Shahramfar Detention Facility in Sanandaj: A Secret IRGC Interrogation Site Brought Down
This image documents the location and apparent destruction of the Shahramfar high-security detention facility in Sanandaj, on Khosrowabad, also known as Shebli Boulevard, at approximately 46.99° E. The compound has long been associated with the intelligence branch of Sepah-e Beit al-Moqaddas Kurdistan.
According to local documentation, the site stands on the grounds of the former SAVAK facility. Its original structure dates to the pre-1979 period, but after the revolution, particularly in the early 1980s, it was taken over by the IRGC and absorbed into its provincial intelligence network. Over time, it reportedly became a high-security detention center operating outside ordinary prison oversight.
Shahramfar is significant not only as a security compound, but as a site long linked to secret detention, torture, and coercive interrogation. It was reportedly never registered in the formal list of prisons and detention centers under Iran’s Prisons Organization, and no independent human rights body is known to have inspected it. Former political detainees have for years described severe abuse and inhuman treatment inside the facility.
The image is therefore important on two levels: it identifies the location of a detention site tied to the repression of dissent in Iranian Kurdistan, and it shows what appears to be its collapse within a civilian urban setting. Its destruction marks more than structural damage. It represents the fall of a facility widely seen as part of the hidden machinery of state repression, while also raising concern that evidence of abuse, detention, and torture may have been lost with it.