Month: March 2026

It has been more than 40 years since I was imprisoned in Iran for speaking out against human rights abuses and state executions, and for defending women’s rights. I spent eight years behind bars in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. I was tortured. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

Every few years, uprisings erupt across Iran – and each wave of resistance is deeper and more widespread than the one before. In 2022, it was women who led the Woman, Life, Freedom movement after the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the country’s “morality police”, and it revolutionised my country. Today, women wear what they want, go out in public with their boyfriends – even live with them – without fear of being arrested. Women earned these rights with their lives. In late December 2025, the spark was once again lit – this time in an old bazaar in Tehran.

The demands are the same ones we raised in the 1980s: an end to poverty, corruption and unemployment, the right to organise, and freedom from repression. Despite the gains for women’s freedoms made since 2022, workers are still denied basic labour rights. Students are arrested and even executed for peaceful protest. Women are still fighting for fundamental rights. People are still risking their lives to stand up to torture and state violence.

The regime’s response has been brutal. Human rights organisations report security forces shooting into crowds of largely peaceful protesters. I have seen heartbreaking images of families desperately looking for their loved ones among hundreds of body bags. The true death toll remains unknown, but reports suggest more than 2,000 people have been killed. Given the scale of the protests and the footage of violent clashes, the real number is probably far higher.

According to the Human Rights Activists news agency, by the end of the 17th day of protests 18,434 people had been arrested and, so far, 97 forced confessions have been broadcast on state television. These scenes bring back painful memories of my own imprisonment, where many people were tortured until they “confessed”. For survivors like me, moments like this reopen old wounds. I still see the faces of friends who were executed.

The regime is terrorising civilians, burning shops and destroying beautiful, historic bazaars. Doctors are reportedly prevented from treating the wounded. Injured protesters are taken away from their hospital beds. But despite the killings, people are still in the street. They say they have nothing to lose but their chains.

But the situation is changing so quickly. As of yesterday, military vehicles now patrol the streets in Tehran day and night, stopping anyone who dares go out. Only bakeries remain open, and people are leaving their homes only to buy the bare necessities.

Now, Iran has been plunged into an internet blackout. The regime wants to hide its crackdown from the rest of the world and stop Iranian people from organising. For those of us in exile, we wait in agony for news. I have not been able to reach my family and friends for more than a week. Watching the few grainy videos that reach us, survivors like me relive our worst nightmares.

When I fled Iran, I left everything behind – my family, my friends, my home. I was lucky though, I survived. I rebuilt my life. Many others did not.

Freedom from Torture has supported Iranian survivors like me for years, and in 2024 they assisted more people from Iran than any other country. For those who have escaped, the harrowing reports of brutality the world has been hearing since December are deeply triggering. We know exactly what the regime is capable of.

My heart aches for my country. Iran has gone through half a century of war against its own people. Our society is deeply wounded, but the status quo cannot continue, because the Iranian people will never give up fighting for their rights and freedoms. Iran’s rulers use torture to silence dissent and instil fear. They tried to take my voice away because I dared to dream of equality and freedom. Today, I use that voice to speak out about the horrors that continue, and to ask the world to speak up for Iranian people.

Since 2022, I’ve watched with dismay as global attention has drifted away from Iran. Silence only empowers those who torture and kill with impunity. The international community and the media must keep shining a light on what is happening.

We must raise the political cost of executions. We must demand the release of political prisoners. We must insist that the use of torture ends right now. We must stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the Iranian people, in their struggle for what many of us in the UK take for granted every day: freedom, dignity and a life without fear.

Since the news that a girls’ elementary school in Minab had been hit on 28 February during ongoing US-Israel military attacks on Iran, the incident has received little sustained attention in Western media. This is despite local sources reporting scores of children among the dead and wounded, most of them primary school pupils. Days later, strikes were also reported near medical facilities in Tehran.

For people inside Iran the incidents are part of a growing sense that civilian life itself has become a target.

At the same time, Iran is experiencing one of the most politically volatile moments in its modern history. The death of Ali Khamenei has been met with conflicting reactions. It might feel strange to people of other countries, to see Iranians dance under bombs after hearing of his death, but I understand. Khamenei presided over a system built on imprisonment, torture, executions and the crushing of dissent.

For so many of us, me included, we wanted Khamenei and his henchmen to face justice in a courtroom, on trial for decades of crimes, repression and killings. I never wanted to see them killed by foreign forces but confronted by the families of those he helped destroy.

The death of Khamenei does not erase the crimes of the system he led. That structure must be dismantled, and those responsible should be held accountable through fair trials.

For survivors, this is not symbolic. Justice is how we reclaim our dignity and our agency. When change comes through foreign bombs instead of the will of the people, it sends the message that we were never capable of shaping our own future.

And none of this can justify foreign military attacks that kill innocent people. The death of one man does not legitimise the bombing of a country, the destruction of infrastructure, or the killing of children. Justice cannot be delivered by missiles.

Iran should be governed by the collective will of its people – not by force, and not by a figure selected or imposed by the United States or Israel. Real justice cannot be outsourced to foreign powers.

