A scion of Qom’s elite Salarieh quarter turns poverty into a human resource for the Islamic Republic.
Near the intersection of Nastaran Alley and Jaleh Street in the affluent Salarieh district of Qom, the deeply religious Yekta family once lived. Haj Abbas, the patriarch, was a well-known merchant in the Qom bazaar. The father of Mohammadhossein (born November 1967), another son, and several daughters, he moved his family to Salarieh in the mid-1980s as the neighborhood was undergoing a massive transformation.
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had purchased much of the undeveloped land in Salarieh from Qom’s primary religious endowment trusteeship, or toliyat, in the 1970s. After the 1979 revolution, he started a construction company and built a couple hundred upscale residences in the area. Rafsanjani went on to gift many of these to members of the emerging power elite to develop and cement his political-religious network in the new Islamic Republic, even as others bought in to enjoy, and perhaps benefit from, the neighborhood’s blossoming cachet.
From the family of Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, head of Iran’s judiciary for most of the 1990s, to members of the Assembly of Experts and Guardian Council, to the family of Seyed Mehdi Hashemi, one of the founders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was later executed for leaking information about the Iran-Contra affair, many powerful figures lived in the district. Brigadier General Mohammad Saeed Izadi, commander of the Palestine branch of the IRGC’s Quds Force, responsible for arming and training Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, was killed in his Salarieh home by Israeli missiles during the 12-day war in 2025. Families tied to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—from the family of Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi to that of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim—lived alongside prosperous, devout merchants like Haj Abbas Yekta. (To distinguish the family’s generations-old, rather common surname of Hosseini, Yekta—”unique” or “peerless”—was at some point appended to it and in time became primary.)
Even after the toliyat sold much of the area to Rafsanjani, it retained a sprawling garden bordered to the south by Yasaman Street, one block over from Jaleh, where Qom’s only amusement park was built, a major attraction for people from around the city. In 1984, at the direction of Supreme Leader Khomeini, Iran’s largest women’s seminary was established, occupying about half of the garden’s footprint, and the amusement park shut down.
Among Salarieh’s most distinctive features, every street was named after a flower (nastaran, wild rose; yasaman, jasmine) or other garden motif (jaleh, morning dew). Later, the streets were officially renamed for martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, but the new appellations were ignored by residents, who continued to use the traditional flower names. The entire neighborhood was filled with fragrant acacia and jasmine trees.
Despite the elegant villas and charming atmosphere, most residents did not resemble the affluent classes of other major cities in their visual appearance. Where in tony north Tehran, the residents—including the families of wealthy IRGC commanders—looked modern and stylish, the primarily religious beneficiaries of the revolution’s patronage system in Salarieh appeared much more traditional: men with beards wearing black-and-white clothing, women in black chadors.
Unlike Haj Abbas, who maintained a low profile in the neighborhood, on the far side of the city from the bazaar that consumed his attention, his son Mohammadhossein in the early 1990s began to play a prominent role in the district’s religious and political events. Soon earning the same honorific by which his father was long known, Haj Hossein cut an intimidating figure at first glance: stern-faced, with a glass eye—he had lost his right eye while serving as an IRGC officer in the Iran-Iraq War—and a thick black beard. But in fact he was warm, approachable, and, as people from working-class neighborhoods might say, down to earth (khaki) and honorable (looti maslak). He spoke in the slang of street toughs and loved joking around. Only when angered did he become truly frightening.
Mohammadhossein eventually became so renowned that Haj Abbas himself was identified through his son’s reputation. When the patriarch died in January 2023, around the age of 80, media outlets were flooded with condolences from political and military officials addressed not to him, but to his son, Haj Hossein Yekta.
Cultivating loyalty
The geographic enclave of Salarieh is linked to three ideological institutions of the Islamic Republic: the Meysam Cultural Center, which operates out of the neighborhood’s Al-Nabi Mosque; Masoumiyeh Seminary, about a mile and a half northeast, whose entire leadership for years lived in Salarieh, including its principal, the Al-Nabi imam; and, just steps from the seminary, the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute, founded by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi. Key figures from the institute, among them Morteza Agha-Tehrani—who currently presides over the Iranian parliament’s Cultural Commission—were frequent participants in the gatherings at the Meysam Center.
