The Nojeh coup, also catalogued here as the Shahrokhi Uprising or the Nuzhih plot, was a failed plan in July 1980 to overthrow the new Islamic Republic. Officers and civilian opponents intended to launch aircraft from Nojeh (formerly Shahrokhi) air base near Hamadan, strike selected targets, and seize radio and television in Tehran. The plot was uncovered before it could begin. This archive treats Noje, Nojeh, and Shahrokhi labels as the same event. It is a coup and its aftermath, not a street protest.¹²

What was planned

Mark Gasiorowski's study in the International Journal of Middle East Studies reconstructs the plot from interviews and contemporary reporting. The operation was also called NEQAB, an acronym for "Saving Iran's Great Uprising." Civilian figures linked to the National Front and to Shapour Bakhtiar's exile circle appear in the planning record. The aim was to stop the new theocracy before it finished capturing the army and the press. Gasiorowski argues that the failed plot, together with other real or imagined threats in 1980, gave radical factions a reason to purge the armed forces and rivals inside the new state.¹

The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center's memorial files describe the intended sequence in similar terms: aircraft from the Hamadan base, attacks on military sites and on Ruhollah Khomeini's residence, and a team assigned to the radio-television building.²

Arrests and executions

Once the plan was broken, arrests spread through several cities. Gasiorowski writes that Khomeini said those arrested in connection with the plot should be executed, and that 144 participants were executed after perfunctory trials. He also records later dismissals of an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 military personnel, and the release of some remaining prisoners when Iraq invaded in September 1980, on condition that they fight.¹

Boroumand's case files, drawing on family testimony and newspapers such as Jomhuri Eslami, document individual officers shot after brief revolutionary-court hearings. The Center states that more than sixty officers and civilians were executed in less than a month, and that executions tied to the plot continued; it estimates that at least 200 people were executed in connection with the coup over the following months and years. Those two figures should be read as separate counts, not averaged.²

This archive

Labels such as "Nojeh Coup," "Noje Coup," "Nojeh Uprising," and "Shahrokhi Uprising" are gathered here, including trial and execution memorials that name the plot. Individual named executions stay on their own item pages.