The disappearance of two teenage girls in Iran: The women, life, freedom, and the death of their daughter Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh
Women have played a central role in Iran’s uprising since it ignited two months ago. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” reverberates through anti-regime demonstrations in its original Kurdish (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi) and in Persian (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi). Jina Amini was a Kurdish woman who died days after she was beaten by Iran’s morality police for improper hijab.
The two teenagers — Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh — have become the new faces of the protests that have convulsed the country for the past month, the largest and most sustained bout of civil unrest to grip Iran since 2009. Their pictures are hidden on walls in cities across Iran and on the banners carried by protesters, who use their names as a cry for revenge against the rulers.
Their relatives wouldn’t see them again. One family searched frantically for their daughter for 10 days, posting desperate appeals for information on social media; the other found out the fate of their daughter within hours of her disappearance.
But the grim result was the same. The missing teenagers had been killed by the security forces, their families and human rights groups said. One girl’s skull was smashed, and the other girl’s head was cracked by baton blows. Their bodies were handed back to their families bruised and disfigured. They were 16 at the time.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an Australian-British scholar of Middle East and Islamic studies. She was imprisoned in Iran in September 2018 over espionage allegations and released in November 2020 in a prisoner exchange. Moore-Gilbert is the author of “The Uncaged Sky: There was a prison in Iran where I lived for 800 days. Her views in this commentary are her own. CNN has opinion on it.
External actors such as the Revolutionary Guards or the ministry of intelligence can control the maximum security facilities in Evin. The Revolutionary Guards’ 2A unit is where I lost more than two years of my life.
I could barely bring myself to contemplate their terror, being locked in a crowded prison ward with no prospect of escape as flames, bullets and riot police encroached from all sides.
In addition to the fights that took place in wards 7 and 8 between prisoners and security, there were also other disagreements between the prison management and the Revolutionary Guards, who had been using live fire and tear gas to quash the fighting.
The notoriously brutal facility houses political prisoners for decades and has recently housed activists arrested during nationwide protests after the death of a young woman in police custody.
Former foreign hostages and other victims of Iran’s prison system as well as family members of current detainees frantically exchanged information and checked up on one another in the fire’s aftermath.
The lawyer and his cellmates got word that they had survived, too. The sigh of relief was shared by those who had been connected to the prison and had received welfare checks.
I spent most of my sentence in Evin prison which is in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Ringed by high concrete walls topped with razor wire, the prison is guarded by a contingent of armed soldiers whose noisy patrols could often be heard from within the cells.
A visit to the prison through the front gates entails passing an elaborate series of checkpoints and being blindfolded, handcuffed and crammed into the back seat of a vehicle. A prisoner could count the number of times a vehicle had been opened and inspected.
There are roughly a dozen prison wards on top of each other in the maze of administrative buildings and judiciary offices inside.
