Who Doesn’t Break?

Iran’s political prisons, from the infamous Evin Prison near Tehran to lesser-known Qaimshahr, are notorious for their crumbling infrastructure, tiny cells, and harsh interrogation rooms, where prisoners endure constant beatings, deprivation, and psychological torture.

Pirbornash spent 100 days at Qaimshahr, many in isolation.

At multiple points during the many interrogations, one subject returned obsessively: Israel. In the regime’s worldview, he explains, Israel is the universal culprit.

“Anyone who writes anything critical is immediately accused of being connected to Israel,” he says. “They say you’re receiving money from Israel. They refuse to accept that their own country is collapsing on its own — that no one from Israel or America needs to point it out. They told me I write for the opposition channel Iran International and claimed the State of Israel was paying me.”

The prison system was set up to break people.

“Of course, people broke,” he says. “I broke, too — more than once. The pain, both physical and emotional, was intense. But that, I was to learn, is what resistance really looks like.”

Isolation had its own horrors, but at least there was privacy. “There were nights when 48 prisoners slept in a twenty-five-square-meter cell,” he says. “Half a meter per person. Don’t even try to imagine how we fit.”

Some of those prisoners were just teenagers.

“We tried to calm them,” he says. “We took responsibility for them, like older brothers.”

Pirbornash was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but three months later, he was suddenly released in a regime amnesty for protesters who hadn’t been convicted of espionage for foreign countries.

Yet, fearing rearrest by the Revolutionary Guards, he never returned home. Instead, with the help of human rights organizations, he fled to Turkey, then onward to Germany.

“As long as the Islamic regime exists, I cannot return,” he says. “If I go back, I’ll be put to death.”

Silence Isn’t an Option”

Iran’s prisons are filled with artists, writers, and intellectuals whose crime was refusing to remain silent. Among them was 49-year-old Mehdi Mousavi, a poet, writer, and translator whose name is still widely recognized across Iran, although he fled in 2015 while out on bail between a year of incarceration and his sentencing.

Mousavi has a doctorate in pharmacology, but he’s better known as a writer.

“In Iran, everyone knows me as a poet, writer, and translator,” Mousavi related from his new home in Norway. “But when you live in a country where everything is under Islamic control, literature itself becomes political. And if you don’t align yourself with the regime, you run into trouble — but how can you remain silent in a country where disaster happens every day? People are killed in the streets. Arrested. Executed before your eyes. As a decent human being with a conscience, silence becomes impossible.”

His first arrest came in 2010, when eight armed men arrived at his home. At the time, though, Mousavi was known primarily as a literary figure, not a political activist. But that didn’t stop them from ransacking his home and blindfolding and handcuffing him before hauling him away.

“I had no particular issues with the regime,” he says. “Maybe my books weren’t approved. Maybe my workshops were blocked. But I never imagined that these things would be treated as a major security threat.”

That first detention, carried out by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, was brief. But three years later, it happened again — this time at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.

In December of 2013, Mousavi and his student and fellow writer, Fatemeh Ekhtesari, had planned to travel to Turkey for a literary workshop, but they were stopped at the airport. They were told they were under a travel ban and their passports were confiscated. A few hours later they disappeared, and didn’t surface again until the following year, in December of 2014.

It turns out they were in Section 2A of Evin Prison, the wing operated by Revolutionary Guard Intelligence. Mousavi was blindfolded most of the time, and was never told what he was charged with.

“That’s how it works in Iran,” he says. “They don’t tell you what crime you’ve committed. You’re not given a lawyer. You exist in total uncertainty.”

Inside Evin’s interrogation rooms, Mousavi was questioned daily — about his personal life, his family, his children, his writing habits, his poems, his publishers.

“But mostly, they asked about my students,” he says. “They were terrified of a popular underground that opposed the regime.”

