Mahshid Nazemi is constantly looking over her shoulder. Even when she’s at home.
Even 3,000 miles away from her homeland of Iran. Because those hunting her – members of the Iranian regime – have found everywhere she’s been, she says. “I feel like I am being watched all the time,” Nazemi says. The 38-year-old activist from the city of Kerman in the south-central region of Iran has been on the run since she was released from prison in 2016.
“I had been picked up by the police one day, along with eight other people. When I asked what I was being arrested for, they told me they had pictures of me at a forbidden, nationally protected site – but it was from during a demonstration supporting farmers who had been advocating for their land rights in Kerman,” she says.
Before being arrested, Nazemi worked as a teacher in a local high school. “I’d been threatened for not adhering to my own hijab before, but I lost my job when I supported the girls who resisted forceful hijabs too,” she says. After losing her job, Nazemi briefly started her own business, a traditional Iranian restaurant that soon became popular among women for offering a safe, judgment-free space, but she says she was ordered to shutter the restaurant because she refused to enforce the mandatory hijab rule.
Inspired by her sister Pouran Nazemi, a firebrand activist, she became active in grass-roots political movements in her region until her arrest. “After I was released on bail, my family insisted that I leave the country for a safer place, so I left for Türkiye,” she says. Her sister, however, refused to leave and continued civil and political advocacy despite threats and detentions.
On 12 December, Pouran was arrested alongside Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist, just days ahead of waves of protests in Iran, which started in late December and have seen at least 3,117 people killed, as reported by Iranian state television on 21 January.
They were attending a memorial service for a human rights lawyer in the northeastern city of Mashhad when police raided the ceremony. Nazemi, who was on a video call with her sister at the time, recorded some of the attack. The shaky video clips show armed and uniformed men entering the mosque complex where mourners had gathered. Sounds of gunshots and screams can be heard before Nobel laureate Mohammadi grabs the phone and begins chanting slogans of freedom.
The clip cuts to show people with injuries huddled inside the mosque. She posted the clips online, campaigning for the release of her sister, Mohammadi and the 37 others taken captive. “The only thing my family was told is that Pouran was accused of moharbeh, and she was being held in solitary confinement. That was 29 days ago,” Nazemi said in January.
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