CNN Special Report How Iran used a network of secret torture centers to crush an uprising By CNN’s international investigative unit and visuals team Illustration: CNN (CNN) — For 40 days, Kayvan Samadi has avoided going to bed during the hours of darkness. Instead, he whiles away the night-time reading books or chatting with the guards manning the entrance of the compound where he’s in hiding – anything to ward off the night terrors. After his afternoon rest, the 23-year-old medical student makes a cup of Turkish coffee and opens a pink notebook on his lap. His memories of Iran’s uprising are recorded in crisp and evocative sentences that were written in perfect handwriting. The death of a young Kurdish woman in police custody last September led to the creation of the protests and eventually led to the rounding up of thousands of others. His recollection comes back in pictures: A narrow alleyway leads to a courtyard filled with voices from a nearby girls school, while Iranian intelligence agents push him through a row of trees into a building. This is a secret detention center, somewhere in the northern Iranian city of Oshnavieh, where he would experience the stuff of nightmares. Over the course of 21 days, his only human contact was the two interrogators who he says treated him to an increasingly harsh regimen of torture. They assailed him with insults, then they beat him so violently that he vomited blood. He was flogged 42 times and he was molested. On the 16th day of his detention – having failed to extract a confession out of him – Samadi’s interrogators raped him with a baton. The uniforms for me and the prison were loose. They pulled my trousers down. I thought they were going to give me an electric shock again,” Samadi says. “He took the baton and went behind me… I couldn’t even scream. I just cried in silence and was dumbstruck. Samadi, who is from Iran’s Kurdish minority, recounts his story in his safehouse, at a location outside Iran that CNN is not identifying for his own protection. The methods of torture he details tally with dozens of testimonies collected by CNN since the uprising began. CNN has now established that much of this abuse was carried out not just in Iran’s official network of repression – prisons and police stations – but also in an extensive network of illegal clandestine jails, or black sites, like the one Samadi was taken to. The methods of repression and torture carried out in this shadowy network appear to be even more horrific than the regular harsh treatment that arrested protesters can expect in legal detention sites. CNN has reached out to the Iranian government for comment on the alleged abuse at the unofficial locations but has yet to receive a response. Over the course of four months, CNN spoke to 12 survivors of torture; six local lawyers, most of whom were in Iran during the uprising; and seven Iranian and international rights groups. They paint a picture of a regime meting out torture on an industrial scale, to crush an uprising that has posed the biggest domestic threat to the clerical elite in decades. The torture was made systematic by the unofficial detain centers run by the Revolutionary Guard and intelligence agents. The sites exist outside of Iran’s official system, but the Islamic Republic affords a modicum of due process. Among the most severe forms of torture detailed in testimonies about the unofficial detention centers were electrocutions, removal of nails, lashings and beatings that resulted in scars and broken limbs, and sexual violence. The person who was a prisoner in the warehouse said that people were beaten so badly, they ended up with broken noses, broken arms or broken ribs. CNN is naming him as Mehran for security reasons. I spent six years in prison. It was far worse this time,” he said. CNN has been able to find the location of more than three dozen black sites. Many are undeclared jails inside government facilities such as military and Revolutionary Guards bases, known to rights groups and lawyers for years. There are also makeshift, secret jails, such as warehouses, empty rooms in buildings, and the basement of mosques, that sprung up near the protest sites during the mahsa Amini uprising. Sources: CNN interviews with eyewitnesses, legal experts and human rights groups; Google Earth Iran’s capital, Tehran, was convulsed with protests during the Mahsa Amini uprising, prompting a proliferation of black sites around the city, according to sources. Unofficial detention sites Note: Some locations are approximate Dozens of testimonies from survivors of torture and legal experts show how extreme the torture used on protesters in these off-grid sites was. These clandestine jails exist outside of whatever due process the Islamic Republic affords, seemingly enabling unfettered cruelty. Markers show the number of black sites CNN has identified in Iran, not the exact location. For years, rights groups have known about the secret jails inside military and Revolutionary Guards bases. Others are makeshift, clandestine jails – sometimes warehouses, empty rooms in buildings or even the basements of mosques. According to CNN, the Basij ran many detention centers at mosques around Mashhad, which is one of two holy Shia cities in Iran, and is considered a power base of the clerical elite. CNN has been able to identify three of these Mashhad black sites where sources said protesters were brutally tortured. The city of Sanandaj was a flash point of the