Finding freedom at the border
With her ten-year-old sister’s hand clamped firmly in her own, Parya Ghaisary strode up to the Iranian border guards, wearing an expression of breezy confidence that she did not feel. The rest of her life, she knew, hung on this moment.
Would her name be on a list? Would they know that she had been protesting on the streets of her home town, running from bullets and tear gas, wearing a mask but no headscarf? Would she be arrested? Would her sister be left alone with no one to care for her?
She fought to keep her panic under control. Carrying a bag in one hand, the 20-year-old Kurdish university student pushed through the crowd with her sister until they reached the guards manning the border.
They glanced at her documents and waved her through. She stepped over the border into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and let her headscarf fall to her shoulders.
‘‘It was the most wonderful feeling,’’ she toldmewhen we met in amountain encampment about 50km from the border.
For the past five weeks, protests have been boiling in all of Iran’s big cities – from Tehran in the north to the Baloch region in the southeast, where Amnesty International has said that at least 66 people, including children, were killed by the security services in one day at the end of last month.
Yet in the northwestern Kurdish-majority region, the protests have flared with particular intensity after the killing of one of their own: Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose family say she was beaten to death by the so-called morality police for not wearing a headscarf ‘‘correctly’’ while on holiday in Tehran.
After her death, people took to the streets shouting ‘‘Women! Life! Freedom!’’, a chant that has its roots in Kurdish resistance movements. They have been met with bullets, tear gas and buckshot. Iranian Human Rights, a monitoring and advocacy group based in Norway, estimates that at least 215 people have been killed. The UN has said that 23 children are among them.
‘‘Each of us is Mahsa, we were all in Mahsa’s situation,’’ Ghaisary said. ‘‘So when that happened toMahsa, we felt that it was happening to us . . . there’s really something in the heart of our girls.’’
The regime, terrified that news of its atrocities will seep out – or that images of the protests will inspire others to take to the streets – has tried to restrict access to the internet. Messaging and social media apps are blocked. Those who speak out are quickly silenced: an example was the climber Elnaz Rekabi, reportedly placed under house arrest after competing in South Korea without a headscarf. Little information makes it out of Iran.
One of the few places where news seeps out is in the hazy, purple-tinged mountains of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. Here, hundreds cross every day through the border gates from Iran, while others are smuggled through the passes.
‘‘No one has any freedom at any time. They can put a bag on your head and take you away,’’ said one woman, who did not give her name. She had just crossed the border with her family, whipping off her headscarf as she walked. ‘‘The demonstrations are going on all the time. You can hear a lot of gunfire.’’