The shots from the Basij came as the crowd was already scattering. As he ran, Ali thought, Why are you shooting at us as we are running away? But there was no time to think about it then; he just needed to escape home.
The man who told me this has just left Iran. I have known him for two years, but for his own and his family’s safety he can’t be identified, so I am calling him Ali. He and his wife are in a neighboring country for now, where they fled last week, after the protests in Iran were crushed by Ali Khameini’s regime in a violent crackdown that has taken at least 6,000 lives—a number that after all the injured and missing are accounted for could climb to over 20,000. Both are young professionals who intend to return home to Iran, but they need the internet, still cut off in Iran, to do their jobs. And they need to breathe.
Ali first joined the protests on January 8. By then, they had grown to a million people. He and his wife, whom I’ll call Roya, live in one of Iran’s bigger cities, and were not activists or dissidents. “I had never been to a protest before,” Ali told me. But he felt a responsibility to take a stand. And, for the first time in Ali’s life, the prospects for a change in the regime appeared hopeful.
