By Assadollah Nabavi

I was walking in my 1.5×2.5 meter prison cell. I don’t remember how many times I had gone down this path, as I didn’t remember how many nights I had spent awake until morning, hearing my friends’ bodies being pulled on the ground after undergoing hours of torture. Many others were then taken for execution.

I could hear the boots of prison guards, the sounds of cell gates opening, the sound of feet being pulled on the ground… “My God, whose turn is it tonight?” This is the question I ask myself every night. I look through a small breach in the door. I saw that it was Akbar. It becomes hard to stand upright and I fall to my knees.

It was just two nights ago when I was talking with him through Morse. And now he is going. Akbar was only 15 years old, and he is the next in line to be executed by the ayatollahs’ regime after four of his brothers. Witnessing such a scene was very hard and painstaking for me, especially knowing it would not be my last. The night before a woman by the name of Parvin was taken for execution. She was the fourth member of her family executed by this regime. That night, like many other nights, I began graving Akbar’s name in my cell alongside the many other names I had written, the 21 others.

Those days a public prosecutor of the regime would smirk at us and say, “Your entire generation is to be wiped off the earth.”

I would ask myself could they truly do such a thing? If so, who will be the last member of People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) to be hanged? It was in the early morning hours. Akbar was gone. I could hear the sound of the despicable laughter of the prison guards. I again thought about the public prosecutor’s words.

After that night and after Akbar, each night I graved more names in my cell until it reached the number of 44. In various nights and in many other cells the names had increased to such an extent that there was literally no more room left. We were never able to record all the names that were executed in all those prisons across Iran. The ayatollahs themselves have said they executed 30,320 in a massacre… Once again this question came to mind: can they annihilate all of the PMOI members?

 

Place: Camp Liberty – Iraq

Time: June 2014

27 years have passed since that dreadful summer, and this time I am looking outside a 12-meter trailer. The name of the new prison is Camp Liberty. The walls are made of cement T-walls and its residents are left besieged and defenseless in the face of terrorist attacks plotted by the Iranian regime and its proxies in Iraq. These residents are even deprived of their basic necessities and human rights.

Today the ayatollahs are killing and torturing people in Iraq, Syria and Yemen through their daily meddling in the entire Middle East. This regime is alive through its crackdown inside Iran, and the export of terrorism and fundamentalism under the banner of Islam. Khomeini once said we will export our ‘revolution’ to the region and the entire world. He meant these killings, beheadings and extremism across the region. The cries of Syrian children breaks our hearts, as the looks of Iraqi children when Iranian Revolutionary Guards torture their parents before their very eyes… should we succumb to all this?

I turned on the TV set. The images of long lines of busses, carrying thousands of people full of hope, all heading to Paris… It was a beautiful sight.

“My God, they are so many,” I think to myself.

The thirst of thousands of Iranians seeking change can be seen in the Iranian Resistance annual gathering in Paris. A long line of prominent international politicians and dignitaries have joined these masses.

This never-ending wave of people makes me think of the past again. I think about Akbar and his words when he said, “We are countless”.

I found my answer. The ayatollahs will never be able to annihilate the PMOI and execute our last member. We have grown everywhere, from Iran, to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Paris, Geneva, the US and …

This is the image of tomorrow’s Iran.

This is Maryam Rajavi.