As someone who survived arrest, imprisonment and torture in Iran, one development is particularly terrifying. Reports indicate that Iranian authorities are transferring political prisoners from Evin Prison. For former prisoners like me, this is an unmistakable warning sign.

History tells us what can happen next. When the Iran-Iraq war began in 1980, prisoners were quietly executed. In 1988, following the end of that war, more than 5,000 political prisoners were killed in mass executions after summary proceedings. Many were buried in unmarked graves. Families were never told the truth.

Western governments often claim that military intervention brings freedom. People in the Middle East know this is not true. We have seen what war did to Iraq, to Afghanistan. We know that authoritarian regimes use war as a cover for repression, and that foreign powers are rarely interested in self-determination.

Iran does not need a ruler chosen by Washington or Tel Aviv. It does not need exiled strongmen or armed factions imposed as “alternatives”. It needs a political future shaped by its own people – without bombs overhead and without prisons filling up.

People in Iran have been living under a constant psychological threat of war for years. Last year, they experienced a taste of it firsthand; now civilians are being killed without any say in the matter.

Internet access in Iran is again severely restricted, leaving families inside and outside of the country struggling to contact loved ones, desperate for news of who is alive, who has been arrested, or who has simply disappeared. The fear is compounded by memories of past atrocities, like 40 days ago when the regime violently suppressed protests reportedly killing tens of thousands of people simply for asking for bread and freedom.

Life feels suspended, and uncertainty hangs over every household.

This war must stop. And while people in Iran have little power to halt it, people in countries like the UK do. These wars are waged in your name, with your tax money, by governments that claim to represent you. Protest matters. Pressure matters. Silence is read as consent.

This illegal war does not only threaten those on the frontlines in the Middle East. Every act of aggression destabilises the region, fuels cycles of violence, and makes all of us less safe. Stopping this war protects lives everywhere, not just in Iran.

Source: The New Arab

I have been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s human rights organisations and media to keep a focus on the country’s plight. But now I see US-Israeli bombs falling on Iran, and some Iranians celebrating this war while innocent people die. My heart is breaking for my country.

Let us be clear: when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to launch their war, it was not out of a desire to free the Iranian people from the tyranny of the regime. Netanyahu said on the second day of the war: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He has named this operation “Lion’s Roar”. Meanwhile, Iranian monarchists celebrate the carnage, waving the shah’s version of the country’s flag with its crowned lion and sun.

While the regime has chosen the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, another man in exile is dreaming of becoming the king. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah – whom Iranians struggled so hard to depose in the revolution of 1979 – now believes he is “uniquely positioned” to lead the country. He tweeted on 1 March: “My heart aches for the 3 American heroes killed and the 5 wounded by the regime. The Iranian people are forever in their debt. To their grieving families: please accept our immense love, deepest condolences, and eternal gratitude.” He is more American than Iranian. If he were truly Iranian, he would express sorrow for the thousands of Iranian civilians who have died in this latest attack, including more than 150 schoolgirls who are now believed to have been killed by a US strike.

We cannot judge the people in Iran raising the monarchist flag the same as those doing so outside the country. Some diaspora monarchists were once Islamic guards, and the US-Israeli war may bring them into power. Those in Iran experienced eight years of war with Iraq and know very well that war brings horror and death. They have since died many times over by the hand of the regime. A drowning person will try to grasp on to anything, even if it still pulls them down further. This is why some are accepting of Pahlavi. In 1953, the UK and US governments executed a coup that placed Pahlavi’s father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in power. We are now witnessing an attempt to do something similar.

Trump, Netanyahu and Pahlavi have once again asked the people to rise up. I do not think people have already forgotten the last call for an uprising. On 13 January, Trump told Iranians: “Keep protesting … help is on its way.” No help came, and tens of thousands of protesters were estimated to have been killed. Trump has again told the people to rise up and “take over your government”. But no help comes – only bombs.

Netanyahu’s statement, Pahlavi’s similar call and Trump’s request for people to keep demonstrating in effect condemn people to death by allowing the regime to frame those who pour out on to the streets demanding bread and freedom as foreign collaborators. Since taking power, the regime has routinely executed activists by accusing them of being agents for the US or Israel. Alongside those who were killed in the recent uprisings, more than 50,000 were arrested. Among these innocent people are hundreds of children.

Making these demands – of innocent people in a country where collaborating with the US or Israel is punishable by death – is reckless and deadly. It appears to me that many powers feared the success of the people’s uprising. Not only the regime, but Israel and the US too have seemed very worried that people might overthrow the Islamic Republic themselves. An uprising led by ordinary people would be uncontrollable. That is why this regime change is being carefully managed and not allowed to emerge naturally from below.

When the regime took power, my generation struggled against them. Tens of thousands of us were executed while many monarchists packed up and left the country. Monarchists have condemned Iranians who are against invasion and the murder of civilians. One of their slogans, I have heard, is: “Death to mullahs, leftists and Mojahedin.” Imagine that – after decades of executions by the regime, monarchists are now openly calling for the same noose to silence the same people.

Now that these powers are united against the people of Iran, the rest of the world should come together and stand shoulder to shoulder against this massacre of civilians from the sky. I am hoping that the people of the west will come out against this war and demand its end.

• Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A

Source: The Guardian