Issa: Writing, mines and transnational repression

In the early 2000s, I began working in mine clearance in Iran, clearing mines left behind from the war with Iraq. I loved my work. In the border regions between Iran and Iraq, where every step could have been the last, I carefully and passionately cleared the land of these silent killers.

In 2008, I felt the absence of public awareness about the dangers of mines in Iran. Alongside my fieldwork, I began blogging and writing articles to inform ordinary people, especially residents of border regions, about the dangers of mines. I created a blog called Green Peace and recorded statistics on mine-blast victims, along with the reasons they had become victims. Every post was a cry to save the lives of people trapped in the shadow of neglect.

Years later, in 2012, because I had exposed areas where clearance had not been carried out to standard, Iranian security forces arrested me. The charge? Disclosing military information. In the narrow, dark cells of prison, I spent nine months in fear and isolation, enduring interrogations that wore down my body and spirit. After much mediation and with a heavy bail payment, I was finally released. But my freedom was fragile; the shadow of death threats hung over me. As soon as I was free, I fled Iran with my family and sought refuge in Turkey, carrying a trembling hope for a safe future.

In Turkey, I spent years trapped in the uncertainty of asylum, waiting to be transferred to a country where I could breathe. But the Iranian regime did not leave me alone. Its transnational threats followed me like a constant nightmare. During those anxious years, writing became my refuge. I wrote books: Mine, the Silent Killer of Iranians, Mine, the Nightmare of Border Children, and the novel Until the Last Mine on Earth.

Then, completely by chance, I encountered the subject of the executions of political prisoners in the 1980s in Iranian prisons. These crimes drew me in. I began writing, and my first novel on the subject, Blood Still Drips from UNESCO’s Eucalyptus Trees, was born. [Link]

UNESCO Prison, which during the Shah’s era had been the UNESCO cultural centre in Khuzestan, was turned after the revolution into a terrifying prison. The eucalyptus trees in its courtyard witnessed the execution by firing squad of political opponents of the newly established regime. Later, those trees were cut down to erase the signs of the crime. But I was determined to reveal the truth, especially when I learned that the person responsible for the executions in that prison had now risen to the highest levels of the regime. This filled me with anger.

The publication of this novel in England and its underground circulation in Iran put me in grave danger. In 2018, Iranian security forces, including senior officials from the 1980s, ordered that I be eliminated.

One morning in Manisa, I left home to pay the electricity bill. A black car approached. A blonde woman, pretending to ask for directions, drew me towards the car window. Suddenly, they threw me inside. My head was trapped between the seats, and the foot of a heavily built man was pressing down on my neck. The sound of the tyres and the unbearable pain in my neck paralysed me. The man, speaking with a strange accent, questioned me about my book, but I could not answer. From time to time, he lifted his foot and kicked me in the side. The blonde woman, who was in charge, pulled out a gun and shouted: “Talk, or I’ll kill you!” Blood had gathered in my mouth. In a broken voice, I said: “I am Isa.” I admitted that I had written the book.

They were angry: why had I written about the executions and senior officials? Why had I not kept my work focused on mines and their victims? They wanted to take me to Iran and make an example of me. They took my phone, accessed my Google Drive, and destroyed all my unfinished books and articles.

After three days of beatings and torture, as the kidnappers’ car was heading towards the Iranian border, I took advantage of their momentary carelessness and threw myself out of the car. [Foreign Policy, The Times of London]

My hand had a small fracture, my leg was completely broken, and my neck had suffered a minor fracture because of the pressure from the kidnapper’s foot. With a broken leg, under the weight of pain and terror, I limped for kilometres to escape death.

I no longer stored my writing on Google Drive, and I reduced my use of Google Docs to a minimum. Now, in Norway, out of fear that my writing could be lost, I keep everything on an external hard drive, but the lack of secure tools for anonymous publishing still troubles me.

After my escape, the Turkish police and security forces warned me not to write books and not to appear on television programmes opposing the Iranian regime. This double censorship — the regime’s transnational threats and the restrictions imposed by the host country — placed me in an impossible position.

Staying in Turkey became impossible. With a heart full of pain and eyes full of tears, I left my family behind and fled to Europe on foot; a journey of hunger, cold, and despair that pushed my body and soul to the edge of collapse.

When I reached Norway, I found a refuge where I could continue my struggle. I recounted my experiences in the novel Nowhere to Go, which was published in Persian by 49 Books in Sweden. [Link] Its Norwegian edition will also be published soon.

I also published the novel Golāreh in Norway. [Link] I am now working on a novel about the massacres in Kurdistan in the 1980s.

The threats and crimes of Iranian security forces, reaching up to the highest levels of power, not only failed to silence me, but strengthened my motivation to reveal the truth about repression, injustice, and human suffering.