分类： society

When Iranian security agents arrived at Peyvand Naimi’s workplace in Kerman on January 8, the 30-year-old member of Iran’s persecuted Bahai religious community had no idea what horrors awaited him behind bars. Accused of involvement in the killing of three Basij militia members the previous night, Naimi’s case already falls apart on basic timeline: he was taken into custody that afternoon, hours before the attack he is alleged to have carried out.

Decades of systematic discrimination had already closed doors for Naimi: barred from university and competitive swimming teams despite his natural talent for the sport, he had long adapted to life as a target of state-sanctioned prejudice because of his faith. Today, he is one of at least 77 Bahais arrested across Iran since nationwide anti-government protests erupted in January, in what community leaders describe as the harshest wave of repression against the group since the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Originating in 19th-century Persia, the Bahai Faith is the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran, with an estimated 300,000 followers nationwide. The Islamic republic has never formally recognized the faith, branding its adherents as heretics and repeatedly leveling unsubstantiated accusations that they act as Israeli spies – a baseless claim rooted in the location of the faith’s global spiritual center in Haifa, Israel, which was established decades before the founding of the modern Israeli state. Community advocates say this scapegoating follows a predictable pattern: whenever Iran faces internal unrest or external regional tensions, authorities turn to blaming Bahais to deflect public anger.

“This is an escalation against the Bahai that we have not witnessed in decades,” Simin Fahandej, the Bahai International Community (BIC) representative to the United Nations, told AFP in an interview. Fahandej confirmed that arrests have continued steadily through the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and intensified sharply after the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June 2025. What makes this crackdown different from past waves of repression, she explained, is the state’s deliberate use of tortured, forced confessions broadcast on state media to spread hate speech and legitimize further persecution of the community.

Amnesty International has corroborated these accounts, confirming that a coordinated state-led campaign of incitement, disinformation, discrimination and violence has targeted Bahais since the June 2025 cross-border war, with repeated false claims that the community serves as Israeli spies and collaborators.

For Naimi and other detainees, the abuse in custody has been brutal. According to his close relative, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity out of fear for family safety inside Iran, Naimi was beaten repeatedly over five days, endured two mock executions with his hands and feet bound, was tied to a wall for extended periods, deprived of food, and forced to appear in a televised coerced confession. During a brief, monitored phone call to his parents, he told them, “If they execute me do not be sad, my soul will be free of the cage of my body.” Later, during a family visit, he reaffirmed his innocence: “I have done nothing wrong, I have not committed any crime and I will not confess.” As of yet, Naimi has not been formally charged or granted a trial.

Naimi’s 29-year-old cousin Borna was arrested in early March and has faced identical abuse, including at least two mock executions and electric shocks that left severe burns on his feet, BIC reports confirm.

The crackdown has swept up Bahai communities across the country, from southeastern Kerman province to the southern city of Shiraz. Roya Basiri, a Canadian resident whose brother, sister-in-law, and 25-year-old sister-in-law Mahsa Sotoudeh were all arrested in late March and early April, described the arbitrary nature of the raids. When Revolutionary Guards agents arrived at Mahsa’s family home and demanded to see an arrest warrant, Basiri told AFP, agents responded bluntly: “We are the warrant.” The agents searched the home, seized all electronic devices, then lured Mahsa back to the house by using her mother’s phone, arresting her at the door in front of her distraught parents. While Basiri’s brother has since been released on bail, Mahsa and Mandana Sotoudeh remain in detention.

In late April, three Bahai women – one of whom is pregnant – from the southeastern town of Rafsanjan were ordered to begin serving existing prison sentences on vague charges of spreading “propaganda” against the Iranian government. Another Bahai detainee, 30-year-old Venus Hosseininejad, who was arrested in January in Kerman and forced to give a televised false confession, was recently released on bail; while she still faces pending charges, BIC confirmed she is not currently at risk of execution, despite recent claims made by former U.S. president Donald Trump on social media.

Thirteen men already have been executed across Iran on charges linked to the January protests, a wave of punishment that human rights activists say is designed to instill mass fear amid rising tensions with the United States and Israel. For Iran’s Bahai community, the current crackdown represents a dangerous acceleration of a decades-long campaign of persecution, with community members once again being made to pay the price for state instability, advocates say.

Just months after Japan recorded its deadliest year on record for human-bear conflicts, the East Asian nation has officially confirmed its first fatal bear attack of 2026, with two additional suspicious deaths under investigation that experts link to hungry bears emerging from winter hibernation. The 2025 crisis, which saw a staggering 13 fatal bear attacks and more than 200 injured people—more than double the previous annual record of six deaths—sparked national alarm, forcing the Japanese government to deploy military troops to assist with trapping and culling aggressive animals that wandered deep into human-populated areas. Incidents ranged from bears roaming near schools and breaking into residential homes to rampaging through supermarket aisles and wandering through popular hot spring resort districts, bringing the long-simmering human-wildlife conflict to the forefront of national public discourse.

According to Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, the first confirmed fatality of 2026 was a 55-year-old woman whose body was discovered on April 21 in Iwate Prefecture, a rural region in northern Japan’s Tohoku area. Police confirmed to AFP that two additional sets of human remains have been recovered this week: one found Thursday in another part of Iwate, and a second recovered Tuesday in a Yamagata Prefecture forest. While police have not officially ruled on the cause of death, local media and wildlife experts have linked both deaths to bear attacks.

Public broadcaster NHK identified one of the two deceased as 69-year-old Chiyoko Kumagai, who went missing after traveling to a mountain forest to harvest edible wild plants, a popular seasonal activity in rural Japan. After launching a large search operation Thursday around the forest where Kumagai’s parked car was found, rescuers located her body shortly after 8 a.m. local time. NHK reported that Kumagai suffered extensive claw injuries to her face and head consistent with a bear attack, and local officials confirmed that licensed hunters would begin increased patrols of the high-risk area starting Friday.

Wildlife scientists have traced the steady rise in bear conflicts across Japan to a combination of interconnected environmental and demographic shifts. A 2025 Japanese government survey found that the national brown bear population has doubled over the past 30 years to roughly 12,000 individuals, while the population of Asian black bears—responsible for the vast majority of attacks on humans, and common across most of Honshu, Japan’s largest main island—has grown to 42,000. Experts note that warming temperatures have boosted food supplies for bears, including acorns, deer, and wild boar, creating ideal conditions for population growth even as rural human populations decline.

This population boom has created what experts describe as “overcrowding” in Japan’s mountainous regions, which cover roughly 80 percent of the country’s total land area. Overcrowding forces younger, bolder bears to stray beyond mountain boundaries into rural villages and towns, where many quickly develop a taste for easy access to farmed crops and cultivated fruits such as persimmons. Compounding this issue, a poor acorn and nut harvest in 2025 pushed large numbers of bears out of the mountains and into populated areas in search of food, leading to last year’s record number of conflicts. Depopulation and population aging in rural Japan have also left large swathes of former farmland abandoned, creating extra habitat for bears and expanding their range closer to remaining human settlements.

While 2026 forecasts for natural bear food sources are more favorable, local media reports show that bear sightings this spring have already hit record levels as animals emerge hungry from hibernation. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the number of confirmed sightings in April across Miyagi, Akita, and Fukushima prefectures was roughly four times higher than the same period in 2025. Koji Yamazaki, one of Japan’s leading bear experts and director of the Ibaraki Nature Museum, warned that Tohoku region residents must remain vigilant through the spring, despite his prediction that 2026 will ultimately see fewer conflicts than 2025’s historic high.

“I’m not sure yet why we’re seeing this kind of unprecedented damage so early in the spring,” Yamazaki told AFP. “Given that all the incidents have occurred relatively close to settlements and the bodies have been severely damaged, I suspect a bear has eaten them.” Yamazaki added that the Tohoku region has one of the densest bear populations in the country, following 20 years of consistent population growth, and that abandoned land from depopulation and aging has only worsened the overlap between bear territory and human communities. For context, brown bears— which can grow to more than 500 kilograms and run faster than the average human—are limited almost exclusively to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island, while smaller black bears are widespread across Honshu and linked to most deadly attacks.

