Maryam Mahmud
War has once again come to be front and centre of Middle Eastern politics. As open confrontation between the United States, Israel, the Gulf and Iran redraw the region’s security map, governments across the region are not only recalibrating their defence policy, but also, internal security doctrines. History has shown it to be the case, time and time again that when regimes feel threatened by external forces, it becomes only natural for them to harden internally, with citizens bearing the brunt of this burden. While the world continues to reel from the horrors that the Iranian regime has unleashed on its own citizens, with mounting evidence of mass killings and violent repression in a country of almost 90 million people, the unhinged nature of the violence has provoked global outrage. Human rights defenders, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with UN officials, have documented unlawful use of force, extrajudicial killings, and widespread crackdowns on unarmed protesters in early 2026 by the Iranian regime. Verified reports accusing the late Ayatollah’s regime of systemic brutality are a chilling reminder of how far state repression can go when power operates without accountability.
But Iran is not the only authoritarian state navigating wartime insecurity, and the question is whether others might follow the same trajectory if confronted with mass unrest. The precarious state of human rights in Saudi Arabia has not, for a long time, been nearly as high on the global agenda. The desert kingdom, often considered a Western-aligned nation despite failing to uphold Western standards of human rights protection, continues to preside over a deeply entrenched system of repression that, although far less widely discussed, is no less severe in its disregard for basic human rights principles.
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