Victor Bet-Tamraz, who was removed from the leadership of the Shahrara Assyrian Pentecostal Church in Tehran and later arrested after continuing to minister to converts in his home; and two Iranian-Armenian pastors, Joseph Shahbazian and Anooshavan Avedian, who were last year also given 10-year prison sentences for the same “offence”.

Meanwhile, among the growing list of Christian properties confiscated and later repurposed are the former home of the Anglican bishop of Iran, which is now a museum; a church founded by the former head of the Assemblies of God denomination in Iran; and a popular retreat centre.

Other Christian properties closed or confiscated in recent years include the Jannat-Abad, Adventist, and St Peter’s and Emmanuel Evangelical churches in Tehran, and the Assyrian Presbyterian Church in Tabriz, which was later reopened after an international outcry.

Christian schools, hospitals and cemeteries have also been confiscated in the years since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

And yet representatives of the Islamic Republic continue to claim on the international stage that religious minorities including Christians are afforded equal rights, and full religious freedom – not to mention, apparently, money for the restoration of their churches.

Truly, as the minister suggests, the people of the world should take note.

British-Iranian bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani has called on the UK government to consider offering a “safe-route scheme” for Iranians fleeing persecution on account of their faith.

In an oral question at the UK House of Lords this afternoon, Bishop Guli cited Article18’s annual report as she referenced the “increasing involvement” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “in the crackdown against peaceful Christian activities in Iran”.

“Other religious minorities and peaceful protesters also report violent treatment during arrest and detention, as well as the interference of the IRGC’s intelligence branch in court proceedings to ensure harsher sentences against those who are accused,” the bishop added. 

Bishop Guli said she “absolutely agree[d]” with those Lords calling for the IRGC to be proscribed as a terrorist group, and asked whether the government would also “consider offering a safe-route scheme for those from Iran who have suffered persecution in the form of arrest and imprisonment on account of their faith?”

In response, the Under Secretary of State for the UK Home Office, Lord Sharpe, assured Bishop Guli that her views would be “taken back”, and added that the incoming “national-security bill” would “provide another significant toolkit in the fight against individuals working for state entities like the IRGC in this country” by “criminalis[ing] a wide range of hostile activities”.

Several UK peers queried why the UK had yet to proscribe the IRGC, despite persistent calls for the group to be recognised as a terrorist entity, but Lord Sharpe said he could not comment, in line with the UK Home Office’s “long-standing policy of not commenting externally on prescription matters”, in order “to avoid creating expectations that the government will proscribe certain organisations; to reduce the risk that an organisation will take evasive action before any potential prescription order comes into force; to manage the risk that subsequent decisions are vulnerable to challenge on procedural grounds, and so on and so forth.”

This Sunday will be the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran.

The once-thriving church, built in the 1970s and re-registered in 1980 after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, was one of dozens of Persian-language churches forced to close over the past three decades, as the Iranian authorities have sought to clamp down on a sharp rise in converts to Christianity.

There were once 43 Protestant churches in Iran – many of which offered services in the national language, Persian, and attracted Iranians of all ethnicities. 

Today, just 16 remain, only four of which are permitted to preach in Persian – Anglican churches in the major cities of Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz – and only to those who can prove they were Christians before the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979. 

Even these four churches have not been permitted to reopen since the Covid-19 pandemic, so in reality there are now only 12 Protestant churches operating in Iran – 10 in the capital, Tehran, and one each in the north-western cities of Tabriz and Orumiyeh – and these churches can only offer services in the ethnic-minority languages of Armenian or Assyrian.

Half of the 12 functioning churches are Presbyterian, while there are three Assemblies of God churches, and one each from the Assyrian Pentecostal, Brethren, and Adventist denominations.

But out of all of the denominations, it is the Assemblies of God Church that has been hit the hardest, losing 13 of its 16 churches in cities across Iran – Arak, Ahvaz, Rasht, Gorgan, Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan, Shahin Shahr, Kermanshah, Shiraz, Bushehr, and Nowshahr – while the popular AoG retreat centre in Karaj has also been confiscated.

