To me, Tehran is like its own planet—an isolated globe. One side tells one kind of story, and the other side tells a completely different one.
I was born in Kurdistan, in Mahabad, on the day Morteza Motahhari was assassinated. We Kurds were the only people who rejected the Islamic Republic from the start so when they killed Motahhari, who was a staunch opponent of the Iranian liberation movement, to celebrate his death they named me Shuresh, which means ‘rebellion.’
Kurdish names are like Native American ones—meaningful. We don’t give our children Arabic names—only Iranian ones. For example, my sister’s name means ‘inverted tulip, ’ my brother’s name means ‘mountain lion,’ my son’s name means ‘fire of love,’ and my wife’s name means ‘a garden full of flowers.’
Before the revolution, Mahabad was called “Little Paris”—for its beauty, nature, hospitality, and the small-town lifestyle of its people. I’m not just saying this, anyone who has traveled there can confirm how beautiful Mahabad is.
I lived there for a time. After that, I spent some years in prison. The first time I was imprisoned was in 1998. I was in jail for about a month or two. I’d written an article about the Mahabad municipality, and they arrested me. When I got out, it was time for my military service and they sent me to Tehran to the special police unit—the riot control division as a form of exile.
I wouldn’t have called Tehran exile, but they sent me there as an exiled soldier. At first, they made me clean toilets, do janitorial work, that sort of thing. But I was an athlete, a provincial boxing champion. When they realized that, they took me off janitorial duty and made me part of the city patrol.
But then the Intelligence Office started causing trouble, saying I shouldn’t be there, so they sent me off to Zahedan. I served about two and a half years as a conscript, without any added time. I spent five or six months of it in Tehran, and the rest in Zahedan.
Tehran is a city that’s one thing on the surface and something else entirely beneath it. When you go under its skin, you experience one world; when you go above it, you experience another. To me, Tehran is like its own planet—an isolated globe. One side tells one kind of story, and the other side tells a completely different one.
When I arrived in Tehran, the first thing that struck me was the city’s disparities. I saw the inequality and injustice, the highs and lows, the poverty and wealth, the haves and have-nots, the hungry and the full. There was a girl sitting in her father’s car—Peugeots had just hit the market back then—and another girl selling flowers, hoping to sell a single rose.
I saw a lot in Tehran—good things and bad things, extreme poverty and extreme wealth—but some things stay with you, in your mind and in your soul. I remember I was in Laleh Park with two or three of my friends one day, when I saw a father beating his child. I got very upset. The child was a beautiful, blue-eyed little boy, and the father looked worn out, broken. I asked, “Why are you hitting him?” He said, “What’s it to you?” I couldn’t stand it, so I pulled the child away from him and asked, “Amoo, why is your dad hitting you?” He said, “I asked for a candy.” I said, “You’re hitting your child over a candy?” He said, “What can you do when you don’t have money for candy in your pocket?” Hitting your child over a candy that cost five or six one-toman coins back then.
I was in that position myself when we went to Turkey for the second time. My child asked me for something I couldn’t buy. I didn’t hit them, but I couldn’t give them what they wanted. The whole thing came back to me again. I put myself in that man’s place. That’s the worst memory I still carry—on my shoulders, in my mind, and right before my eyes.
One good memory from Tehran was once, we were in Tajrish, standing guard in the streets—I was on duty. After the 1999 Tehran University dormitory protests, they’d send us soldiers to walk the alleys and streets. I saw a man loading pots of food into his car. He had a really nice car—I didn’t know the name—one of the newest models, an SUV. He was putting pots of food, water, and fruit into the back. He invited us over and said, “Officers, have something to eat.” We said, “We’re on duty.” He said, “Come on, have some fruit.”