Within this set of institutions, a circle of influential figures play various roles in developing and executing communications strategies to maintain the regime’s popular base, ensure it is continually replenished with youthful recruits, and mobilize them on demand to display their support for the regime—and sometimes more aggressive actions. Agha-Tehrani and Mehdi Aboutalebi, a long-time associate of Hossein Yekta’s, for instance, are “producers of meaning,” developing ideological frameworks and maxims, then disseminating them in media appearances and at religious gatherings. Meanwhile, figures in the leadership circle of the Meysam Center such as Abbas Mohsen and Mojtaba Vafi are primarily responsible for direct outreach to prospective supporters and their subsequent training and mobilization.
Hossein Yekta has played multiple roles. He spent years working out of the Meysam Center to recruit and indoctrinate teenagers and young adults, becoming known especially as a teller of stories about the war against Iraq, drawing on his own extensive combat experiences. With the passage of time, his influence expanded well beyond the center, as he gradually emerged as a leading institutional administrator and strategist in his own right. Whatever its members’ specific roles, the circle’s collective aim, in Yekta’s words, is to “build human beings for the New Islamic Civilization.”
Almost this entire network, whose members met as young neighbors in Salarieh, came of age attending events at the Meysam Center. According to one local resident, “the center’s function was patron cultivation—transforming the wealthy religious youth of the neighborhood into devoted followers of the Supreme Leader and promoters of the ruling ideology.” They pursued their clerical studies at Masoumiyeh Seminary—some, like Hossein Yekta, briefly; others, such as Mehdi Aboutalebi, more comprehensively. They are ultimately of one mind in promoting an unswerving worldview: loyalty to the Supreme Leader and dedication to revolutionary activism.
Claiming the mantle of a discourse centered on alleviating hardship, these figures, almost all from backgrounds of relative privilege, speak repeatedly of “saving the deprived.” Yet they place far less emphasis on the economic empowerment of lower-income groups than on their ideological and identity-based organization. Their so-called jihadi work is increasingly directed at recruiting ardent followers into the burgeoning jan-fada movement, the Islamic Republic’s “devotees unto death,” a process that involves the crucial step of pledging allegiance to the doctrine of Velaayat-e Faghih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist—the principle by which the Supreme Leader exercises absolute authority.)
War stories and “Travelers of Light”
For most of the 1980s and early 1990s, Iran’s leading storyteller—or, in the Persian idiom, narrator (ravi)—of the war with Iraq was documentary filmmaker Morteza Avini. Across more than 80 films made during the war and its aftermath, he took his camera to communities near the front lines, focusing on how ordinary citizens participated in and were affected by the conflict. For years, his films aired every Friday night on Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. After Avini’s death in 1993, members of the Meysam Center engaged in intensive discussions about his legacy. To fill the void of inspirational war narrator, a quiet competition developed among the center’s members, including Haj Hossein Yekta. As an officer in the IRGC’s Habib Battalion, he was a veteran of many of the war’s fiercest battles, including Valfajr 3, 4, and 8, Operation Badr, and Karbala 1, 4, and 5. After the war, he remained a core member of the Habib Battalion network, which evolved into a coterie bringing together some of the Islamic Republic’s most hardline intelligence and security figures around Mojtaba Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s most influential son and eventual (if perhaps only nominal) successor as Supreme Leader. Yekta ultimately won recognition as Avini’s successor, though he employed a methodology very different from the filmmaker’s.
The campaign he led tasked school administrators and guidance counselors around the country with selecting religiously devoted students and sending them to cultural-military camps along the Iran-Iraq border, in the operational zones of the “Sacred Defense.” Known as Rahian-e Noor (Travelers of Light), these student excursions, which might last anywhere from two to ten days, have been described by critics as meant primarily for ideological indoctrination. Whether voluntarily or under pressure, thousands of teenagers and young adults were sent to listen to Haj Hossein recount war stories, including vivid tales of grassroots resistance and martyrdom.
