They’d select the ladies who have been beautiful and suited their urge for food …
… then the officer would take one in all them from the cellular to a smaller, non-public room.”
“They would sexually assault them there.”
CNN Special Report
Covert testimonies divulge sexual attacks on female and male activists as a women-led rebellion spreads
By Tamara Qiblawi, Barbara Arvanitidis, Nima Elbagir, Alex Platt, Artemis Moshtaghian, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Celine Alkhaldi and Muhammad Jambaz, CNN
November 21, 2022
Haje Omeran, Iraq (CNN) — A trickle of other people passes via a usually busy border crossing within the mountains of northern Iraq. “It’s a big prison over there,” one Iranian girl says, gesturing to the hulking gate that marks the border with Iran’s Islamic Republic, which has been convulsed by way of protest for over two months.
A portrait of the founding father of Iran’s clerical regime, Ruhollah Khomeini, looms towards a backdrop of rolling hills studded with streetlights. Snatches of vacationers’ muted conversations punctuate an eerie silence.
Fear of indiscriminate arrest has made many reluctant to chance the adventure. Some of the few who pass say the noose is tightening: protesters gunned down, curfews within the border villages and middle of the night raids on houses.
In hushed tones, they discuss of feminine protesters specifically, and the horrors they are saying some have persisted in Iran’s infamous detention amenities.
Iran’s executive has closed the rustic off to non-accredited overseas newshounds, continuously shuts down the web and suppresses dissidents’ voices with mass arrests. An excessive local weather of concern prevails in Iran because the crackdown intensifies.
One Kurdish-Iranian girl, whom CNN is looking Hana for her protection, says she each witnessed and suffered sexual violence whilst detained. “There were girls who were sexually assaulted and then transferred to other cities,” she mentioned. “They are scared to talk about these things.”
Women have performed a central position in Iran’s rebellion because it ignited two months in the past. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” reverberates via anti-regime demonstrations in its authentic Kurdish (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi) and in Persian (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi). It is a nod to the 22-year-old Kurdish girl whose dying sparked the protests — Jina (Mahsa) Amini was once believed to had been brutally overwhelmed by way of Iran’s morality police for incorrect hijab and died days later.
The rights of ladies have additionally been on the middle of discussion amongst Iran’s clerical established order for the reason that protests started. Some clerics and politicians have known as for the enjoyable of social regulations, whilst others doubled down, conflating the feminine protesters with what they name “loose women” who have been simply pawns in a plot hatched by way of Western governments.
In one of the crucial putting feedback within the smear marketing campaign towards feminine protesters, Zeinab Soleimani, the daughter of Iran’s respected slain basic Qassem Soleimani, accused females within the protests of short of to “get naked.”
In contemporary weeks, social media movies have emerged allegedly appearing Iranian safety forces sexually assaulting feminine demonstrators at the streets. Reports of sexual violence towards activists in prisons started to floor.
With media get admission to within Iran seriously constrained, CNN went to the area close to Iraq’s border with Iran, interviewing eyewitnesses who’d left the rustic and verifying accounts from survivors and resources each in and out of doors Iran. CNN corroborated a number of experiences of sexual violence towards protesters and heard accounts of many extra. At least any such brought about serious harm, and any other concerned the rape of an underage boy. In one of the circumstances CNN exposed, the sexual attack was once filmed and used to blackmail the protesters into silence, in keeping with resources who spoke to the sufferers.
Iranian officers have no longer but answered to CNN’s request for remark at the abuses alleged on this document.
Armita Abbasi, 20, bore the entire hallmarks of a Gen Z-er. Her edgy hairdo was once dyed platinum blonde and he or she had an eyebrow piercing. She wore coloured touch lenses, and filmed TikToks along with her cats from her lounge.
The rebellion modified her lifestyles, and Iran’s safety forces seem to have subjected her to one of the worst in their brutality.
After the protests started, social media posts below Abbasi’s identify turned into charged with unrestrained complaint of Iran’s regime. It is unclear if she participated within the protests. Yet, in contrast to maximum Iranian dissidents within the nation, she didn’t anonymize her anti-regime posts.
