www.silverguide.site –
Sepehr
Sepehr, 25, was shot and killed during January’s mass street protests. His father became widely known because of a video he recorded on his phone in their home city of Kahrizak, close to the capital, Tehran. In the video, his father kept repeating: “Sepehr-e Baba, where are you?” It is an intimate Persian form of address, something close to “my Sepehr, my child”.
Sepehr became known by that cry, and the same words are now written on his gravestone: “Sepehr-e Baba, where are you?”
Today, there is a crowd around Sepehr’s grave. People arrive, speak, stand for a while and then leave. The mother of a 16-year-old boy killed during the nationwide women’s rights protests in 2022 is there.
Sepehr’s father says he does not fear arrest and speaks with a courage that seems to come from the place where grief has hardened into something else. He gestures to the people gathered around him and tells them they are free to film and take pictures as they like.
“I’m waiting for these people to fall,” he says. “Don’t doubt it – they’re already gone. This regime will not go back to what it was before [January’s crackdown on protesters]. I’m telling all of you this.”
Mohammadreza
Mohammadreza was 38 when he was killed in Tehransar, an area in western Tehran. At his grave are his sister, with long curly hair, and his elderly mother, who wears a pale blue headscarf. “My child had a hard life,” she says. “He didn’t have a good life.”
“I cursed [Ali] Khamenei,” says his mother. “I was very happy when they [US/Israel] killed him. But my heart aches for these children of ours. I wish they had been here, too; they had dreamed of seeing Khamenei gone. There is so much longing in it. I miss my son. We have to endure.”
Mohammadreza’s sister says his wife now sleeps hugging her dead husband’s pillow, while his son comes and kisses his father’s grave and cries.
“My brother saved a lot of people the night [he was killed]. He brought everyone into the parking garage. At his funeral, people said: ‘He saved our lives that night.’ He was very kind. He had so much loyalty and honour.
“I want to write javidnam [Farsi for ‘everlasting name’ and adopted by families to remember those killed in protests] on my brother’s gravestone, but we were afraid because they [Iranian police] have broken some of the stones. I’m waiting for a little time to pass, for the atmosphere to calm down. Then I’ll write javidnam on his stone. God willing, by next Nowruz [Iranian new year in March 2027] these pieces of shit will be gone.”
His sister later points to a grave near her brother’s. “Look at this grave next to us. She was such a beautiful girl. Her mother won’t say it. She says it was cardiac arrest as she’s afraid. I tell her: ‘Say it, don’t be afraid.’ But she says, ‘We don’t know.’ I tell her: ‘We are all families of the javidnam.’ But she is afraid. She doesn’t tell anyone.”
Sara
From a distance, Mohammadreza’s sister points out Sara’s grave. Sara was 45 when she was killed during the January protests. A CCTV video of the moment she was attacked in the street by plainclothes security forces carrying machetes went viral on social media: her terrified gaze, alone, empty-handed, under the kicks of a plainclothes man with a blade.
No one is at her grave today. She has a large white gravestone, and in front of her name, in parentheses, is the word darya (Farsi for “sea”), which families use to represent eternity.
Nearby, another woman sits at the grave of her own javidnam. “They killed my cousin [in the protests] and this one [pointing to the grave] a day later. We found my cousin after four days, but we couldn’t find this one. My cousin was killed with bullets; this one with a knife.
“I wish they had seen Khamenei’s death. Let those bastards go to hell. They will be finished in the end.”
Mohammad
Mohammad, 28, was killed in Ariya Shahr, in north-west Tehran. Today, his father and young brother are at his grave. They are from the poorer neighbourhoods of the capital. His brother is washing the stone.
“They had grabbed two girls and were dragging them,” says his brother. “He went to save the girls, and those bastards hit him instead. He was a boxer. His friends who were with him told us what happened. Four or five Basijis [the Basij is a volunteer paramilitary branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] had surrounded two girls. My brother and his friends beat the Basijis and helped the girls escape.
“But then the Basijis surrounded them on motorbikes. They beat them until finally one of them shot my brother in the side. He fell and said, ‘I’m burning, I’m burning.’ Then one of them came over and shot him in the head and heart, too. Three times in total.”
His brother says the family had searched the streets until they found his body and saw many others who had died in even worse ways. “My brother had been martyred more easily than the others. There, I saw bodies where a bullet had gone in and come out through the eye. One had come out through the throat. Most of the people I saw had headshots – they had been given finishing shots.”
A man who is there with his friends at the grave of another friend killed during the protests points to a grave beside it and says: “They buried five unknown people here together, people whose identities were never established.”
Ali
Ali was killed by a bullet in Moshiriyeh, south Tehran, and still has no gravestone. The last time I was here, I saw a young man sitting alone at his grave in the dusk, crying, playing a sad pop song on his phone.
“They killed my friend in Moshiriyeh. They arrested me, too, but for some reason they released me, and I wish they hadn’t. Since that day my life has gone black. My friend is under the ground and I’m alive.”
Today, Ali’s whole family is at his grave. His father is middle-aged, thin, with sunburnt skin and a very calm face. Several of his teeth are missing. He thanks everyone who comes. Money is short in Ali’s family and buying a gravestone will be difficult for them.
Ali’s father says: “My son was a footballer. He was 2 metres tall. A goalkeeper. We went to Kahrizak and identified him there. After everything happened on Thursday, we had no news of him until two or three in the afternoon on Friday. Then we went looking for him.”
Ali’s younger sister stands beside her father. He points to her and says: “His sister suffered so much. She was so attached to him.” His mother wears a long black manto (coat) and has a gentle, kind face. She does not speak. She only gives me a soft smile and thanks me for coming to her son’s grave.
Among the many killed over those two or three days, only a few have become widely known. Behesht-e Zahra and other cemeteries across Iran are full of the dead of those few days – people no one knows. Their families come in loneliness, sit at the graves of their children, and leave.
Recognition can bring some comfort, but being known has dangers too. To be constantly threatened and watched by security forces is frightening, and it also increases the risk that family members will be arrested.
Danyal
Danyal’s father is sitting on a chair. His mother and aunt sit beside the grave. His father says: “These people – the Islamic Republic’s units – have no religion, no faith, no mercy, no decency. One of them was saying they should open fire on the opposing people with machine guns. Their brains have been washed like this.
“The Islamic Republic has done something to them, to the regime loyalists and supporters, so that they think anyone who says anything against the system should be lined up against a wall and shot. They come with that way of thinking and kill everyone. They killed my son.”
Danyal’s father says he has two sons, Danyal and Nima. Nima works in music. Danyal, his father says, was among the first people to be shot and killed in Fardis, west of Tehran. “We opened the body bags one by one, searching through the bodies.
“At one point I lost hope. I said: ‘That’s enough, leave it.’” Here, Danyal’s father begins to weep. “After days of searching, we found him and put him in the morgue.”
The family says the mortuaries were full of bodies, with women and men screaming as they searched for loved ones, opening zipped-up bags one by one. Danyal’s aunt says: “My other brother said there was a girl whose body bag had been left open and she was naked. I said: ‘God damn you. You killed so many people over a few strands of hair, and now you’ve left her here like this?’”
Danyal’s father says the Iranian security forces put pressure on him to declare his son a martyr. “They said we had to write ‘martyr of a terrorist attack’. I said to myself, because of this other child [his other son, Nima], we have to accept whatever they said. Later, when things calm down, we’ll change it.
Comment