As I write this, I have just heard the news of another death — the fifth in just a few days in my close circle. This time, it was my close friend’s cousin.
He was at a protest with his wife and he saw a green light — presumably from a gun laser — that landed on her face. He thought only of protecting his wife, stood in front of her, and he was shot in the face and killed.
AP
Like so many of the dead, the regime is now charging families “bullet fees” before they will return the bodies. His family had to pay 500 million tomans (roughly $5000) to get him back, and they buried him today.
The final awfulness is that in the official cause of death, it says “impact of a sharp object to the face”—they didn’t write that he was shot, even after charging the bullet fee.
But, even amidst such horror, there is a belief that this time it’s different. Everyone believes that this time the regime will come to an end.
You can see it, and feel it. The streets in Tehran are full of people who shout for their rights and protest against the regime.
Thursday and Friday last week were unbelievable — we were protesting a lot. The crowd was beyond comprehension. It was so crowded, it shocked the police and the Guard.
On those days, they fired tear gas and pepper spray and sound bombs to scare people and break up the crowd.
It was frightening, but I also want to mention something that was very meaningful for me. Despite the police and the tear gas and pepper spray, people came out to the protest with their children.
I saw pregnant women in the middle of protestors who were shouting for their rights.
Old men and women stood in the crowd too, shoulder to shoulder with the younger generation. People are suffering from the situation, no matter how old they are. And they want the same thing — regime change.
But on Saturday, everything changed. They brought anti-terrorist police forces into the operation to start suppressing them very forcefully, shooting protesters.
This regime is so ruthless and blood thirsty that it is ready to kill everyone — innocent people who are just walking and chanting. They shoot them with live ammunition and bullets, and they are completely unwilling to back down.
I heard that the number of people they killed is more than 10,000. And then, of course, the ultimate cruelty — the families of the people killed must pay the “bullet fees” to the government to receive their bodies.
Five people around me are dead now, and it is heartbreaking. Three of them are my cousin’s friends, and two of them are sons of my mother’s friends. They were killed on the streets of Tehran. All for protesting their inalienable right to freedom.
Since the repression intensified on Saturday, a lot of the protests aren’t as crowded as before. But still, we Iranians take to the streets. Even if it is terrifying.
We are also so cut off from the world. I can see the news only via a satellite (when it works) — otherwise there is a full blackout here.
The ridiculous thing is the police have started to enter people’s houses without permission to find out who is using a satellite, and they collect the satellites from the roofs.
On Sunday, a message came to my husband’s phone saying that he’d been identified as present at illegal protests in the Sattar Khan neighborhood, and he was being monitored.
The message said that he should leave the protest site immediately, otherwise you will be identified as a rioter. We were out at the protest and it was scary, but being in the crowd makes you feel stronger and braver.
Then last night, Monday, in a neighborhood called Punak, they were using drones to identify people so they could attack them.
In general, the atmosphere of the city is very strange. Almost all the shops are closed from around 5 p.m.
For a city like Tehran, where most shops are open until midnight, it’s very unnerving and scary.
The city is very unsafe, especially in the afternoon onwards. My friend’s brother was returning home from work on Saturday in the Mahdieh district and a group of thugs wearing paramilitary uniforms broke the windows of cars in traffic and attacked the drivers with machetes.
His face and arms were injured and he was in the operating room for four hours.
Our neighborhood has a lot of office buildings and workshops so there aren’t many neighborhood gatherings, and you don’t hear much chanting at night in our area.
But in other neighborhoods, you hear a lot of chants from behind windows and there are a lot of local gatherings that begin and escalate.
The people of Iran have remained silent for years despite the severe harm that has been done to them, trying to cope with the worst conditions and severe oppression.
But now everything has become so unbearable that they have finally broken their silence.
Daily life is awful—it is impossible to go on as before. Even before the violence began, prices have been constantly increasing. Just since last month, the price of chicken and eggs had gone up by 35%.
For people, it has become truly difficult to afford even basic living expenses anymore.
The air is extremely polluted, and on most days visibility isn’t even clear beyond 100 meters.
At night, three days a week, water is cut off from around 9 or 10 p.m. until 6 a.m.
To put it briefly, over these 47 years, aside from destroying the ecosystem and natural resources, damaging our country’s cultural heritage, and cutting ties with the rest of the world because of warmongering, they have brought nothing to our people except poverty.
