Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were 19, still in high school and living with their mother when masked men came for them in the middle of the night.

According to their U.S.-based cousin, the twin sisters were dragged from their beds with bags placed over their heads about a month after they joined anti-regime protests in Isfahan. Their family was given no explanation and spent months searching courts, hospitals and government offices trying to determine where they had been taken.

Four months later, their mother, Marzieh Nourmohammadi, was finally allowed to see them at Dowlatabad Prison. She barely recognized her daughters.

Their cousin, Masoud Nourmohammadi, told The Guardian that the twins had badly swollen and bruised faces, injuries to their elbows, hands and feet, and significant hair loss that he said resulted from guards pulling them by their hair as they were moved between cells. He said their mother also learned that the sisters had been held in solitary confinement.

Now 20, Taraneh Rahimi faces execution over her alleged role in the January protests, while her twin sister could spend decades in prison, in a case unfolding amid a sharp rise in Iran’s use of the death penalty.

Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) sharp rise in executions across Iran.

The Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran Islamic Republic," Ben Taleblu said. "The Islamic Republic is quite literally cracking skulls, cracking down on civil society, on dissidents, on protesters."

Among those imprisoned in Iran’s broader crackdown is Seyed Ahmad Seyedabdollahi, a 32-year-old psychologist whose case Fox News Digital reported in August.

Seyedabdollahi posted an English-language video on Jan. 4 appealing directly to President Donald Trump to support Iranian protesters, according to his relatives and Fox News Digital’s previous reporting. He was arrested 10 days later and ultimately sentenced to seven months in prison and barred from government and public services for five years.

His relatives told Fox News Digital that Iranian authorities later pressured him to record another video insulting Trump and Americans and alleged that he was subjected to solitary confinement and torture.

"We saw this trend in the aftermath of the 12-day war as well," Ben Taleblu said. "Lose a war abroad, come home and pretend like you're the victor."

"Simply here, the Islamic Republic is continuing the longest war it's ever fought, which is the 47-year war against the Iranian people," he added.

Wednesday marks four years since the Sept. 16, 2022, death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was detained three days earlier by Iran’s morality police over what authorities described as "improper hijab." Her death sparked nationwide protests that became known internationally as the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement. The U.N. said reports that Amini had been beaten in custody warranted an independent investigation, while Iranian authorities maintained that she died of "natural causes."

The 2022 uprising was itself part of a longer cycle of unrest. Nationwide demonstrations beginning in December 2017 rapidly spread across Iran and represented the largest challenge to the government since the 2009 Green Movement. The 2017-18 protests were followed by another major nationwide wave in 2019 and then the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.

Ben Taleblu argued that whenever another major protest movement emerges, Western governments should be prepared to help Iranians communicate with one another and the outside world, particularly when authorities shut down internet access.

"We know every single time another major protest is happening, the way the regime cracks down is to first turn off the internet," he said. "That means the regime fears what comes of coordination between Iranians and fears what comes of when the Iranians are able to send their message outside to the international community."

"The partners of the Iranian people, America, Israel, the West, these are largely all cyber superpowers," Ben Taleblu said. "We should not let the Iranian people continue to die in the darkness."