protest where thousands were rounded up and protesters were killed with live bullets. Dr Sohrabi was taken into custody at a black site because he wouldn’t report injured protesters to the police. On a particularly dangerous day in September last year, dozens of protesters were killed in Zahedan. One female protester told CNN she was raped multiple times after being held at a black site for over a month. Many arrested protesters have said that the sites served as a first port of call. They would be held as little as a few hours or as long as a month. The interrogation methods ranged from verbal abuse to extreme forms of sexual and physical torture, according to the testimonies collected by CNN. In many of these cases, the families of the arrested protesters did not know where they had been for hours or days. The protesters were blindfolded, often driven around the area in circles in order to distract the prisoners from being questioned in the sites. “They took us to the rooftop and started videotaping us from head to toe,” said Fatemeh, a protester who says she was detained in a black site in the affluent northern Tehran neighborhood of Tajrish. CNN is using a different name for security reasons. She said that they slapped her on her mouth and called her a slut because they wanted to record her saying that foreign media had influenced her to go to the street. Fatemeh said the men were members of the Revolutionary Guards’ paramilitary unit – the Basij. She said that they beat, abused and blindfolded her for four hours. On the rooftop of the unofficial site, her hijab momentarily slipped and the window of the adjacent building caught her eye. “Through that window, I saw men with their hands tied behind their backs,” she said. “They were completely naked and they were bleeding from their backs.” One of her captors noticed her transfixed by the other apparent clandestine site next door, she said, abruptly pulling the veil over her face. The cries and pleas for mercy of the tortured men rang out in the air. She said she was freed at midnight. Her abductors made her run down an alleyway if she didn’t look back. Kayvan Samadi, a medical student, was not blindfolded. He remembers the room he was in, which was a dirty blanket, a closet with torture tools, and the interrogators who called themselves “Rezaei and Ibrahimi”. He claims that he was given electric shocks at the back of his head, neck and back. “I remember vividly they electrocuted my genitals for several seconds.” “When I was untied, I was unable to stand on my feet. The soldiers dragged me to the cell because I was weak. Samadi was released on bail three weeks after his arrest. It’s unclear why he was let go, despite not having signed a confession – although this is not unusual in Iran’s arbitrary, unpredictable system. He fled Iran shortly after his release and says he has slept in more than 15 safehouses since then, fearing the long arm of Iran’s security forces. Off-the-books centers in Iran are not a new phenomenon. The abuse was documented by several rights groups for years. The number of websites during the protests was unprecedented according to lawyers and activists. “Not only has the use of secret detention centers increased significantly, but the torture used in them became more severe and the conditions of detention more restrictive,” said Ghassem Boedi, a lawyer from Tabriz, northwestern Iran. The fear of being overthrown led to brutal tactics by the regime. The scale of the protests is different between the previous ones and these ones. They have been so widespread,” said Boedi, who sought refuge outside Iran. “The regime felt that it would be overthrown this time. They had to stop the protests at all costs. One Iran-based lawyer who asked not to be named for security reasons told CNN that they took protesters to places like the parking lots of mosques and garage in Basij bases, where they did whatever they wanted to do with them. The protesters were brutally beat by a group of dogs. Four Iranian lawyers and two witnesses told CNN that they saw interrogators give protesters sedatives. A lawyer who used to work for a judge in the holy Shia city of Mashhad in Iran told CNN that there were many torture sites in the city that led to the death of at least one man. Mohebi said that Basij centers in numerous mosques were converted into black sites in the city of Mashhad, a regime power base in northeastern Iran, where protests appeared to blindside the clerical leadership. The Basij were angry. They did things we thought were unimaginable before these protests,” Mohebi told CNN from a location outside Iran, where she fled during the uprising. There are also unofficial sites around the main protest site in Zahedan which is home to many members of the Baluch community, a restive Sunni minority. Dozens were gunned down there on September 30 last year, the single most violent day of the crackdown. It has become known by rights groups as “Bloody Friday.” The female protester who took to the streets said she was raped by three men after being taken to a secret location inside a Revolutionary Guards facility. She told CNN she suffers from suicidal thoughts and sought the counsel of a cleric to ask if taking her own life would have repercussions on her in the afterlife. The cleric told CNN about the conversation. The protester and cleric wanted to remain anonymous for security reasons. A Baluchestan activist journalist group, Haalvsh News Agency, connected