Several other Protestant-owned properties have been confiscated since 1979, including schools, hospitals, cemeteries, and even churches like the Assyrian Presbyterian Church of Tabriz and St Peter’s and Emmanuel Evangelical churches in Tehran.

The first Assemblies of God Church forced to close was that of Pastor Hossein Soodmand, hosted in his home in the conservative city of Mashhad, for which the pastor was sentenced to death and in 1990 hanged for his “apostasy”.

But the real tipping point, according to Article18’s director, Mansour Borji, came in 2009 with the forced closure of the Assyrian Pentecostal church in Shahrara, Tehran, pastored by Victor Bet-Tamraz.

“This was when the authorities renewed their long-standing demand to all the Persian-speaking churches that they must ‘cooperate’: meaning to cease all their services in Persian and disallow non-Christians from attending their services,” Mr Borji explained, “and then the first action that showed the teeth of the intelligence service during that new phase was the closure of Pastor Victor’s church.”

Other significant closures were the 2011 closure of the Ahvaz church, and arrest of the pastor, Farhad Sabokrooh, his wife, and two other church leaders, and the 2012 closure of the Jannat-Abad church in western Tehran.

A year later, the Central AoG Church met the same fate. Once a thriving congregation of around 500 predominantly Muslim-background converts, the Central AoG Church was forced to close as a result of that very fact, and its senior pastor, Robert Asseriyan, became the latest church leader to be arrested.

By then, all Persian-speaking churches had been ordered that they must cease all Persian-language services, provide the ID numbers of all members to the Ministry of Intelligence, cancel their Friday services, and hold meetings only on Sundays. (In Iran, Friday is a day off, and Sunday a working day.)

The following year, St Peter’s Evangelical Church in Tehran, which had offered Persian-language services since 1876, was forced to stop this provision.

In the years since the 1979 establishment of the Islamic Republic, the issue of converts has been – and remains – the central challenge for the Church in Iran.

Only those churches that have agreed to close their doors to converts, and latterly – in a bid to further crackdown on any chance of converts attending – to preach in Armenian or Assyrian, have been permitted to remain.

Those churches that have refused to comply have been closed, and their leaders arrested.

The only churches now open to converts are the secret network of underground house-churches, which can only survive for as long as they remain secret.

Once discovered, these house-churches are forcibly disbanded and their members forced to sign “commitments” to have no further engagement in Christian activities, or face prosecution for “actions against the state”.

The former superintendent of the AoG in Iran, Haik Hovsepian, who was killed in 1994, was one of those who refused to commit not to preach to converts or allow them to enter his churches.

Similar “commitments” were sought from the as many as 85 AoG church leaders arrested in 2004 – among them Pastors Sabokrooh and Asseriyan – as they gathered at the Karaj retreat centre that would later be confiscated.

The same thread links all these incidents together: the issue of converts – anathema to the vision of an Islamic Republic. And until that vision changes, converts and those individuals or churches that aid them or evangelise to them can expect little in the way of freedom.

Intelligence officers belonging to the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or FARAJA, are using spyware to monitor members of minority groups, including Christians, according to new research.

Since March 2020, at least 487 devices have been infected with “BouldSpy”, which has the capability to extract data including photographs, screenshots of conversations, and recordings of video calls from applications including WhatsApp and Telegram, according to researchers at US-based Lookout Threat Intelligence.

And most victims live in minority areas, such as Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchestan, as well as West Azerbaijan Province, where many Armenian and Assyrian Christians live.

“In particular, about 25 victim locations were gathered in the city of Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province, which is historically associated with Armenian and Assyrian Christianity,” Kyle Schmittle, Lookout Threat Intelligence Researcher, explained to Article18. 

“Some files stolen from victims indicate Christian faith, particularly snippets or scanned sections of relevant books,” he added.

