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The Revolution At My Door: Escape From Iran

I worked at a prosperous medical clinic in Iran. When the protests began, the regime came for me. This is how I escaped.

It was seven in the evening late last September, just after sunset. I was getting ready for my last two patients of the day when my assistant walked into my office. “Doctor,” she said, “Can you come to the laser room? It’s better if you hurry.”

I worked at a small clinic in Karaj, a city west of Tehran, where we performed simple cosmetic procedures like Botox and lip injections. It wasn’t the kind of place where we saw a lot of emergencies, but I could tell from my assistant’s tone that something was amiss. She led me to the little room where we performed laser hair removal. There I found a boy, about 10 or 11 years old, and his father, who had draped a coat over the child. When he removed it, I could see the boy’s back was covered in blood, his shirt riddled with bullet holes. My heart began to beat faster, and I could feel my muscles tighten.

“What happened?” I asked. But I already knew. For days, protests had raged through the city and the country over the death of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini...

...Anger at Iran’s repressive, theocratic government has been simmering, and boiling over in protest, for years. But Amini’s death—its brutality and ugliness and pointlessness—touched a raw nerve. The day after she died, the funeral in her hometown of Saqqez attracted protesters who removed their own hijabs in solidarity. At some point, police fired on them—an early volley of violence in a standoff between regime forces and citizens. In the months since, countless Iranians have marched in the streets, and hundreds have lost their lives in clashes with government forces.

This boy and his father hadn’t been taking part in the protest. “We were just there to see what was going on,” said the father. “We were only curious.” But when the police began shooting, everyone was caught in the line of fire.

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