CNN with the protester and the cleric. It also provided CNN with the location of the unofficial site where she was detained and assaulted, as well as other sites that were corroborated by another activist researching accounts of detentions in Zahedan. Laying the groundwork for death sentences The sites are believed to have aided in laying the groundwork for death sentences against protesters during sham trials. According to testimony collected by CNN, the protesters were nearly always asked to sign a forced confession professing to being part of a terror group, seeking to topple the state or sowing disorder, charges that carry long-term imprisonment or the death sentence. Four people have been executed since the beginning of the protests. At least 24 (note: check before publication) have been sentenced to death, and more than 100 have been charged with crimes that carry the death sentence. A well-known Iranian lawyer said that he was able to confirm that the protesters had been tortured before signing their coerced confessions that would justify their death sentences. According to two sources familiar with the events, Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini – two protesters who were executed at the ages of 21 and 39 respectively – were both tortured at unofficial sites before being transferred to Karaj prison, south of Tehran. After he was sentenced to death for protesting, a third source says that he was taken to a secret site before being taken to prison. Karami was an Iranian-Kurdish karate champion. Mizan Online, a news agency affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, has a report of the father of Karimi stating that his child was tortured during his interrogation before being left in the street thinking he was dead. Hosseini was a protester who “had his hands and his legs tied… the soles of his feet beaten with an iron rod tased in different parts of his body,” according to his lawyer, Ali Sharifzadeh Ardakani. Shekari was also tortured in a clandestine site, according to a source familiar with the events. The three were sentenced to death for their crimes. “Whenever security forces tortured people, they were careful not to harm their faces or hands,” Dehghan, the lawyer, told CNN. They kept their faces dry so that they would appear in court without any signs of abuse. They kept their hands safe so they could sign their confessions. The network of harsh interrogation sites appears to have produced a desired effect from the brutality meted out there. The protests that had the potential to be a significant threat to the regime are over. Activists say, however, that the underlying dissent has not gone away, and that the regime’s cruelty in the face of the Mahsa Amini uprising has bred resentment that could re-emerge in even greater force. But they admit that that the spree of death sentences had a particularly chilling effect. Samadi, the medical student, escaped that fate – but only because he resisted, he says, repeated attempts by his captors at forcing a confession. Sitting upright on his metal-framed bed in his safe house outside Iran, Samadi has dark circles around his eyes from the lack of sleep. He says he finds solace in his decision not to sign the documents. He says that he had no doubts about it. I don’t understand why I should sign my own death warrant.
The women’s ward is not changed at all. Someone mentioned that they had spoken with emergency services outside of the prison gates. Two further sources from political prisoner families confirmed the news. The women are shaking, but everyone is okay.
I knew the courageous lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was said to have been recently rearrested, along with a number of other activists I had known in prison, such as Golrokh Iraee.
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As the situation stabilized, crowds massed on the streets outside Evin, and family members desperately tried to gather information about their loved ones inside.
I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to hear gunfire just meters outside the locked doors of their unit. I am certain that this man is in some way complicit in the unjust imprisonment of innocent people, but I am happy that he found a conscience that day. It may have been the difference in the lives of my friends.
It is not illogical to suppose that Iranian prisoners, many of them entirely innocent of any crime, would want to demonstrate solidarity with their brave compatriots protesting on the streets.
If the regime is not able to control its most sensitive maximum security prison it is likely to lose its grip on the country more broadly. Many of us are hoping that in the not too distant future there will be no need for an Evin prison.
Tehran’s crackdown on protesters has slowed the tide at the crossing between Iran and the mountains of northern Iraq. Fear of indiscriminate arrest has made many reluctant to risk the journey. The Washington Institute is one of the sources.
Iran’s government has closed the country off to non-accredited foreign journalists, regularly shuts down the internet and suppresses dissidents’ voices with mass arrests. An extreme climate of fear prevails in Iran as the crackdown intensifies.
Many are reluctant to risk their journey because of the fear of being arrested. Some of the people who crossed say that the situation is getting tighter: curfews, nighttime raids on homes and protesters being killed.
