ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday said that Washington balks at Iran's treatment of its own population, criticizing Tehran for its extensive use of the death sentence in addition to standard condemnations of its nuclear ambitions and support for regional armed groups.

“Our problem with the Iranian regime isn’t simply—I mean, obviously, it’s predominantly their desire to acquire nuclear weapons, their sponsorship of terrorism, but it’s ultimately the treatment of their own people,” Rubio stressed at a State Department presser.

Speaking about Tehran's promiscuous imposition of the death penalty, Rubio said that "some of them [the executions carried out by Iran], by the way, were in the aftermath of the war with Israel, where they went through and have jailed people and accused people of being informants and spies and things of that nature. But we’re under no illusion.” 

In November, the Oslo-based Hengaw Human Rights Organization reported that Iran carried out over 1,500 executions in 2025.

Two months prior, Amnesty International said Iranian authorities had executed over 1,000 people at the point, calling it the highest number of yearly executions in at least 15 years.

Rights watchdogs have often criticized the executions as being politically or ideologically motivated, and, despite making up only around 12.5 percent of Iran’s population, Kurds comprise 15 percent of the total execution cases in Iran. 

In the wake of the Women, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi) protests in September 2022 and the 12-Day War with Israel in June, Iran has intensified the arrest and execution of individuals on charges of espionage, treason, and posing a threat to national security.

On Saturday, the Iranian judiciary announced the execution of Aqeel Keshavarz "for the crime of spying for the benefit of the Zionist regime."

“That regime is not reflective of the people who live in Iran, who are the inheritors of a proud and long cultural legacy and a proud, proud history.  And then you’ve got a clerical, radical regime that has driven it and taken the wealth of that country and used it not to enrich—secure—their people and their future, not to make sure they have enough water and electricity.  They’ve used their money to sponsor terrorist organizations all over the world,” Rubio said.

"I know of no nation on Earth where there is such a difference between a regime that governs the country and the people who live there every single day."

Multiple prisoners on charges of alleged espionage for Israel have been executed by the Iranian authorities since June, with little information made public about how their trials were conducted and the cases presented against them.

Most of the executions are carried out in prisons, though Iran still intermittently holds public killings.