Just weeks after the Islamic Republic killed and detained thousands of Iranians demanding freedom, the regime staged a carefully curated rally meant to intimidate the public and reward loyalists. In one segment, a uniformed IRGC soldier appeared to participate in a one-month sigheh, or temporary marriage, presenting his temporary wife on stage as triumphant music blared and supporters waved Islamic Republic flags. In a country where public gender relations are heavily policed and segregated, showcasing sigheh as a reward for soldiers is intended to signal that sexual access can be granted as a prize for ideological loyalty and present a recruitment tool to attract young men.
After the rapid blows to the Islamic Republic seen in the last decade, from December 2017 to Bloody November of 2019to the Lion and Sun Revolution, the state has found itself in a deep crisis of legitimacy. Its narrative that it maintains the “strongest military in the region” was also shattered by the 12-Day War and the Operation Epic Fury. The regime has been made painfully aware of how its Jihadi concepts of “martyrdom,” “anti-imperialism,” “anti-Zionism,” and Islamo-fascist beliefs cannot be utilized as recruitment tactics for the Iranian public. So now they turn to a more compelling route: Sexual Jihad. When a regime loses a nation, it offers its fighters sex instead.
The Islamic Republic’s rally-stage sigheh belongs to a broader pattern of sexualized mobilization, even if it operates through a Shi’a legal form rather than the practices associated with Sunni jihadist groups. The term “sexual jihad” allegedly first circulated widely in 2013, after a Tunisian official claimed that Tunisian women had traveled to Syria to provide sexual “comfort” to Islamist fighters. Since then, sexualized mobilization has appeared across Islamist militant politics in forms like forced marriage, sexual slavery, rape in detention, temporary-marriage arrangements, and propaganda that presents women’s bodies as rewards for male loyalty and sacrifice. Across all these groups, the underlying logic is to make sexual access part of the militant economy of power. It rewards loyal men, humiliatesenemies, disciplines women, and turns domination into a sacred performance.
The Islamic Republic does not need to import this logic from other jihadist movements. It has built its own system of sexual repression and sexualized loyalty through the institutions of the state. In Iran, it often takes the form of state violence: rape in detention, threats of rape, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, and torture. Men and women alike have been subjected to these abuses. For the regime, rape is a structural method of rule, designed to terrorize society. For the perpetrator, it becomes a protected privilege of power.
That logic has reappeared during the January 2026 crackdown. Reports indicate that at least two nurses were gang raped while detained for aiding protesters. The rape of these women was so violent that parts of their intestines were removed, and they now live with colostomy bags. A mother also reported that sixteen people raped her 22-year-old son while he was detained for the protests.
On the other hand, the recent public displays of sigheh have revealed how the regime is now using sexual jihad as propaganda on the streets. If rape in detention shows how the Islamic Republic uses sex to punish its enemies, the public performance of sigheh shows how it uses sex to recruit sexually frustrated militant forces and reward their loyalists, and turns to more desperate tactics to manufacture loyalty.
As more Iranians distinguish Iran from the Islamic Republic, the regime can no longer reliably invoke nationalism to rally the public under external military pressure. What it once sold as “defending the nation” is increasingly understood as defending the regime itself. This rupture is visible online, where opposition and diaspora voices now call for humanitarian intervention, Responsibility to Protect, and even targeted action against regime figures, not as attacks on Iran, but as tools against the force occupying it. Faced with a nation it can no longer claim to represent, the regime turns inward to its most loyal and violent base.
Considering this inherent structural violence, the question for the U.S. policy is not whether to “talk” or “not talk.” The question is whether engagement will be structured around accountability or around impunity. Dialogue and deals that ignore rape in detention, gender apartheid, hostage-taking, and executions function as permission. They tell the regime that it can brutalize Iranians at home, perform aggression abroad, and still be rewarded with legitimacy.