She was once arrested in her place of birth of Karaj, simply west of Tehran, just about a month after the onset of the demonstrations. In an October 29 remark, the federal government claimed she was once “the leader of the riots” and that police came upon “10 Molotov cocktails” in her condo.
It was once an ominous remark that gave the impression to suggest that Iran’s justice machine would reserve a harsh punishment for the 20-year-old. But it additionally served as a denial of a sequence of leaked accounts on Instagram that had brought about uproar on social media within the days since her arrest, and which became Abbasi — like Amini and Nika Shahkarami sooner than her — into a logo of Iran’s protest motion.
The contents of the leaked accounts — conversations between medics on Instagram’s non-public messaging provider — steered that Iranian safety forces tortured and sexually assaulted Abbasi.
On October 17, Abbasi was once rushed to the Imam Ali medical institution in Karaj, accompanied by way of plainclothes officials, in keeping with leaks from that medical institution. Her head were shaved and he or she was once shaking violently. In the accounts, the clinical personnel getting to her spoke of the horror they felt once they noticed proof of brutal rape.
An insider at Imam Ali medical institution showed the veracity of the ones leaks to CNN. The supply requested to stay nameless for safety causes.
“When she first came in, (the officers) said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. The plainclothes men insisted that the doctor write it as rape prior to arrest,” wrote one member of the clinical personnel in some of the messages.
“After the truth became obvious to all, they changed the whole script,” wrote the medic. CNN can ascertain that 4 to 5 medics leaked the messages to social media. All of them mentioned they believed she was once sexually assaulted in custody.
“To make it short, they screwed up,” that medic added of the safety forces. “They screwed up and they don’t know how to put it together again.”
In its remark, the Iranian executive mentioned Abbasi was once handled for “digestive problems.” Medics on the Imam Ali medical institution mentioned the declare didn’t tally with the indicators Abbasi exhibited. Abbasi was once additionally handled by way of a gynecologist and a psychiatrist, which the medics mentioned was once additionally inconsistent with the federal government’s account.
CNN has offered the leaked accounts of Abbasi’s accidents to an Iranian physician out of doors Iran who mentioned the indicators as described indicated brutal sexual attack.
“She was feeling so bad we thought she had cancer.”
– A medic who witnessed Abbasi’s accidents in medical institution
The leaks level to a extremely secretive procedure closely managed by way of Iranian safety forces. One medic mentioned on social media that police averted personnel from talking to Abbasi, and that the medical institution management’s account of her clinical situation stored converting. When CNN known as the Imam Ali Hospital, a personnel member mentioned they’d no file of her, regardless of the federal government’s acknowledgement that she was once handled there.
According to the leaked accounts, safety forces got rid of Abbasi from the medical institution via a rear front simply sooner than her circle of relatives arrived to look her. “My heart which saw her and couldn’t free her is driving me crazy,” wrote one medic.
Abbasi is lately being held in Karaj’s infamous Fardis jail, in keeping with the Iranian executive. CNN has been not able to achieve her or her members of the family for remark.
Before Hana was once arrested, she were warned that girls in Iranian prisons have been “being treated very badly.” Her mom won a telephone name from her neighbor — a high-level legit in Mahabad jail within the nation’s northwest — urging her not to let her daughters out in their house “under any circumstances,” Hana tells CNN.
Hana says she was once undeterred. She joined the protests and, like many different feminine demonstrators, she spun round and danced as she waved her scarf within the air sooner than burning it, in what has turn into a ritualistic function of the national protests.
When she was once arrested, Iranian police mentioned they noticed her torching her shawl in surveillance photos, she says.
Hana says she was once held in a detention heart at a police station in Iran’s northwestern town of Urmia for twenty-four hours.
Unlike maximum of her fellow activists, Hana fled Iran. For days, she and her uncle’s circle of relatives adopted a gaggle of Kurdish smugglers as they weaved in the course of the border area’s mountains. Only a handful of protesters have embarked at the perilous adventure. That’s for the reason that Iranian facet of the border is closely militarized, and safety forces continuously shoot-to-kill those that pass, and smuggle items, illegally.