I’ve always been curious by nature. So I said, “If you don’t mind me asking, where are you taking all this food?” He said he was taking it to Shahriar, and I asked why there? He told me because people are living there…construction workers, Afghans…lots of people who dream of a skewer of kebab. He had pots of rice and two full pots of kebab, meat, and chicken. I asked, “Which street? Where exactly are you taking it?” He said, “Why so many questions? You want to arrest me or something?” I told him that I write poems and stories sometimes, and that I’d like to write his. He said, “No, I’m not doing this so you can write about me.” I promised I wouldn’t write about it, I’d just come and see. So he said come to this street, this alley in Shahriar.
That Thursday or Friday, I managed to get city leave, so I went there to see. And yes—people didn’t know who he was, didn’t even know his name. He’d just put the food into disposable containers and distribute it among the houses. I found out he was a really charitable man. I never learned his name, but to me helping others in any way possible is beautiful. Helping doesn’t just mean giving money or toys or things like that. He said that there are kids who’ve never seen kebab in their lives, who’ve never had a single skewer of chicken kebab. “Let them have it once a week.” That, to me, was something really beautiful.
Comparing Tehran and Mahabad is like asking which hurts more when they hit you: a long stick or a short one? Tehran is the long stick—a capital city with 11-12 million people. By contrast, the entire population of Mahabad is only about 800,000 to one million. The level of inequality and injustice in Mahabad is much lower than in Tehran.
Kurdish towns have this habit—the people themselves have a socialist way about them. When someone really has financial problems, the rich help them. I knew a lot of people there. I used to talk to wealthy people, shopkeepers, merchants; they had books with lists of names of people they would pay a stipend to every month.
If something bad happens in Mahabad, like a shop burns down, everyone gathers and raises money to lift it out from under the rubble. Once, a Tehrani guy came to Mahabad and his car— one of those Peugeots that used to catch fire—caught fire. Right there, people collected money for him and bought him a new car; that’s how it is. But in Tehran, if you have such a problem, people just watch, pull out their phones, or stare at you. One time, an addict was overdosing. There was no one [helping], so I went to his side. Everyone said, “Let him die, he’s a junkie.” I said, “He’s an addict, not a madman… even if he were mad, he’s a human. This addict is a person, a human being—how can you want him to die?” Mahabad isn’t like that. If they see an addict, they pay for his treatment to get him clean.
When I was leaving Tehran, there were so many stories in my head that I hadn’t written. Tehran itself is a book, a novel, a series that never ends — a story that keeps going every day. That’s how I see Tehran. I’m not saying it’s bad, filthy, or unlivable — no. Tehran is a story in itself, a long book you can never finish reading. Every day, you sit and listen to its own words. Go sit at the city’s highest point — that alone is a story. All its people, the rich and the poor, are stories of their own.
If one day I can return, I’ll go back to Tehran to finish the things I left behind. My hope is for that time — when everything and everyone in Iran come together as one, like in the Mahsa movement, the Zhina movement — when we all unite to build a more beautiful Iran, more beautiful than ever before.
To me, the Mahsa movement reconnected all of Iran’s vital arteries; now they all flow back to the heart. Those lifelines that were once cut off from one another have come together again, returned to the same heart we’d all longed for in Iran. That heart is beating again.
The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ slogan goes way back. It started with Kurdish girls—since so many of our girls are part of political movements, many of them armed—that’s when it began. By the time it reached the Mahsa movement, it truly shook Iran’s dictatorship to its core.
When they say, ‘My life for Kurdistan,’ Kurdistan answers, ‘My life for Iran.’ That’s the dream we’d all had for Iran. And through the Mahsa movement—though it came at the cost of so much blood—that dream finally took root.
You can only speak of hope when you see solidarity among your people — that’s when hope becomes real. When the people of Iran stand together like unbreakable steel chains… when they can accept one another — accept differences, accept criticism — that’s when hope is possible.
Then I’ll have hope that Iran will become the kind of country the whole world dreams of living in. Our Iran is good, beautiful — but only if you, as a Tehrani, and I, as a Kurd, can accept each other. If you and I can stand with a Baluchi without a birth certificate, and help them get one — so that they can accept us, and we can accept them.
