Over the last few weeks, as most of my friends in the writing community on Twitter know, I've spent countless hours tweeting, retweeting, and translating tweets from Persian into English so that my non-Iranian friends — and strangers — can understand what's going on in Iran, the country where I was born.
Reading these tweets and articles has been emotionally exhausting for me because I feel everything, and I can't detach myself from the events, but I can't stop either because writing / translating is the least I can do to help my sisters and brothers who are fighting the Islamic Republic terrorists in Iran. In fact, this is all I can do.
I've always been clear about where I stand. I am with the people of Iran and support them in every way I can. Why? Because I've lived in occupied Iran, and there's nothing good about it. The Islamic Republic government is made up of a bunch of nobodies who, in the weakest moment of Iran, nearly forty-four years ago, found an opportunity to invade the country and reign over the land and its people.
The Islamic Republic regime, a theocracy, has never had any respect for life and/or human rights. It has especially taken away women’s rights. A woman in Iran is not allowed to wear what she wants; she must cover her hair and her body. A woman cannot get divorced unless her husband wants a divorce, and good luck to any woman who wants to get custody of her child(ren). In a court of law, two women’s testimony counts as one man’s testimony. A woman cannot travel without a man’s permission; if a woman is married, her husband decides whether or not she can travel; if she is unmarried, her father makes this decision.
The Islamic Republic regime has destroyed Iran’s economy. While most people have been struggling to provide a shelter and other basic necessities for themselves and their children, just trying to live a normal life, the corrupt government officials have been seizing people’s properties and stealing the country’s riches, transferring these stolen goods out of the country, and filling their Swiss bank accounts for themselves and their offspring, who mostly live in other countries because — irony — Iran is no longer a good place to live. The economy is generally bad, and it gets worse with each step the terrorist government takes: Once any official’s actions affect other countries, sanctions are imposed on Iran — sanctions whose impact is only on the Iranian people, not on the corrupt officials responsible.
The Islamic Republic regime’s judiciary system is a joke. They make up laws all the time — laws for the people — and none of these laws apply to them. They arrest, torture, rape, and murder anyone they want, anytime they want. If any official — or any relative of an official — breaks the law, they will not be prosecuted, but if anyone outside of their family breaks the law, the most common verdict is the death penalty. In court, if they don't feel like it, they won't allow attorneys. People are killed daily for practicing a religion other than the regime’s version of Islam, for being gay, for fighting any injustice, and sometimes for nothing at all. It's basically the law of the jungle, and the government officials have all the power.
Over the last four decades, the people of Iran have started protests against this corrupt regime several times, and each time, the Islamic Republic government has murdered a large number of protesters. The last time was three years ago, and that number was 1,500 people — in a matter of days — in November 2019.
This year, specifically in September 2022, a young woman named Mahsa Jina Amini, from Saqqez, Iran, went to Tehran, the capital, for a visit. The Islamic Republic forces — the so-called morality police (I’m not making this up; that’s what they call themselves) — arrested her because her hair wasn’t covered properly. Three days later, she was dead. The people once again stood up and spoke out in protest, and this protest was different — different because it was led by women, mostly young women and teenagers, and because the people never stopped. People’s protests started on September 16, 2022, the day Mahsa Jina Amini died, and they still continue today, November 25, 2022. Two weeks after it all started, people knew this was no longer a protest: It was a revolution.
Since September 16, 2022, over a thousand people, including over fifty children, have been killed. Thousands have been injured. And over fifteen thousand people have been arrested. The arrested protesters have been — and are still being — raped and tortured in prison. The prisons in Iran are now full of writers, artists, journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, and students. Many people have been abducted from their homes and taken to unknown locations. Many people have been killed in their homes. All these victims’ family members are being threatened by the terrorist state to keep their silence; they are being coerced to give untrue statements to the media about how their loved ones died. Some still tell the truth, and bad things happen to their families.
The regime’s forces steal people’s dead bodies and charge their families obscene amounts of money in exchange for the bodies of their loved ones, and the families have no choice but to pay because they want to bury them and give them proper funerals. They do many unspeakable things. There is no limit to the Islamic Republic regime’s atrocities. I am in the process of putting together an outline for a book because it is my responsibility, as a writer, to tell these stories — and I’m sure many other people are finding ways to tell the world what happened.
The government has all the power because they have weapons. People try to protest peacefully but get attacked — shot at, beaten with batons, thrown from buildings, etc. — at every turn. They have to fight armed terrorists, a.k.a. the Islamic Republic regime forces — also called “security forces” — with their bare hands. The only weapons people have are the rocks and stones they find on the ground and a few household items. In Iran, people do not carry weapons; there are no stores that sell guns; regular people do not have access to guns. Many of these “security forces” wear plain clothes and walk among people with the sole mission to identify the protesters so that the forces can later go abduct them or murder them in their homes. It’s stones against guns and military weapons. It’s innocent protesters seeking basic rights against evil terrorists.
The government also has agents in other countries, including the United States. Shortly after the revolution in Iran started — toward the end of September — I started tweeting about it. Since then, many people have contacted me, asking me to translate, write, and edit pieces of writing for various websites and social media platforms, all in the name of helping the people of Iran. Of course, some Iranians living in the US are, in fact, trying to help the people in any way they can, just like I am. However, there are also said agents, like the people affiliated with NIAC, an organization that supports the Islamic Republic and uses the media to distort the truth and hide the regime’s crimes.
It’s hard to tell who contacts me and what their intentions are, but to anyone who has reached out to me, and there have been quite a few, I have made it a point to immediately and explicitly state that the people in Iran should stop being peaceful and start killing the terrorists because this is war. I know this puts me in some danger, but when it comes to corruption and injustice, I want to be as clear in my private conversations as I am publicly in my tweets, and I want to be loud. This regime must go, one way or another. Whether the officials stay in Iran to kill more people and end up being killed or leave Iran to crawl back in the hole they came out of almost forty-four years ago, the regime must and will go. Those who flee must know that we the people will eventually find them and hold them accountable for the crimes they have committed.
The people of Iran fight, knowing they might get killed. They are sacrificing themselves for democracy, mostly for their children and future generations. They are ending this violation of human rights at any cost. Victory is near.
