Lessons from My Friend’s Execution in Evin Prison

For months, Shirin could not walk because the skin was torn from the bottom of her feet during the torture. Most of the time, we would sit together and, from a small window, look at the mountains beyond the walls of the prison. She would sing a beautiful Kurdish song. She wished just to walk to the mountains freely, to fly away like a bird one more time.

We ate and talked together almost daily. She asked me to promise her that if I was released and she wasn’t, to never stop fighting against the evil Islamic regime.

From the first day of my release, I started fighting for her release, even though I remained in mortal danger myself. I will never forget that horrific day I got a call from one of my cellmates still in prison: “Marzi, Shirin was executed,” then uncontrollable crying.

I felt like I had died. I hung up the phone, and for a few hours, I felt as if all my internal organs had frozen. My whole body froze. I could not move, talk, or think. 

Along with my roommate, Maryam, with whom I had also been arrested and sentenced to death and then released, we went outside the prison with Shirin’s brother, pleading just to get her body to bury her with dignity. The prison authorities lied. They told us her body had been sent to the cemetery. We rushed there, and they said they never received Shirin’s body. We returned to Evin Prison, begging them to give us her body. They refused, mocking us and any sense of justice. Today, nobody knows her burial place, if she even has one. 

Even 15 years later, Shirin’s execution is one of the most painful things in my life.  Growing up in the Islamic Republic, there were many. This year, we must take a lesson from her murder, as the Islamic regime remains the greatest threat to the US and the world. I am pained that leaders in my adopted country, which I love and am so grateful for, are being deceived by the notion that the ayatollahs can be rationalized with, that negotiation is anything more than a fool’s errand. 

Indeed, the Iranian Islamic Republic cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Ever. Under any circumstances. Negotiation will only give them time to bury their centrifuge deeper, and to hide the enriched uranium that has no civilian purpose. To be clear: if the Islamic Republic is able to acquire a nuclear weapon, they will use it. They will threaten the US and Israel, the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan.” They will establish a nuclear umbrella that will let them blackmail and terrorize the rest of the world. There is no doubt about this, yet too many in the West don’t realize it. 

While all this is horrible, and is threatening, and causes enough to do everything possible to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, no less horrible is the cancerous threat of the spreading of their evil, extremist Islamic ideology: in the US and the rest of the world. A nuclear bomb can kill millions instantaneously, but its dangerous ideology infects the whole world, spreading like a virus, and destroying and threatening millions from within over decades.

My friend Shirin is evidence of that. Arrested, tortured, and executed, she was one of millions of Iranians who were victims of this extremist ideology. While no level of torture is out of bounds in the Islamic Republic, according to their strict following of Islamic laws, it’s not allowed to execute a virgin. It is a known practice for women like Shirin, and others, that before being executed they are brutally raped, taking the level of obscenity beyond imagination. That’s another example of why negotiations are futile, and they can never be trusted. 

I was supposed to be one of its victims too. Outside Iran, through its terrorist proxies around the world, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Syrian Assad regime, Kataib Hezbollah, and more, millions of others have been killed and maimed. Vast “no-go” neighborhoods of major European cities have become dangerous cesspools of Islamic hate. 

The US and the world must be saved from this threat. But there’s another reason as well. For more than 46 years, 85 million Iranians have been held captive, hostage to the ayatollahs, victims of their lies. They have been repeatedly let down by the West, looking to make a deal. The worst of these examples was President Obama, who, while I was in prison, not only abandoned the Iranian people during the Green Movement, but also sent billions of dollars to Iran, thinking that he could pay off the ayatollahs. Still today, Iranians consider Obama to have betrayed them.

There have been reports of the Islamic Republic today offering the US billions in contracts to rebuild Iran, but that is nothing more than extortion. In fact, the US can achieve unlimited potential and billions in contracts rebuilding Iran by doing everything possible to bring down the Islamic regime, making Iran and Iranians free, and eliminating the world’s greatest source of terror and war. 

This is what needs to be done. While it cannot bring back Shirin, it will at least fulfill her wishes for a free Iran, and those of so many others who have suffered their brutality. 

Photo Credit: ©Marziyeh Amirizadeh

Marziyeh Amirizadeh is an Iranian American who immigrated to the US after being sentenced to death in Iran for the crime of converting to Christianity.   She endured months of mental and physical hardships and intense interrogation. She is author of two books (the latest, A Love Journey with God), public speaker, and columnist. She has shared her inspiring story throughout the United States and around the world to bring awareness about the ongoing human rights violations and persecution of women and religious minorities in Iran, www.MarzisJourney.com.

Marzi also is the founder and president of NEW PERSIA whose mission is to be the voice of persecuted Christians and oppressed women under Islam, expose the lies of the Iranian Islamic regime, and restore the relationships between Persians, Jews, and Christians. www.NewPersia.org