Sahar Delijani, writer: “The Iranian people’s struggle against tyranny tests our political conscience”

LIran is just recovering from a massacre. Seeking to survive a new uprising against forty-seven years of dictatorship, the Islamic Republic killed scores of Iranian protesters in January, committing one of the largest and most violent massacres in recent history.

The regime aimed machine guns and sniper rifles at the demonstrators. He used machetes and knives, pistols and assault rifles. He killed until the morgues were overrun with corpses, the sidewalks littered with body bags, and the hospital floors were red with blood.

“What did we do to deserve this?” » A mother cries as she dances at the grave of her 17-year-old son, killed by security forces. “I cursed you who took my child.”

But it is Iran’s children who the curse is striking again as Israeli missiles are fired [et américains] starting to rain on this country of 90 million inhabitants. This is the world order’s answer to every call for life: it destroys it. In cyclical, insane, endless violence. In an insatiable thirst for destruction – a need to build an empire on corpses. As the Iranian government’s guns finally fall silent, the American bombs arrive. As Iranian security forces withdraw, airstrikes begin.

Tens of thousands of people slaughtered

I am a child of these ruins, of this endless mourning, of loss, that defines every day of my life. My story began in a place of captivity and death. A place that tears families apart, crushes dissidents and buries resistance. I was born in Evin prison [détruite le 23 juin 2025 par des frappes israéliennes], in 1983. My parents were imprisoned there for their political activism against the Islamic Republic. The regime hunted down dissidents. Some, like my parents, survived and returned home. But in the summer of 1988 – the final year of the Iran-Iraq war – thousands of political prisoners were executed and thrown into mass graves. My uncle Mohsen was one of them.

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