Photo/A Femen activist during a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin – Reuters
Fearing that she would fall again into the clutches of “sexual terrorism”, the young woman Brittan fled Iran, but nightmares insisted on following her to Iraqi Kurdistan, where she wakes up every morning to scenes of the blatant violations she was subjected to in the prisons of the Iranian regime.
“Not a night goes by without me waking up due to terrifying nightmares, which embody scenes of torture and rape that I was subjected to at the hands of the Iranian intelligence (Etila’at) elements during my detention with them,” Brittan (a pseudonym) tells “Alhurra”.
The security services arrested Brittan, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, for the first time in September 2022 while participating in the widespread popular protests that took place in Iran following the death of the Kurdish girl Mahsa Amini.
Amini died after being beaten by the Iranian morality police, on the pretext of not adhering to the hijab imposed by the regime on Iranian women since it seized power in Iran in 1979.
Brittan was arrested for hours in a protest square in the city of Mahabad in Iranian Kurdistan, northwest of the country, after her veil fell off while security forces attacked the protesters and fired live bullets at them.
Then, intelligence agents took her into one of their vehicles, where she was interrogated before being released.
However, a year after the protests, a 12-member Intelligence Service force stormed Brittan’s home in September 2023 and arrested her.
Brittan was transferred to the Intelligence Service branch in the city of Rezaieh (Urumiyah), where she was held in the branch’s prison for weeks without informing her mother or any other family member of the place of detention, and was prevented from appointing a defense lawyer or making any contact.
Brittan, 27, adds: “During my detention in the Ettelaat Branch, I was subjected to all kinds of torture, including beatings, electric shocks, suffocation, and drowning…”.
The prison guards did not stop there, but Brittan was also subjected to continuous rape during each session of torture. “The rape and sexual assaults I faced from the Iranian Ettelaat members were extremely horrific, and my memory cannot erase those scenes,” the young woman says.
In December 2023, Amnesty International issued a report confirming that Iranian security services “used rape and other forms of sexual violence to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the (Women – Life – Freedom) uprising that erupted in 2022.”
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Iran documented the Iranian authorities’ use of severe repressive violence in ethnic minority areas.
After several weeks of detention in the Ettelaat Branch, Brittan was transferred to Rezaieh Women’s Prison. After her family’s attempts and paying huge sums of money, the Special Intelligence Court released her on bail of 15 billion tomans until her trial.
After many attempts, her family was later able to reduce the bail to 5 billion tomans, but Brittan’s tragedy did not stop.
Brittan says: “During my temporary release, the Intelligence agents arrested me three times under the pretext of interrogating me, and during each of these periods of detention I was subjected to all kinds of physical and psychological torture, and they broke one of my legs and one of my hands during the torture…”.
“They physically assaulted me and gang-raped me several times with each interrogation session,” the young Iranian Kurdish woman adds.
The Intelligence agents did not stop at raping Brittan and severely torturing her, but they threatened to fabricate a charge against her mother and arrest her as well.
She said: “They tried to find out which Kurdish party I belong to in order to try me on the charge of (corruption on earth) and the death penalty.”
After each interrogation and torture, Brittan was held in solitary confinement for a week and was prevented from meeting her lawyer.
“After each interrogation, they would hold me in solitary confinement in a room, exhausted and bleeding from all parts of my body. They would bring a group of female intelligence officers into the prison pretending to be prisoners and start a fight. Then they would beat me up to make it appear that I had sustained serious injuries as a result of a fight in prison and not torture.”
Brittan’s detention lasted for more than three and a half months. After her temporary release, her lawyer informed her that the regime would re-arrest her and sentence her to life in prison and that she would be transferred to the notorious Evin Prison.
So she decided to escape with her mother, and they crossed the Iranian-Iraqi border with one of her relatives through the rugged and dangerous mountain roads and succeeded in reaching Iraqi Kurdistan.
Brittan was not the only girl who was subjected to torture, rape and sexual violence inside the prison. All the women detained with her in the prison were subjected to what she was subjected to, but she still remembers one girl whom she met several times in the detention rooms, which brought them together after the torture.
However, she was only able to communicate with her once and quickly because the guards prevented any communication between the detainees inside the prison.
Brittan explains: “This girl was arrested on the same charge as me, which is participating in the demonstrations, but she initially managed to escape to Iraqi Kurdistan, and before her arrest she was living in Sulaymaniyah Governorate, where the Iranian intelligence arrested her in Sulaymaniyah and returned her to the prison in Iran.”
Brittan was not able to know the address of the girl and her family to communicate with them when she left the prison, and that was the last time she saw that girl.
Despite her presence in Iraqi Kurdistan, she still fears that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian intelligence will reveal her location and arrest her again and return her to Iran, so she chose to hide her identity.
“I live in constant fear, afraid of being kidnapped by the Iranian regime,” she says.
Brittan hopes that her sacrifices and those of the people of Iran will not be in vain, calling on the international community to provide full protection to Iranians from the ruling regime in Tehran.
According to Brittan, this regime does not hesitate to use all means to oppress its opponents and all those who stand in the way of its violations of human rights and its aggression against the people of Iran.