Mr Schmittle said the researchers were confident FARAJA was behind the infections, because “the first location collected from victim devices was in the direct vicinity of either a regional police station, a border control post, Iranian Cyber Police building, military facility, provincial police command headquarters, narcotics police station, or Islamic Republic of Iran Police Force Headquarters. Most of these categories of facilities fall under the ultimate command of the overarching Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or FARAJA”.

“Because of the consistency in first-location collections from victim devices near police stations all over Iran, we believe the BouldSpy malware is most likely installed using physical access to the device when a victim is detained,” Mr Schmittle told Article18. “Additionally, some victims had photos of official FARAJA documents on their devices indicating that they had been arrested. While this information led us to attribute the malicious activity to FARAJA, in our opinion this is insufficient information to achieve a high confidence attribution.”

There was a particular spike in infections at the height of the Mahsa Amini protests in October 2022, Mr Schmittle noted, explaining: “We saw an infection rate of roughly 23-30 devices per month from July to September 2022, with a jump to 74 devices in October, and again back to about 23 devices in November.” 

Mr Schmittle added that infections are “ongoing”, and that there has been another uptick in recent months. 

“Similar numbers of devices have been infected in March and April 2023, with 69 and 87 new infections respectively, suggesting another large increase in infection activity,” he said.

The true number of victims is also likely to be higher, the researchers noted, because exfiltration data is often cleared.

The “sharply deteriorated religious-freedom conditions” in Iran are the focus of the cover and introduction to the latest annual report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The cover of the report, which was published yesterday, features a photograph of Mahsa Amini, alongside the names of scores of Iranians imprisoned on account of their religious beliefs, including a dozen Christians.

The report begins by explaining how protests erupted in Iran following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, “because her visible hair violated the government’s religiously grounded headscarf law”. 

“Outraged by this flagrant denial of life,” the report goes on, “young women and girls led hundreds of thousands of fellow Iranians in peaceful protests asserting their right to freedom of religion or belief, risking severe punishment, permanent injury, and even death.”

The cover, USCIRF says, “honors the many Iranians, known and unknown, held in prison in 2022 on account of their religious beliefs, activity, or identity by displaying the names of the individuals from Iran who are included in USCIRF’s Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List”. 

Among the names listed are a dozen Christians: Malihe Nazari, Joseph Shahbazian, Gholamreza Keyvanmanesh, Morteza Mashoodkari, Ahmad Sarparast, Ayoob Poor-Rezazadeh, Alireza Nourmohammadi, Amin Khaki, Milad Goodarzi, Abdolreza (Matthias) Ali-Haghnejad, Zaman (Saheb) Fadaie, and Yousef Nadarkhani.

The report also highlights the cases of Anooshavan Avedian, Abbas Soori, Maryam Mohammadi, Rahmat Rostamipour, Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh, and Fariba Dalir, as well as the Christian converts “pressured to abandon their faith” in Dezful, and Armenian church leaders “pressured … to issue statements supporting the government”.

“Iranian authorities’ repression of freedom of religion or belief has been a decades-long campaign targeting both religious minorities and members of the majority Shi’a Muslim community,” the report explains. 

“During 2022, in addition to its repression of protesters, Iran’s leadership continued to target members of the Baha’i, Christian, Gonabadi Sufi, Zoroastrian, Yarsani, Sunni Muslim, Shi’a Muslim, and nonreligious communities with harassment, arrests, egregiously long prison sentences, multi- year internal exiles, or bans on participating in political and social activities.”

USCIRF recommends that the US State Department re-designates Iran as a Country of Particular Concern for “systematic, egregious, and ongoing violations of religious freedom”; “imposes targeted sanctions on Iranian government agencies and officials responsible for severe violations of religious freedom”; “continues to coordinate international action to lift the veil of impunity under which Iran’s leadership continues to operate”; and “prioritizes resettlement for survivors of the most egregious forms of religious persecution, including Iranian religious minorities”.