Before Hana was arrested, she had been warned that women in Iranian prisons were “being treated very badly.” Hana said she received a call from a high-level official in Mahabad prison in the country’s northwest who urged her to not let her daughters out of their home.
Armita Abbasi, a Gen Z-er and the leader of the Iranian riots, was arrested in Karaj, Iran
Armita Abbasi was similar to a Gen Z-er. Her edgy hairdo was dyed platinum blonde and she had an eyebrow piercing. She wore colored contact lenses, and filmed TikToks with her cats from her living room.
It was an ominous statement that seemed to imply that Iran’s justice system would reserve a harsh punishment for the 20-year-old. It was a way to deny the leaked accounts that made Abbasi, like Amini and Nika Shahekarami before her, a symbol of Iran’s protest movement.
She was arrested in her hometown of Karaj, just west of Tehran, nearly a month after the onset of the demonstrations. In an October 29 statement, the government claimed she was “the leader of the riots” and that police discovered “10 Molotov cocktails” in her apartment.
CNN has presented the leaked accounts of Abbasi’s injuries to an Iranian doctor outside Iran who said the symptoms as described indicated brutal sexual assault.
On October 17, Abbasi was rushed to the Imam Ali hospital in Karaj, accompanied by plainclothes officers, according to leaks from that hospital. Her head had been shaved and she was shaking violently. The medical staff that was going to her spoke about the horror of seeing evidence of rape.
“When she first came in, (the officers) said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. A member of the medical staff wrote that the doctor was told to write it off as rape in one of the messages.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/11/middleeast/iran-protests-sexual-assault/index.html
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The Iranian government says Abbasi is being held in Karaj’s notorious Fardis prison. CNN has been unable to speak with her or her family.
Hana says she was undeterred. She joined the protests and, like many other female demonstrators, she spun around and danced as she waved her headscarf in the air before burning it, in what has become a ritualistic feature of the nationwide protests.
Hana told CNN that there were about 30 to 40 women at the holding center and the rest were boys.
CNN got audio testimony from a teenager who said he and his friends were raped and killed in prison after they were arrested in the protests. Testimonies heard by CNN suggest that the sexual assault of the underage boy was not an isolated incident.
There was a main hall with private interrogation rooms off it, she says. An officer would take a pretty girl, and he would go to a room and sexually assault her.
… and then in some cases moved from one location to another, their families left in the dark about where they are held. According to rights groups, hundreds have vanished into this network of prisons.
Hana was the only one who fled from Iran. For days, she and her uncle’s family followed a group of Kurdish smugglers as they weaved through the border region’s mountains. Only a handful of protesters have embarked on the perilous journey. That’s because the Iranian side of the border is heavily militarized, and security forces regularly shoot-to-kill those who cross, and smuggle goods, illegally.
In Iraqi Kurdistan Hana lives with her relatives in a mountain town. Her hair falls down to her waist. She has a scarf around her neck on the day CNN talks to her. It covers a purple mark where a security officer forced himself on her, she says, and violently kissed her.
A fight had broken out outside of the tiny interrogation cell where Hana says a cop beat her and promised her freedom in return for sexual favors.
“They brought four men over who had been beaten, screaming intensely in another cell. And one of the men who was tortured, was sent to the waiting room where I was,” the boy told CNN. I asked him what that screaming was all about. He said they were raping the men.
International rights groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also said that they recorded several instances of sexual assault in prisons since the onset of the protests in mid-September.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/11/middleeast/iran-protests-sexual-assault/index.html
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“I’m not trying to spread fear and horror,” wrote one medic from Imam Ali hospital in a social media post. This is the truth. I have to speak up because a crime is happening.
There’s a correction. This article has been updated to remove a reference to a criticism about protesters allegedly made by Zeinab Soleimani, the daughter of the late general Qassem Soleimani, the authenticity of which could not be independently confirmed by CNN.