Over the course of more than 20 years leading the Rahian-e Noor camps, Hossein Yekta’s war narratives earned him recognition among religious youth and Basij militia members who would also visit the camps to hear his presentations. But the regime’s interest in cultivating loyalists willing to give their time at a moment’s notice to pro-regime rallies and marches and even carry out acts of repression required deeper recruitment—particularly from lower social strata—and Yekta’s role evolved to provide it.
A new society
For two decades, Iran’s leading nongovernmental aid group addressing the needs of marginalized communities was the independent Imam Ali Society. Founded by university students in 1999, the group—formally, the Imam Ali Popular Students’ Relief Society—focused on empowering vulnerable children, youth struggling with addiction, and those affected by poverty and violence. In 2010, it achieved special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, and a decade later it was operating more than 40 facilities in disadvantaged areas across Iran, supported by more than 10,000 volunteers.
According to Sharmin Meymandinejad, one of the Imam Ali Society’s founders, officials in the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus tried to bring the organization under ideological control after it received UN recognition—even as they praised it publicly. When those co-optation efforts failed, the security forces moved in 2017 to establish a parallel structure: the Imam Reza Society, with Haj Hossein Yekta as its public face. The following year, Yekta’s war narratives were collected and published as Red Squares, further boosting his reputation; the collection has been reprinted 11 times. By this point, he was also a member of the central council of the Ammar Headquarters, an internal propaganda think tank, and a senior commander of the IRGC’s internal plainclothes operations.
The Imam Reza Society initially presented itself as a humanitarian group providing relief to earthquake and flood victims. Maintaining that it received no funding from any government or state-affiliated institution, the society announced that it was created to step in where the government and traditional charities had been unable to solve problems and try to fill the gaps.
As the Imam Ali Society continued to defend its independence, on June 21, 2020, IRGC operatives shut down its Tehran headquarters, confiscated all of its computers, phones, and archives, and arrested Meymandinejad and two colleagues. The accusations against the trio, who were held incommunicado for 48 hours, involved transgressions against national security and insults to the country’s religious leaders. Meymandinejad’s colleagues were released on bail following two months’ imprisonment.
Meymandinejad, who later left Iran after he was incarcerated for four months under brutal conditions, told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit: “In Rahian-e Noor, they couldn’t recruit soldiers or create ‘fire-at-will’ forces. That program mostly drew from the regime’s base of middle-class ideological supporters. But with the Imam Reza network, they went after marginalized children—kids who, in my experience, were sometimes susceptible to [committing] violence and repression.”
Human rights documentation suggests that the Islamic Republic systematically draws from lower-income and marginalized populations in its repression apparatus. While not officially declared policy, this pattern is visible in institutional design, socioeconomic incentives, and security planning. The Imam Reza Society appears to be part of this structure.
The society today is involved in an expansive range of activities, many of which give it access to the demographic Meymandinejad describes. It provides vocational training and life-skills education for young people, organizes local markets where farmers and other small producers can sell directly to consumers, distributes free charitable meals (nazri), campaigns for the release of prisoners, and participates in school construction and flood-control projects.
At the same time, it also engages in overtly political and ideological functions. The society has marshalled teenagers to participate in public pledges of allegiance to Mojtaba Khamenei, organized pro-government street rallies, and arranged pilgrimages to Shiite holy sites.
While Hossein Yekta is widely believed to be the society’s founder, Meymandinejad claims that it was actually established by a former Imam Ali Society member who was later revealed to have been an infiltrator planted by the Revolutionary Guards. In his view, organizations like the Imam Reza Society “don’t have a public audience—they serve the state. Security structures cannot organically attract volunteers; they must infiltrate existing social networks.”
Identity-based mobilization
In political economy studies, the use of force combined with the allocation of resources—money, jobs, privileges—to maintain political control is known as the “economy of repression.” Its inputs include official defense and intelligence budgets, unregulated revenues from institutions tied to the Supreme Leader’s office, and informal income streams such as rents and smuggling—areas where entities like the IRGC and Bonyad Mostazafan (BM) play key roles.
