Protesters who have been forced to flee Iran hope that the war will overthrow the regime – National

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

For 102 days, Iranian government security agents held Hassan in a building in Sanandaj.

So when he heard that it had been canceled, he was happy.

Now he hopes that the Islamic regime that persecuted him for expressing his views will also end soon.

But with the war launched by the US and Israel in its third week, that remains an uncertain outcome of the conflict, which the Trump administration said on Sunday “will end in the next few weeks.”

Although Iran’s military has suffered heavy losses since the offensive began on February 28, powerful clerics and politicians still control the country.

If they continue to rule, Iran will be like a car that needed a new engine but ended up changing the tire, according to Hassan.

“If the war ends without removing the regime, it will be a disaster for the Iranian people,” he told Global News in an interview at the bookstore he runs in Sulaymaniyah.

Born three years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought a democratic regime to power, Hassan is one of many Iranians who have witnessed the brutality used by the regime to quell dissent.

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

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

Unable to accept such chains, he fled to Sulaymaniyah, a city surrounded by mountains in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, just a hundred kilometers from the Iranian border.

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

Once a place where the late Iraqi dictator stomped on ideas and freedom, it is now dedicated to the free flow of ideas.

Most of the books are in the Kurdish language, which has been suppressed in Iran as part of an effort to eliminate a separate minority identity.

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

Pro-government forces ended the uprising by opening fire on the protesters, killing thousands.

If the government were to leave the war while still in power, the conditions of the activists would be worse, said Hassan.

“We know that if the state is allowed to rebuild and regain its power, they will be much lower than before,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched hundreds of missiles and drones in neighboring countries.

Unless it falls, the regime will continue to be a threat not only to the Iranian people 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 in the place of the center where he was imprisoned.

“I want to go back there and establish a library in the same place where I suffered,” he said.

2:30
Iran protester’s bold video slams regime ‘price of freedom’

Three hours in Erbil, another refugee who was forced to flee Iran for expressing his views sat in a hotel lounge posting an Instagram video that landed him in trouble.

In the video, Ali Rezaei Majd began by introducing himself as a young man who “lives under fear and oppression every day.”

The Iranian people want freedom and a better future, he said before urging the United States to “stand with the Iranian people, help us bring back the light to our country before it’s too late.”

Posted on Jan. 6, the video ended the life he knew.

As it unfolded amid growing protests against the Iranian regime, he heard from friends that the security forces were looking for him.

He packed a bag and fled to Iraq.

Two months later, Majd admitted in an interview with Global News that perhaps he had not thought enough about the consequences of his words.

He also seemed to be in disbelief at what his country had become: a place that can’t even watch a heartfelt video that lasts less than two minutes.

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

But it was US President Donald Trump who tipped the balance, he said.

On January 2, Trump posted on social media that if Iran kills protesters, the US will “save them,” writing that we are “locked and loaded and ready to go.”

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

Global News confirmed the videos by placing them in a location near the Dorud train station, where Majd said a friend helped him film them.

“Today I am growing up in the dark,” he said in this video. “Our voice is silenced, our dreams are disappearing, and our people are suffering, not because we have done something bad but because we want to live freely.”

He said that Iran is not an enemy of the United States and said that if the United States helps the Iranian people to be free again, they will never stop paying the debt.

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

As the video gained more than 800,000 likes, Majd received word from his friends that the security forces were questioning him. Fearing that he was about to be arrested, he hid.

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

From his current refuge in Erbil, he has followed the war to see if it will mark the exit of a government he believes Iranians should have long since ousted.

But while Trump first said the empire should go, and that he wanted a say in choosing the next leader, he has since appeared to walk away from those statements.

Instead, the Trump administration appears to have shifted the focus of the war to downplaying the nuclear, military and missile threats posed by Iran.

Majd said he is not sure that the Iranian people will be able to get their country back easily. Even if it is in a weak state, the state shows no limits 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