Iran's protesters reveal the price they pay for defiance

One woman tells Borzou Daragahi how she, her mother and her sisters were held in prison for weeks, where she was interrogated and told she would be beaten if she didn't strip

-  Borzou Daragahi

Sara* had barely begun to take part in the protest near a square in the western Iranian city of Kermanshah. She, her sisters and their mother took off their hijabs and began chanting slogans: "Death to the dictator," they cried. That's when plainclothes and uniformed members of the security forces arrayed nearby swooped in. They grabbed the women and shoved them into vehicles.

Sara, her mother and her sisters resisted and tried to get away. But the police assured them they would be held for just an hour if they came willingly and simply allowed the authorities to record their names. Instead, the 32-year-old and her family were eventually held for weeks in squalid detention centres, following the protest towards the end of last year.

Sara recounts being threatened and subjected to abuse and humiliation before being handed draconian charges and released on bail at an astronomical cost. She and her family were roughed up, separated from each other, and taken one by one into an interrogation room. "They took off the blindfold," Sara says in a phone interview. "They told me to remove my clothes. I noticed there was a camera. They told me they would beat me if I didn't strip."

She was terrified. Many years earlier, she says, she had been arrested as a Kurdish activist and brutally raped by security forces. "When they told me to take my clothes off, I thought five or six men would come rushing in," she says of her latest ordeal.

Harrowing accounts of abuse and deprivation are emerging from inside Iran's network of some 250 long-overcrowded detention centres. Tens of thousands of protesters and activists have been detained during four months of protests sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by the morality police for allegedly failing to wear proper Islamic clothing.