TEHRAN — Ali Asadollahi, a thirty-seven-year-old Iranian poet and dissident, has not been heard from since late February, when he called his family from Evin Prison in Tehran and told them he would be released on bail. His family has been unable to locate him after prison guards said detainees had been transferred elsewhere, and Iranian authorities have not disclosed his whereabouts.

Asadollahi was taken from his home in late January by security officers arresting suspected sympathizers of protests that had erupted across Iran that month. He was not formally charged at the time of his arrest. During the late-February phone call, he asked his family to gather funds and pick him up from prison. The family did not hear from him again for weeks.

The United States and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, initiating a war. During the bombardment, the Asadollahi family traveled to Evin Prison, located north of Tehran in the Alborz Mountains foothills, to search for Ali. Hundreds of Iranians gathered outside the prison despite the ongoing strikes. Guards at Ward 209, a section of Evin run by the Ministry of Intelligence that holds political prisoners, told visitors that detainees had been transferred elsewhere.

The family then went to the Islamic Revolutionary Court in eastern Tehran seeking information about Ali's location. An officer at the court confirmed Asadollahi had been moved to a new location but did not provide details. The court was hit by an air strike soon after the family returned home.

Some prisoners across Iran were transferred to new locations, complicating family efforts to locate or advocate for them. Prisoners were moved due to staffing, food, and capacity shortages at detention facilities. Since the bombardment in March, prisoners have been moved to military zones, police facilities, safe houses, and other jails damaged by air strikes, according to human-rights groups and relatives of prisoners. As many as fifty thousand people are thought to be held in detention facilities across Iran.

Hadi Ghaemi, director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said, "Prisoners are in real danger of being routinely executed in this darkness." Ghaemi also said, "They're telling their base that they are fighting two wars—one is against foreign aggression, and the other at home, against protesters in the streets."

The Asadollahi family has a history of dissent. Ali Asadollahi and his sister Anisha were arrested during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which emerged in Iran in September 2022. Approximately twenty thousand protesters were arrested during that movement.

The Iranian government cracked down on hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in late December and early January. Estimates of protesters killed range from seven thousand to thirty thousand. Since early March, Iranian authorities have arrested at least fifteen hundred people, including activists and civilians accused of speaking to foreign media outlets. Iran's police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, said, "From now on, if someone acts at the enemy's behest, we will no longer consider them protesters or anything of the sort. We will regard them as the enemy."