From the day I learned to speak, from the day I could stand on my own two feet, I noticed things — I understood injustice. My father was a salaried man, so we had everything we needed, but many kids didn’t. I’d come home and ask, “Mom, how come Khaled doesn’t have shoes and I do?” And she’d say, “Because his father’s a laborer.” I’d ask, “But doesn’t a laborer work? Doesn’t he get paid?” She always said that even as a child, I was obsessed with these things, always asking questions like that. My father used to say, “This one’s going to get himself into trouble someday.”
I was young back then and had that journalistic instinct. So in 2003, I became a reporter for the Center for the Defense of Democracy in Iran, based in the Netherlands, and worked with them on cases of human rights violations I’d gathered in Tehran, Zahedan, and elsewhere. There were no satellite TV [news channels] yet, and internet cafés had just started to open — you could go there and get online. After I began filing my reports, another group was formed called the “Center for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights of Kurdistan,” and I started working with them too, reporting on human rights violations.
In 2005, during Khatami’s presidency, when they started arresting journalists, lots of people were detained. I was one of them. One of the people I’d been working with, someone I used to send reports to, had given them my name. So they arrested me in March and took me to the Intelligence [Office]. I was held there for two months and went through the worst kinds of torture imaginable.
I had written a lot about people who were tortured, but when I saw and felt it myself, I realized two things: how low a person must go to inflict that kind of pain on another human being, and how strong someone has to be to endure it. The physical torture is one thing; after a few days, the pain fades, the wounds heal. But the kind of torture that takes over your soul, that destroys your being — that never heals. It’s been more than twenty years now, but it’s still with me.
When they arrested me, they asked me where I lived. I knew my wife was at my father’s house, so I said there. I didn’t take them to our own home because I had books and other things there. We went to my father’s house, and they searched it but didn’t find anything.
We were newlyweds — just a year in. She was seven months pregnant. We’d been together before marriage, boyfriend and girlfriend. We’d made so many promises, made so many plans for a good life — “We’ll do this, we’ll do that,” all those dreams and hopes. Then suddenly,it’s all taken away.
In that moment, when I looked at her, I saw the tears falling from her eyes, one by one. She had her hand on her belly, just looking at me. I said, “Forgive me.” She said, “I won’t forgive you — but come back.” I said, “I’ll come back. I promise I’ll come back.”
And I did come back — but it took six years.
The first night when they took me to the Intelligence [Office], they tied me to a radiator in such a way that I couldn’t sit down or straighten my legs. I had to stay there on my tiptoes. My eyes were blindfolded, but I could still tell what time it was — I counted the calls to prayer and realized it was the evening one, near the end of the night.
Then I heard the scrape of slippers on the floor, getting closer. Suddenly, someone struck the back of my neck — hard. They’d tied me so tightly that I couldn’t fall, couldn’t even bend my knees. Imagine that — standing on your toes like that. Then that bastard turned his back to my face — and farted in my mouth. How far can a person go in destroying their sense of decency, their humanity?
The next day, they brought me into the interrogation room. I was completely naked, blindfolded, my hands tied behind my back. You sit there like that — naked, blindfolded — in front of the interrogator, unable to see anything. Sometimes they take a stick and “play” with (assault) you … they possess your soul.
They removed my blindfold, and I saw my wife’s intimates pinned on a board in front of me. He said to me, “Do you know who’s here?” I said, “You’re saying my wife is here.” I didn’t lose it — not on the outside — but something broke inside me.
Even now, as I tell this story, it gives me goosebumps. He said, “Do you know how far along your wife is?” I said, “Do you?” He said, “Yes, she’s seven months pregnant.” I looked at him and said, “So you’ve been to my house?” He said, “Your wife is here too. The guys are having fun with her.”
I lowered my head and said, “Everything’s in your hands right now. But if you’re a man, untie my hands.” He said, “Like this — naked and barefoot — you want to fight? Should I tell them to come and f*** you [up]?” I said, “I’m in your hands now. You can do whatever you want. But if you were man enough, you’d untie my hands for five minutes.”
He started laughing. They blindfolded me again, and the beating began — a storm of blows. They dragged that swimsuit across my face, the bra across my neck. So many things… It was unspeakable.
My wife later told me that six men climbed down from the roof into our yard. She was heavily pregnant — as we Kurds say, her belly had reached her mouth — and they pushed her. She fell, lost consciousness, and then went into labor right there. The neighbors, hearing the commotion, had rushed over, picked her up, and took her to the hospital.
They had gone through all our personal belongings — mine and my wife’s — and taken everything: one of her bras, her swimsuit, even the most private things between a husband and wife.
The people working in the Intelligence service aren’t right in the head. One of them once told me: “Don’t think I love the government — no. I take money to extract confessions from [the likes of] you. I get paid to do this.”
They’d bring in teens who’d been arrested for supporting the Democratic Party [of Kurdistan] or for spray-painting slogans on walls, and make them sit on a lit camping stove. There was a metal ring on top, and because they were blindfolded, they didn’t realize what they were sitting on. They’d force them down onto it, and two others would hold them so they couldn’t get up. I personally witnessed two or three of those cases. They did that to terrify me — to show me what they could do to me too.
These people (torturers) — most of them are outcasts. Even in their own families, no one shows them a bit of respect. A person like that, who’s been treated like nothing his whole life, suddenly finds himself with a bat or a club in his hand — and he can easily take a life, strip someone naked, humiliate them in any way he wants.
It’s like these mullahs. Now they’ve taken power, taken Iran with all its wealth and people — and what are they doing? Executing people every day. Killing left and right. How many of our youth have they killed? Fifteen hundred people in one protest alone. These were people the world rejected; even the earth wouldn’t let them set foot on it. But now, they hold power.
It makes a difference [where they hold you] — Tehran’s different, Isfahan’s different. Urmia’s Intelligence is a slaughterhouse. Mahabad’s Intelligence is even filthier. Bukan’s is filthier still. I don’t know a single person who’s been there and come back without broken bones. I was a boxer — my body was used to taking hits — and they still broke my jaw three times. My fingers are all crooked now.
My cousin’s still in prison. There are five Kurds who’ve received death sentences again — one of them is my cousin. I was talking to his father, and he said, “Shuresh, they burned off all his tattoos with an iron — every single one of them.”
When I was transferred to the central prison in Mahabad there was another young guy with me. We were so filthy that the prisoners wouldn’t let us stay with them. They said, “Go shower tomorrow, then come to the ward.” So they left us in a small room by the door.
There were two or three boys there — maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Imagine [minors] in an adult prison. I don’t know how that could make sense in anyone’s mind.
I fell asleep. I ached all over. They’d had me for two months. The young guy who was with me — I was around twenty-eight then, he must’ve been eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty — woke me up and said, “Agha Shuresh, Agha Shuresh, I hear something.” I said, “What?” He said, “Get up.” I got up.
They hang curtains between prison beds for privacy. I heard creaking and moaning — those kinds of sounds. I pulled back the curtain and saw two of the prisoners were assaulting one of those boys. I got really upset and walked out.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night. In the morning I found out that those kids were dealing drugs inside. They’d stay there for ten days, twenty days, maybe a month… the prisoners would sexually abuse them, give them drugs, and then they’d go out, pick up more, and come back in — as easy as that. I saw it myself. I’ve said I’ll testify to it at The Hague — that I witnessed these things with my own eyes. Many of us did. Many of the prisoners who were there with me also saw how they brought underage boys into the prison — they’d both sell drugs and be sexually exploited by the inmates.
From talking with prisoners, I found out that in Mahabad prison there were at least thirty or forty political prisoners. One of them was shot in the leg and they’d left it to fester until it had to be amputated; they did amputate his leg. There were many others.