The torture, Mousavi says, took many forms. “You have no pillow. No blanket. No paper. No pen. Nothing,” he recounts. “Your new home is a dank room roughly the size of a grave.”

Even basic sanitation was an instrument of humiliation.

“When you need to go to the bathroom, you slip a small note under the door. If the guards are feeling merciful, they allow it. They blindfold you, take you out, and bring you back a minute later.”

Sleep, too, was denied. “The lights were always on,” Mousavi says. “Day and night. They were never turned off, and there were cameras everywhere. They would take recordings of you in humiliating situations and threaten to publish them.”

Clothing became another tool of torture. “They never gave me a change of clothes,” Mousavi says. “I had to wash what I was wearing and put it back on wet. It was winter and snow was falling, but whenever the guards noticed my clothes were wet, they forced me into the yard. Sometimes the clothes froze on my body.

“And the hardest thing is that you never know when it will end. They never tell you when or if you’ll be released. You don’t know whether there will be a trial, whether you’ll be executed, or whether you’ll disappear forever. You feel like you’re being erased, like you don’t exist. As if the world has forgotten you.”

Mousavi says that the torture he endured was tailor-made not to leave permanent physical damage.

“I was a public figure, and they wanted to make sure that when I returned to public life, there would be no visible scars. So they subjected me to what they considered ‘lighter’ torture. My teeth shattered from the beatings, and to this day, I can’t lie on my back.”

In December of 2014, Mousavi was released on 200 million tomans (about $60,000) bail until the sentencing.

“I was under constant surveillance during that time,” he relates. “I couldn’t make phone calls, I was forbidden to appear in public or online, and my publishers were threatened. One of them was found dead in a lake.”

When the sentencing verdict was delivered — six years of “real” prison time and 99 lashes for “contact with foreign elements and immoral acts” — Mousavi knew he had no options left: He needed to flee Iran.

Through his network of contacts, people were offering to help him escape through various schemes, but he had no way of knowing who was sincere and who might be a regime agent. In the end, he chose the most basic route: escape by land.

“A friend living near the Kurdish border in western Iran said he could help us, so I cut my hair, glued on a mustache, put on a pair of glasses, and put on traditional Kurdish clothes.”

He crossed from Iranian Kurdistan to Iraqi Kurdistan, and from there, a smuggler transported him onward to Turkey, although that meant crossing through a war zone between Iraqi and Turkish troops and ISIS militias thrown in the mix.

Once in Turkey, an international writers’ organization arranged Mousavi’s relocation to Norway.

“As long as the ayatollah regime stands, I can’t go back,” he says. “I pray that it falls soon.”

Turning Points

Iran has witnessed several major uprisings since the ayatollahs seized power close to five decades ago, but few shook the regime like the Green Movement of 2009, when masses took to the streets in outrage over the perceived faked reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His challenger, the former prime minister and relative reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, remains under house arrest to this day. The protests over alleged vote fraud and demand for accountability and greater human rights were brutally suppressed by the government — protesters were beaten, pepper sprayed, arrested, tortured, and even shot.

One high-visibility protestor was Somoel David, then in his early twenties. (David is not his original surname, but after escaping Iran, he left Islam and converted to Christianity and changed his name.)

Ironically, David traces his political awakening to his service in the Iranian army, where he was the personal assistant to a senior commander in the Engineering Corps, spending two years practically living at his side.

David insists that beneath the surface, resentment toward the Revolutionary Guards ran deep.

“Most army commanders couldn’t stand the Guards, Khamenei, or the corruption,” he tells Mishpacha from his home in Paris, where he’s been living for the last 15 years. “I was very close to my commander. I was his confidant. He spoke openly with me, and told me that all the senior commanders felt the same way.”

When Ahmadinejad’s victory was announced, David moved from quiet dissent to open resistance.

“We went to the streets to take Iran back from Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards, and the regime,” he says. “We were finished with this reality.”

David helped organize daily protests in Tehran, but as the protests intensified, the regime shifted tactics.