Lower-income populations are often more easily drawn into such systems due to economic incentives, access to patronage networks, and susceptibility to identity-based mobilization. The Islamic Republic has long structured recruitment around this dynamic, from the Basij to newer entities like the Imam Reza Society.
In effect, the system transforms poverty into loyalty and a capacity for repression. Not all participants come from disadvantaged backgrounds—ideology also plays a role—but economic leverage remains central.
Budget transparency is limited, making it difficult to arrive at precise figures. In 2023, Deutsche Welle estimated the cost of Iran’s repression apparatus at 557 billion tomans (then approximately $11.2 million USD) per day, based on official budgets for the IRGC, intelligence ministry, and security police. This figure does not include many off-budget funding streams. For example, around the same time he became head of the new Imam Reza Society, Hossein Yekta was also appointed by Ebrahim Raisi—Iran’s future president—to launch another charitable body, the Karamat Foundation, under the aegis of Astan Quds Razavi, one of the Islamic Republic’s wealthiest religious-finanical entities.
With a putatively humanitarian mission similar to that of the Imam Reza Society, the Karamat Foundation’s operations include a comprehensive counseling center, a women and family affairs center, the Razavi volunteer service network and service centers, the Pilgrim Endowment Institute, and a sports and physical education institute. While these projects are ostensibly focused on assisting disadvantaged communities, critics argue that their ultimate objective, again like that of the Imam Reza Society, is to identify vulnerable Iranians, organize them into structured networks, and transform them into dependable supporters of the regime, ready for mobilization.
Meymandinejad argues that recruitment into such networks builds on years of ideological conditioning among poor youth: “They first make children anti-social, because someone raised that way can more easily commit violence. They invest heavily in shaping them.” He traces such efforts in recent years to the IRGC’s recruitment of Afghan migrant children as young as 14, living in Iran mostly without legal residency, to fight the Islamic Republic’s proxy war in Syria. Further back, he points to the regime’s formative era, when the use of child soldiers in the Sacred Defense against Iraq became normalized.
Repression as ritual
On January 8, 2026, amid mass protests against the regime, Hossein Yekta released a video online in which he openly threatened violence, urging Basij forces to take action and warning families not to complain if their children were harmed. The video was picked up by state television and broadcast repeatedly, gaining widespread attention and leading to Yekta’s sanctioning by the EU and multiple European countries. In the next 48 hours alone, thousands of Iranians were killed by regime forces and followers—IRGC, Basij, eager jan-fada, all freed to “fire at will.”
More recently, during the months-long fraught ceasefire with the United States and Israel, the signals that Yekta’s Imam Reza Society serves as a mobilization arm for repression have grown louder as well. The society has organized a series of mass street events in which jan-fada occupy and overwhelm public space in a way meant to intimidate any observers opposed to the regime. The participation of children and teenagers in a rally pledging allegiance to the Supreme Leader on April 29, 2026, underscored that the Imam Reza network’s true commitment is to state security goals rather than grassroots charity.
The Imam Reza Society and Karamat Foundation, under Hossein Yekta, are vital exponents of the Islamic Republic’s broader economy of repression. Through training, jobs, privileges, and tangible goods, the state cultivates a loyal force capable of suppressing protests, enforcing social surveillance, and on occasion, wreaking vengeance.
For participants from affluent backgrounds, this system is not merely ideological—it is also economic. It offers access to contacts, contracts, and institutional power. Dismantling such a system is beyond difficult, as it requires replacing the entire structure of incentives that sustain it. And as long as this “economy of repression” persists, meaningful change will remain elusive.
Reflecting on the jan-fada movement and Hossein Yekta’s role in organizing and galvanizing it, Sharmin Meymandinejad argues that the regime supporters who storm demonstrations chanting “Heydar, Heydar” have already been invested with a sense of epic heroism, casting them as protagonists in a historic, almost mythic struggle. Once convinced that they alone represent righteousness, they are able to carry out the most extreme violence with remarkable ease. He puts it starkly: “They have turned repression into ritual. Ritual is powerful—it mobilizes emotion. Where we gave poor families bags of rice, they deliver black body bags.”