There were at least fifty or sixty people who disappeared — their bodies still haven’t been found. No one knows where they are. Some of them were killed under torture, and their bodies were given to the medical school so students could dissect them. Or they were buried somewhere.
A lot of prisoners had been transferred in from Sanandaj, and many came from Naqadeh, Paveh, and Baneh prisons. So I got the idea to subtly collect names.
For instance, I’d go up to someone and ask, “Ali Agha, when you were in Paveh prison, were there many political [prisoners]?” He’d say, “Yeah, Shuresh, they took five or six people and disappeared them.” I’d ask what their names were, where they were from, and they’d say: so-and-so was arrested for this reason… and so I’d piece together histories [for these prisoners]. I even collected the names of those who were executed. When that list of names came out, it shocked the Islamic Republic, because they had hidden this information for such a long time. They were in shock.
No one ever found out that I was the one who did it. For example, I’d casually say in conversations, “They say so-and-so was executed,” and people would confirm it — Yeah, we talked to his mother, or [yeah] the family said they were given a grave-plot number where [the] body is buried. That’s how it went. I gathered this information little by little.
I wouldn’t let my wife visit me much — mostly my brothers came. I didn’t want my child to see me in prison. They told him, “Daddy’s on a trip. He’s away, Daddy’s coming back.” But I’d see photos — pictures from birthdays — they’d bring them to me. Gradually, my child’s face took shape in my mind.
In prisons, especially in West Azerbaijan, female visitors are treated with extreme disrespect. Female guards strip-search them without hesitation, cameras or not. It’s still like that today. Sometimes they even send male soldiers to grope women under the pretext of searching for contraband.
I didn’t want my wife to go through that, so I’d only ask my brother to tell her to come see me when I had names. I was willing to accept the risk of her being humiliated or …, because the work we were doing was too important for me to be sensitive about those things.
I had a specific set of clothes just for sending out information. My wife knew that this outfit was only for that purpose, because we couldn’t talk on the phone. I’d write letters; sometimes I’d give her my poems to take out — I didn’t want them left in prison.
When everyone went to sleep at night, I’d go to the bathroom — there was one that didn’t have a camera. The way the cameras were placed, that one spot was blind. I’d go there, write, and hide the notes inside the lining of my collar. I’d sew it shut with a thread and a sort of makeshift needle — they hadn’t given us metal ones, so it was something like a toothpick that you could pierce, and thread. That’s how I stitched it up and gave it to my wife, and she’d take it out and email it from an internet café.
From the very first day I met my wife, she was involved in my work — my partner, my helper. Many of the things we said to each other were in code, our own language. If she coughed once, I knew exactly what she meant. If she said a single word, that one word carried an entire story — a sentence, a long text between us.
It was like that story of the man who wrote to his wife from prison: “Everything’s fine here, but I wish I had a red pen.” And his wife understood immediately that he was being tortured and suffering — because the letter wasn’t written in red ink.
It was the same with us. I’d planted that understanding in her from the beginning. I’d say, “The collar’s really dirty — wash it well.” And she knew exactly what that meant, what was hidden inside the collar.
It wasn’t normal to send your clothes out to be washed. The first time I gave her mine, they asked her, “Why are you taking his clothes?” She told them, “Shuresh has sensitive skin, and most of the prisoners here are sick. He can’t wash his clothes inside.”
When a person reaches the end of the line, you don’t know if you’ll survive the central prison or be killed. So many were killed there; some had their throats slit at night. You have to leave something of yourself behind so people will know what goes on inside those prisons. Some things just cling to your soul and never let go. And you don’t want to let them go either —so you just keep going, as far as you can.
Because I reported the names of those underage kids who were selling drugs, after about a year or so of being there, they were removed from the prison.
I set up a library — they wouldn’t let me at first. I sent out so many letters through my wife, through representatives, through anyone I could, until they finally allowed it. I even started a newspaper we’d post on the wall. Many of the guys who were in for drugs, booze, or murder — they started reading books.
