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

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — On the third day of the Iran war, air strikes destroyed the detention centre in western Iran where Wyra Hassan was tortured.

For 102 days, agents of Iran’s state security apparatus held Hassan on the constructing in Sanandaj.

So when he heard it had been razed, he was glad.

Now he’s hoping the Islamic regime that persecuted him for expressing his opinions will soon be gone too.

But with the war launched by the U.S. and Israel into its third week, that is still an uncertain end result of the conflict, which the Trump administration said on Sunday would “end in the subsequent few weeks.”

While Iran’s military has suffered significant losses because the attacks began on Feb. 28, hardline clerics and politicians still control the country.

Should they continue to be in power, Iran shall be the equivalent of a automobile that needed a brand new engine but only got a tire change, in keeping with Hassan.

“If the war ends without removing the regime, it is going to be a disaster for the Iranian people,” he told Global News in an interview within the book shop he now runs in Sulaymaniyah.

Born three years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought a theocracy to power, Hassan is considered one of many Iranians who’ve experienced the brutality the state uses to crush dissent.

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

When the police were done torturing him, they told him he could be released but that he had to depart Sanandaj and was forbidden from writing.

Unable to just accept such shackles, he escaped to Sulaymaniyah, a city ringed by mountains in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, just 100 kilometres from the Iran border.

He became the director of the Jamal Erfan Cultural Foundation, a hangout for book lovers that was built on the positioning of considered one of Saddam Hussein’s torture centres.

Once a spot where Iraq’s late dictator forcibly stifled ideas and freedoms, it’s now dedicated to the free flow of ideas.

Lots of the books are within the Kurdish language, which has been suppressed in Iran as a part of an effort to eliminate the minority’s distinct identity.

Hassan said Iran’s response to the mass protests that erupted in January, and the war that began the next month, have shown the true face of the Iranian regime.

Pro-regime forces quashed the rebellion by opening fire on demonstrators, killing 1000’s.

Were the regime to emerge from the war still in government, conditions for activists will only deteriorate, Hassan said.

“We all know if the regime is allowed to rebuild and get its strength back, they are going to crack down worse than ever,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched a whole bunch of missiles and drones at neighboring countries.

Unless it falls, the regime will proceed to pose a threat to not only Iranians but the whole region as well, Hassan said.

He hopes that won’t occur.

He desires to return to Sanandaj to open one other book centre, this one at the positioning of the detention facility where he was once held.

“I would like to return there and establish the identical library in the identical place that I used to be tortured,” he said.

2:30
Iranian protester’s daring video condemning regime was ‘price of freedom’

Three hours away in Erbil, one other refugee forced to flee Iran for expressing his views sits in a hotel lounge streaming the Instagram video that got him in trouble.

Within the video, Ali Rezaei Majd began by introducing himself as a youngster “living under fear and oppression each day.”

Iranians want freedom and a greater future, he said before appealing to america to “stand with the people of Iran, help us bring back light to our country before it’s too late.”

Posted on Jan. 6, the video ended the life he had known.

When it went viral amid growing protests against Iran’s regime, he heard from friends that security officers were searching for him.

He packed a bag and fled to Iraq.

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

He also seemed incredulous at what his country had turn out to be: a spot that might not even indulge a heartfelt video lasting lower than two minutes.

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

But it surely was U.S. President Donald Trump who tipped the balance, he said.

On Jan. 2, Trump posted on social media that if Iran killed protesters, the U.S. would “come to their rescue,” writing “we’re locked and loaded and able to go.”

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

Global News verified the videos by geolocating them to a spot near the Dorud train station, where Majd said a friend helped him make the recordings.

“Today I’m growing up in darkness,” he said within the video. “Our voices are silenced, our dreams are being destroyed, and our individuals are suffering, not because we did something unsuitable but because we would like to live free.”

He said Iran was not America’s enemy and that if the U.S. helped Iranians regain their freedom, they’d never stop repaying the debt.

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

Because the video racked up greater than 800,000 likes, Majd got word from friends that security agents were asking about him. Fearing he was about to be arrested, he went into hiding, he said.

As he made his method to the border, he said he witnessed the violent crackdown on demonstrators on Jan. 8 and 9, and eventually found a gaggle of smugglers who helped him cross to Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah.

From his current refuge in Erbil, he has followed the war to see if it is going to mark the exit of the federal government he believes Iranians must have tossed out way back.

But while Trump initially said the regime needed to go, and that he wanted a say in choosing its next leader, he has since appeared to backed off from those statements.

As a substitute, the Trump administration seems to have shifted the goal of the war to degrading the nuclear, military and missile threats posed by Iran.

Majd said he was unsure Iranians would have the option to simply take back their country. Even in its weakened state, the regime shows no limits when its feels threatened, he said.

“I believe they are going to fight to the death and we’ve to be prepared,” he said.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca