Asrin Mohammadi, originally from Bukan (Iranian Kurdistan), tightly holds the round pendant with the photo of her brother Shariar. Tehran had her in its sights because for years she had regularly attended protests organized by the economic situation or human rights in Kurdistan. One day, when protests over the death in police custody of young Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini overflowed the streets, a text message informed him of the death of her best friend, Mohammad. Upon receiving the news, Shariar went to the hospital and inquired about him. No one wanted to inform him, so the brother went to the downtown morgue, located in an annex building, broke the glass at the entrance, entered, and found the body among dozens of accumulated corpses. He picked it up and took it home. In a photo shown by his sister on her mobile phone, Shariar is seen sitting on the floor of a room in front of a bundle wrapped in a white sheet.
“I wanted to give him to his parents. I felt like I owed him,” explains Asrin in an interview with EL PAÍS. A chain of events then ended Shariar's life and led to Asrin's exile. “One night, my brother was fleeing by car after participating in the protests. The forces of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) – the Intelligence body outside the Government that exercises real control of the country – began to follow him and shoot out his tires. He lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a wall. Several cars surrounded him and started shooting at him. He died in the hospital hours later.” He was 28 years old.
The social earthquake that occurred in Iran with the outbreak at the end of 2022 of the Women, Life and Freedom movement, which emerged after the death of Amini, has had an implacable response from the regime over the last year. Today, repression continues against those who refuse to remain silent. Relatives and friends of the deceased and detainees seek justice where there will never be any. Exile, through the route that leads through the northeast towards Iraqi Kurdistan, then becomes the only way out from persecution, prison and death.
With just a few days left until the anniversary of Shariar's death, which occurred on November 18, 2022, Asrin began planning the ceremony to honor his memory. That day she was inside a copy shop waiting for the poster she would take to the cemetery. Suddenly, two men dressed in plain clothes entered the store and demanded her cell phone and purse. “I tried to get away from them, but they grabbed me and threw me to the ground. Then they dragged me out of the store and put me in a car. The man who sat next to me started kissing me and touching me,” Asrin recalls with obvious rage. “I started screaming and opened the car door to jump out. I only thought about dying. Then they stopped the car, handcuffed me and covered my eyes with a piece of clothing. They pressed my head hard between my legs and started hitting me on the back,” he recalls.
The hell of the trip continued in the detention center where she was taken. There, several agents locked her in a room and began to beat her. “Not only did they hit me all over my body. They brought a hot iron to me and burned my wrist and arm,” she says, overwhelmed. “I spent the night locked up and in the morning they sent me home without a cell phone and ordered me to return after a few hours to attend a hearing with the judge.” The next step Asrin took, after saying goodbye to her mother, was to organize her escape with the help of contacts. She was hidden for 24 hours, until a vehicle picked her up at the agreed point and took her to the border. Now, weeks later, she is trying to recover in a safe haven outside Iran.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
Pursuit beyond borders
Although exile means accessing a less dangerous place, Tehran maintains a network of agents and hitmen abroad who can easily attack the targets it wants to eliminate. On November 16, the well-known Iranian lawyer Sohrab Rahmati returned from his karate class. When he entered the house, someone put a gun to his head. “I reacted quickly and put a hold on him to twist his arm, but he fired and two bullets pierced my abdomen,” he explains to EL PAÍS in a hidden place in Iraq. Since then, he changes places every few days, with his children and his wife. The Kurdish forces protect him, but he feels very insecure. He walks with difficulty, after two recent operations. “I can't go back home and I don't know if I will be able to continue with my work.”
Rahmati left Iran years ago. Since 2017, he has been in charge of defending a dozen cases of political exiles whom Tehran has tried to kill or kidnap. “We have won trials that have put agents of the regime in jail. “Iran pressures Baghdad to release them, but it does not always succeed.” This lawyer handled the case of the well-known Kurdish opposition leader Qadir Qadiri, murdered in 2018 in Iraq. In 2021, a court convicted five people of terrorism related to this case. Before they attempted to assassinate him, Rahmati had received two offers from the Iranian Consulate in Erbil offering him to cooperate with them. “First they try to contact you in a friendly way. If you reject their offer, they go on the attack to end your life,” he concludes.
At 21 years old, Alireza Babaee's youth has run out. The last few months she has spent alone trying to find a place to sleep and a job to survive. Before her, she lived with her family in Sanandaj (Iran), she studied at the University and regularly attended demonstrations to demand an improvement in the economy. When Amini's case broke out, her activism increased. “The police came to my house and confiscated my mother's cell phone. They asked her where I was and she said she didn't know,” she explains. After that day, her mother took him to Tehran. She was away from home for a month, but when she returned she joined the protests again, which those days overflowed the streets of the entire country before the astonished gaze of the world.
“One night, at a demonstration, an officer shot me in the head with a pellet gun. Look, he plays,” he says, and brings his finger up to a small bump that protrudes visibly on his forehead. “When they shot me, they didn't take me to the hospital because we were afraid of finding the Intelligence forces, who were then guarding the hospitals looking for protesters.” His mother managed to remove some of the pellets, but after that he lived in terror. Six months ago he crossed the Zagros Mountains to Iraqi Kurdistan to save his life.
What Hemn Khastan remembers most anxiously today from his 25-day detention period was when his interrogator told him that he was being taken to his father's funeral. It was a lie. His father was still alive, but that sentence destroyed him. “They had handcuffed me, covered my head and sat me facing the wall. They forced me to undress and dress again. Afterwards, they locked me in a crowded cell. There was no shower, just a dirty bucket. A cellmate tried to commit suicide and they took him to an isolation cell,” he explains, adding how before being locked up he was offered to work as a collaborator of the regime. When he refused, they put the accusation against him on the table: criminal activity against the Supreme Leader and against the Islamic Republic, very serious charges. “They told me that if he wanted to get out of jail until the trial he had to pay bail. I paid it, but once I was on the street they didn't leave me alone.”
Hemn was a member of an environmental group in Kurdistan and had actively participated for years in the demonstrations organized in this region, stigmatized and more impoverished than other areas of the country. “They came to my house and accused me of belonging to the opposition Kurdish party Komala, which is false,” she says. Along with the threats, “fabrication of new charges” and the “harassment” that she suffered for several months, Shemn was the victim of yet another deception. “One day I discovered that a girl she had met was actually a parastoo ―name of a bird in the Persian language―”, he explains. This term refers to women who use the regime to obtain information in a sibylline way. While on parole, in hiding and terrified, her lawyer confirmed that if he attended the trial he would surely be sentenced to many years in prison with the risk of execution. After that day, Hemn left the country.
After the death of Mahsa Amini, the families of the victims have lost their fear of publicly denouncing targeted killings. Angry mothers who shout on social networks about the death of their children. The regime has identified this new front and is dedicating enormous efforts to preventing funeral ceremonies from being held and persecuting relatives who raise their voices.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
Limited time special offer
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#persecuted #Iranian #regime #find #escape #route #Iraqi #Kurdistan