Things like that are worth courage. They’re worth putting your life on the line for. I was threatened all the time. Sometimes they’d take me away, threaten me, beat me — “Don’t do these things.” I’d tell them, “I’m not doing anything illegal. It’s just a library.”
One person has to show courage so that ten others can find it. If I don’t have courage, maybe those ten won’t either. Someone always has to sacrifice themselves — their life, their family — to at least change the future for their children. My struggle wasn’t for me. It was for these children — for mine, for yours, for my brother’s, for the children of Iran. So they could have a chance at a better future, not end up like us. We were the cautionary tale. Well — let them not be like us; let them not have to flee.
My poor wife — she’s endured so much because of me. I think even if I lived another thousand years, I could never make up for what she went through with me. I just can’t. Every time I look at her face, my eyes sting with tears — for the days we lost, the days that [could have been]… when I got out, we were both old. It had only been six years, but we’d aged in the prime of our lives.
The government confiscated everything we had. We were living with my parents. It was a bad time, really bad. Then we spent seven miserable years in Turkey. It’s been nine months now that we’ve been somewhere we can finally breathe a little easier. After twenty years of life together, we’ve only had these nine months of peace.
When I was released after six years, they gave me another six years of “social rights deprivation.” It meant that if I did anything — anything at all — I’d be sent back to prison to serve those six years again. That’s the condition you agree to when you sign the social rights deprivation form upon release.
It means being cut off from university, from most things an ordinary person in Iran can have — you can’t have any of it. Every week, either my father or my brother had to go and sign a paper saying, “Shuresh hasn’t gone anywhere this week.” That’s how it was.
In Kurdistan, there are commemorative dates like August 16, and January 22 — anniversaries that are important to Kurdish people, like the founding of the Democratic Party or the execution of Qazi Muhammad. These are symbolic days — people either celebrate or mourn. On August 16, for instance, they’d come around our house to see if I’d lit a fire or gone anywhere. Either I had to go in myself, or my brother had to go and sign.
During those six years, I was under such strict censorship. I couldn’t publish anything. Can you believe it? I could only write at home. I had no published work anywhere.
After six years, they finally allowed me to open a boxing class. I started teaching, but every day they’d call me in — or call in my students. Once my “social rights deprivation” ended, I slowly began filing reports, and I started working with the Center for the Defense of Democracy again. They had launched a radio station — Radio Kurdane. I’d send them pieces, but under the website administrator’s name, not my own.
The young man who was the admin returned to Iran, and unfortunately, they arrested him. He immediately gave up my name and told them, “He’s the one sending these reports.”
One of my students at the boxing gym was an IRGC intelligence agent. One day he came to me and said, “I’m an officer myself, and maybe what I’m about to do is treason. But I respect you a lot and care about you. You’ve changed my life with this sport. If you don’t run now, they’ll arrest you. Go.”
The moment he said that, I gathered my clothes, called and told my wife, “Let’s go.” My wife and the kids — by then there were three — my [oldest] son, who was about twelve, the middle one was four, and the youngest, my daughter, was two — we left right away, straight for Turkey.
That same man (the IRGC agent) arranged for us to cross the border. You know his life was falling apart; he worked in intelligence and was having problems with his wife. Even though boxing is a rough sport, but believe me, most of my students’ parents would come to me with their kids’ problems, and I’d help them sort things out. I organized gatherings, took them hiking, to the swimming pool. It wasn’t just young people — I had students in their seventies and eighties. It got to a point where no one could tell anymore who was a friend and who was a foe, who worked for the intelligence [services] and who didn’t. Old and young, everyone came there to train, to feel alive again. I’d earned a kind of respect there — even my enemies respected me.
Maybe God — if there is one—was looking out for my kids maybe He loved them, because we didn’t end up in misery again, or back in prison. Turkey wasn’t a great place, but it was better than prison, better than torture, better than being separated.