High in the misty Caucasus highlands of Armenia, three Syrian brown bears — Nairi, Aram, and their young cub Lola — now roam spacious, natural mountain enclosures, digging dens and foraging for fresh produce that mimics their wild diet. It is a stark contrast to the life they escaped just over a year ago: confined to a cramped three-meter cage in the heart of Armenia’s capital Yerevan, forced to sit in their own waste and fed a steady diet of sugary junk food. For these three bears, the rescue was a life-changing second chance, but conservationists warn that as many as 20 more bears remain trapped in inhumane captivity across the country, held as luxury status symbols by the nation’s wealthy elite.

The problem of captive wild predators in Armenia is not a new one, rooted in long-standing patterns of illegal wildlife trafficking and elite trophy collecting that have persisted since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Strategically positioned at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, Armenia has become a key transit and destination hub for illegal wildlife trafficking, according to global crime research. A 2023 Global Organized Crime Index report identifies persistent demand for rare and dangerous wild animals among the country’s ultra-wealthy, where owning large predators has become a display of power and social status.

High-profile cases have brought the issue into public view for decades. In 2015, an Armenian member of parliament drew widespread international criticism after publicly acknowledging he kept six endangered Siberian tigers on his private property. The crisis reached a breaking point in 2016, when a private zoo owned by a businessman in the northern city of Gyumri collapsed into insolvency, leaving dozens of caged animals — including lions and bears — to starve to death behind locked gates.

Today, the Frontline for the rescue mission is run by the Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC), a local non-profit that operates Armenia’s only dedicated bear rehabilitation center on a remote mountainside an hour outside Yerevan. Rescuers have documented appalling conditions across the country’s unregulated captive sites: bears are confined to tiny concrete cages at hotels, private backyards, and even roadside petrol stations, denied access to natural sunlight and the ability to hibernate, a critical biological need for the species. Many suffer from severe health issues caused by inappropriate diets, with widespread rotting teeth resulting from being fed cookies, sugary snacks, and even Coca-Cola by their untrained owners.

“It became clear the moment we mapped the scale of the crisis that we needed a dedicated rescue and rehabilitation space,” explained Tsovinar Hovhannisyan, FPWC’s conservation manager. The three bears Nairi, Aram and Lola were among the most high-profile rescue operations the group has ever completed. Their owner refused to hand the animals over, claiming the bears were “happy” living with him and accusing rescuers of threatening their lives. The team waited more than eight hours in heavy rain for a court order to enter the property and seize the animals. When they finally entered the cage, Hovhannisyan recalled, the space was caked in layers of filth and reeked of waste: “It was horrible, those are memories I will not forget.”

Now, with Armenia scheduled to host a major UN COP summit on biodiversity this October, the FPWC team is racing against time to rescue the remaining 20 known captive bears across the country. But the mission faces a critical barrier: the rehabilitation center is already at maximum capacity, home to 32 bears that can never be released back into the wild after a lifetime of captivity left them unable to hunt. The organization is currently fundraising to expand its enclosures to accommodate more rescued animals.

Wealthy owners often see large predators like bears as a bragging right, says FPWC communications manager Ani Poghosyan. “It is a status symbol for them. Something to brag about, especially owning a big predator — it is a way to prove their power and masculinity.” Even when owners initially agree to surrender the animals, many change their mind at the last minute, leaving rescuers empty-handed after traveling to remote properties.

For the bears that do make it to the center, the team works to recreate as wild an environment as possible. Enclosures are large enough for the animals to roam, dig their own winter dens, and climb trees, and staff provide live prey to encourage natural foraging behaviors. After years trapped in tiny cages, many newly rescued bears are initially afraid to explore the full space of their new enclosures, used to being confined to a few square meters. But over time, most begin to exhibit natural behaviors, including hibernation, something they were never able to do in their former cages.

While the bears will never be able to survive in the wild, the center’s mission is simple: give them the chance to live out the rest of their lives as bears. “They need to dig, they need to climb, they need to smell wild plants and feel free,” said Narine Piloyan, the center’s coordinator. “They need to feel that they are wild.”