A Port Moody, British Columbia, woman is witnessing a crackdown in her former Iranian community and is living a nightmare.
Video of the Iranian government using tanks to put down protesters in the western Kurdish town of Sanandaj has started to surface.
Every morning after waking up, Mehran, who Global News has agreed not to name out of fear for her family’s safety, eagerly checks social media for the newest videos.
I hope I don’t receive any terrible news today, I wake up every single day, she admitted.
“Yes, I’m afraid, and every morning when I wake up I pray to God that we won’t get any terrible news.”
Kurdistan, the province where Mehran is from, has experienced some of the regime’s worst repressions. Amnesty Internatonal reports that Iranian security forces in the region are using firearms indiscriminately.
Videos of Tehran delivering heavily armoured weapons to the city are also making their way online. Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose murder in police custody served as the impetus for weeks of anti-regime demonstrations, is from the same ethnic minority as the city’s majority population.
Mehran recalled a recent video contact she had with her niece in Kurdistan, during which she witnessed some of the violence firsthand.
“I am watching this and observing what is happening right now. Will my niece be shot, for example? And guess what? Right in front of my eyes, they began to throw pebbles against every window. It was absolutely horrible.
The violence reminds Mehran of the difficult times she participated in protests against the Islamic republic in 1980.
She claimed, “I was in precisely the same circumstance when I saw my friends slaughtered, when I my sister (lose) her leg, and when I saw my brother killed.
Mehran claimed that despite her anxiety, independence keeps her spirit alive.
And despite the crackdowns, that spirit of freedom appears alive in Iranian Kurdistan as well, where protesters continue to defy the regime with illegal singing and dancing in the streets to Kurdish music..
For a Port Moody, British Columbia, woman, the crackdown in Iran’s Kurdish area is personal.
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