“They couldn’t arrest me directly,” David recalls. “So intelligence agents moved among the crowds dressed as civilians.”

Their goal was not confrontation, but neutralization.

“They would approach me quietly and say: ‘It’s too early to fight Khamenei. First, we fight for our vote.’ They were trying to redirect and weaken the movement.”

For a week, the protests continued, until Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei intervened personally. In a Friday sermon broadcast nationwide, he issued an unmistakable warning: Anyone who went out to the streets the following day, his blood would be on his own head.

Despite the threat, the protesters returned.

“We ignored him,” David says. “On Sunday, we went out in full force. Our goal was Azadi Street, a central artery of Tehran, but police had sealed it off completely. Still, protesters filled the streets leading toward Azadi, attempting to push forward, but the more we pushed, the harder they pushed us back.”

David stood at the front of the crowd.

“I was on Kesar Dasht Street, one of the roads leading to Azadi. Facing us were about ten police officers and military commanders, all armed with batons and firearms, while we had a few stones and sticks,” he relates.

Minutes into the standoff, David noticed something shocking. The officers were speaking Arabic, not Persian. They weren’t Iranians, but foreign mercenaries that had been brought in.

David picked up a stone and began to spin it in his hand, when one of those officers fired off several rounds. The blast tore into David’s arm, shrapnel scattering throughout his body. He was struck by close to a hundred pellets, from his legs up to his head. And then he collapsed.

David learned from his friends what happened next: “The police tried to take advantage of that moment to finish me off. They picked me up from the ground and smashed my knees with their boots. But somehow, my friends managed to pull me away. When I finally regained consciousness, I was in a makeshift field hospital in critical condition.”

From there, he was moved to a safe house nearby, while medics tried to help him. A hospital was out of the question, as they were under Revolutionary Guard control.

Somoel David was forced to flee Iran in order to survive.

“During the protests in Tehran, many European embassies opened their doors to the wounded,” he recounts. “My friends brought me to the French embassy, and from there the staff began arranging my escape from Iran.”

From Tehran, David was smuggled to Turkey, where he spent a month hospitalized. From there, he was sent to France; he spent the next year in a Paris hospital, as doctors worked relentlessly to extract the shrapnel embedded throughout his body.

“They’re still trying,” David says. “One of those pieces is still lodged four millimeters from my eye, and there are another 52 pellets all over my body.”

From his home in Paris, David continues to follow events inside Iran closely, and has helped organize demonstrations across France in support of the protesters.

“According to reliable information I received, the spark of the current protests began in the marketplace,” he says. And that detail matters. “When business owners strike, it’s a major sign. They’re willing to give up their livelihood for the struggle.”

For David, this signals a turning point.

“For 47 years, the Iranian people have been imprisoned by this regime,” he says, but sees a shift happening, which he credits to Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s exiled shah.

“He managed to unite the Iranian people,” David says. “He helped establish the civilian Javid Guards, allowing young people to organize themselves more effectively in the streets.”

Asked whether the Iranian army would side with the people if the uprising reaches a decisive moment, David is unequivocal.

“Yes,” he says. “I believe the army will stand with the people. But I believe the Revolutionary Guard will stay loyal to the regime until the very last second. Yet the moment it falls, they’ll shave their beards and put on suits and ties.”

David, who is an outspoken supporter of Israel and who had visited Israel just last month, says his dream is really quite simple: “A free Iran, where Israelis can walk freely in Tehran, and Iranians who love Israel can visit Jerusalem and the entire country.”

After 16 years away from his homeland, he says Israel felt like home.

“Despite the fanatical, obsessive hatred of Israel by the regime, I know that the Iranian people love the Jewish and Israeli people — and the feeling is mutual,” he says. “We are brothers.”

Special thanks to journalist Sahar Saaydian, presenter on Israel’s Persian-language Kan channel, for her assistance in arranging the interviews.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096)