Hana now lives along with her relations in a mountain the city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her jet-black hair tumbles right down to her waist. A white shawl is wound round her neck at the day CNN speaks along with her. It covers a red mark the place a safety officer pressured himself on her, she says, and violently kissed her.
Outside the tiny interrogation cellular the place Hana says the policeman assaulted her — assailing her with guarantees of freedom as he hinted closely at calls for for sexual favors — a struggle had damaged out, distracting the policeman.
“They will threaten (the woman) not to talk about the abuse, who did it to her, who insulted her, and who sexually violated her.”
— Hana
She recounts how a woman were corralled into any other interrogation room as her teenage brother demanded he sign up for her to ensure not anything “was happening to her.” Hana describes the police beating the boy with batons. He lay at the flooring, wounded and having dirty himself all through the thrashing, she remembers. Meanwhile, his sister was once screaming within the interrogation room. Hana says she believes the girl was once being sexually assaulted.
Her feminine cellmates advised her they’d been raped within the police station, she says. When Hana’s interrogator returned, Hana says he resumed making undesirable sexual advances on her. But inside of mins, her father had come to bail her out, saving her, she believes, from the worst.
Other females weren’t so fortunate, she says. Many of the ones held on the station have been denied bail and disappeared right into a labyrinthine jail machine which incorporates secret detention facilities in army bases, in keeping with resources and rights teams. Kurdish rights teams have again and again reported that loads of other people had been forcibly disappeared within the Kurdish areas of Iran, and feature documented proof of secret detention facilities in army bases.
Most of the experiences of sexual violence reviewed by way of CNN for the reason that protests sparked by way of Amini’s dying started got here from the west of the rustic, the place massive swathes of the area are predominantly Kurdish. Throughout this investigation, CNN has spoken to resources in quite a lot of flashpoints of the rustic’s protests, together with rights teams and activists related to the Kurdish-majority spaces, activists in common touch with feminine detainees in key prisons, similar to Evin jail in Tehran, and a Baluchi activist community attached to the southeast Baluch majority of the rustic.
Alongside the government’ common detention of protesters, the media blackout within the nation has worsened. The stigma connected to sufferers of sexual violence provides any other layer of secrecy to what’s unfolding.
Despite the trouble of investigating those claims and the dangers run by way of sufferers who document them, CNN has discovered of eleven incidents — once in a while involving a couple of sufferers — of sexual violence towards protesters in Iranian prisons and has corroborated just about part of them. Almost all befell within the Kurdish spaces.
In one case, CNN won the audio testimony of a 17-year-old boy who mentioned he and his buddies have been raped and electrocuted in detention when they have been arrested within the protests. Testimonies heard by way of CNN recommend that the sexual attack of the underage boy was once no longer an remoted incident.
“They brought four men over who had been beaten, screaming intensely in another cell. And one of the men who was tortured, was sent to the waiting room where I was,” the boy advised CNN. “I asked him what all that screaming was about? He said they are raping the men.”
A security guard overheard the conversation about the sexual assault, the boy said, after which he proceeded to torture him. The boy said he then was also raped.
“I asked him what all that screaming was about? He said they are raping the men.”
— A 17-year-old boy in Kurdish-majority Iran
International rights groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also said that they recorded several instances of sexual assault in prisons since the onset of the protests in mid-September.
The head of the Kurdistan Human Rights network, Rebin Rahmani, told CNN that two women in detention, with whom he spoke, were threatened with the rape of their teenage sisters as a means of pressuring them into giving a forced TV confession. In one of those incidents, security forces brought the woman’s teenage sister to the interrogation room and asked her if she was “prepared” to let them rape her sister, he said, citing the woman’s account. The woman gave in and made the confession, she told him.
CNN relied on sources and survivors inside Iran risking their freedoms and lives to report the sexual violence. In Armita Abbasi’s case, her apparently brutal rape is unlikely to have become public knowledge if the medics had not leaked the details to the press and to social media.
“I’m not trying to spread fear and horror,” wrote one medic from Imam Ali medical institution in a social media submit. “But this is the truth. A crime is happening and I can’t remain silent.”
