Protesters forced to flee Iran hope war will topple regime – National

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – On the third day of the Iran War, airstrikes destroyed the internment camp in western Iran where Wyra Hassan was tortured.

Agents of the Iranian state security apparatus held Hassan in the building in Sanandaj for 102 days.

When he heard that it had been destroyed, he was happy.

Now he hopes that the Islamic regime that persecuted him for speaking out will also soon disappear.

But as the war started by the United States and Israel enters its third week, the outcome of the conflict remains uncertain, which the Trump administration said on Sunday will “end in the next few weeks.”

Although the Iranian military has suffered significant losses since attacks began on February 28, stubborn clerics and politicians still control the country.

According to Hassan, if they remain in power, Iran will be like a car that needed a new engine but only got a tire change.

“If the war ends without toppling the regime, it would be a catastrophe for the Iranian people,” he told Global News in an interview at the bookstore he now runs in Sulaymaniyah.

Born three years after the Islamic Revolution brought a theocracy to power in 1979, Hassan is one of many Iranians who have experienced the brutality with which the state suppresses dissent.

A journalist and member of the country’s persecuted Kurdish minority, he was arrested in 2006 and accused of organizing a demonstration to mark International Women’s Day.

When the police finished torturing him, they told him that he would be released, but that he had to leave Sanandaj and that he was forbidden from writing.

Unable to endure such shackles, he fled to Sulaimaniyah, a mountain-ringed city in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, just 100 kilometers from the Iranian border.

He became director of the Jamal Erfan Cultural Foundation, a meeting place for book lovers built on the site of one of Saddam Hussein’s torture centers.

Once a place where the late Iraqi dictator violently suppressed ideas and freedoms, it is now dedicated to the free flow of ideas.

Many of the books are written in the Kurdish language, which has been suppressed in Iran to eliminate the minority’s distinct identity.

Hassan said Iran’s response to this Mass protests that broke out in January and the war that began the following month have shown the true face of the Iranian regime.

Pro-regime forces crushed the uprising Opening fire on demonstratorswhich killed thousands.

If the regime stays in power after the war, conditions for activists would only worsen, Hassan said.

“We know that if the regime is allowed to rebuild itself and regain its strength, it will act worse than ever.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has now been launched Hundreds of missiles and drones in neighboring countries.

If it does not fall, the regime will continue to pose a threat not only to Iranians but to the entire region, Hassan said.

He hopes that won’t happen.

He wants to return to Sanandaj to open another book center, this one at the site of the detention center where he was once held.

“I want to go back there and set up the same library in the same place where I was tortured,” he said.

Three hours away Erbilanother refugee who was forced to flee Iran because of his views sits in a hotel lounge streaming the Instagram video that got him into trouble.

In the video, Ali Rezaei Majd first introduced himself as a young person who “lives under fear and oppression every day.”

Iranians want freedom and a better future, he said, before calling on the United States to “stand with the Iranian people and help us bring light back to our country before it is too late.”

The video, released on January 6, ended the life he had known.

When it went viral amid growing protests against it Iran’s regimeHe heard from friends that security officers were looking for him.

He packed a bag and fled to Iraq.

Two months later, in an interview with Global News, Majd admitted that he probably hadn’t given enough thought to the consequences of his words.

He also seemed in disbelief at what his country had become: a place where not even a heartbreaking video lasting less than two minutes would be possible.

Majd said he joined the opposition movement after fighting with authorities over his Christian faith and his business, a gym in Dorud, an industrial city in western Iran.

But it was the US President Donald Trump He said who made the decision.

On January 2, Trump posted on social media that the US would “come to their rescue if Iran killed protesters” and wrote: “We are stuck and ready to go.”

Encouraged by the president’s words, Majd stood on the train tracks in Dorud and recorded two videos – one in Persian, one in English.

Global News verified the videos by locating them at a location near Dorud train station, where Majd said a friend helped him record them.

“Today I wake up in the dark,” he said in the video. “Our voices are silenced, our dreams are shattered and our people suffer, not because we have done anything wrong, but because we want to live free.”

He said Iran was not America’s enemy and that if the US helped Iranians regain their freedom, they would never stop paying back their debts.

“Please don’t forget us. Stand with the Iranian people.”

As the video racked up more than 800,000 likes, Majd learned from friends that security officials were asking questions about him. He said he went into hiding out of fear of being arrested.

On the way to the border, he said he witnessed the violent crackdown on protesters on January 8 and 9 and eventually found a group of smugglers who helped him cross to Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.

From his current refuge in Erbil, he has been following the war to see whether it will mean the demise of the government that he believes the Iranians should have toppled long ago.

But while Trump initially said the regime must go and that he wanted a say in choosing its next leader, he now appears to be backing away from those statements.

Instead, the Trump administration appears to have shifted the aim of the war to downplaying Iran’s nuclear, military and missile threats.

Majd said he was not sure whether the Iranians could easily retake their land. Even in its weakened state, the regime shows no boundaries when it feels threatened, he said.

“I think they will fight to the death and we have to be prepared,” he said.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca