Then They Came For Me by Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy

one occasion back then my friends and I fought with, and had to escape from, a group of Basijis in the very same streets. As the Guards charged toward the crowd from the south and the policemen from the north, I darted down a side street I had taken shelter in twenty-five years earlier, and I kept running until I was out of breath.
    I stopped near a medic who was tending to a sixteen-year-old boy. His brother kept on calling his name: “Reza, Reza
joon.
” Reza was semiconscious, and his blue short-sleeved shirt was drenched in blood. His brother, Maysam, was standing nearby, throwing the books he had been holding in the direction of the riot police.
    “Khaar kos deh ha, madar jendeh ha!”
he yelled, his voice brimming with anger. “Sisterfuckers, motherfuckers!” These are the worst insults in Iran, but enraged by the sight of his brother covered with blood, Maysam didn’t seem to care.
    I ran up to Maysam and asked what had happened. He told me that he and Reza were coming back from language school when the riot police attacked them without provocation, striking them with clubs. When Reza fell on the ground, a plainclothes intelligence officer kicked him in the head. The medic, an older man with stubble on his chin, looked pained as he tended to Reza’s wounds. I asked the medic if he needed any help. When he glanced up at me, I saw that he was on the verge of tears.
    “I didn’t know this is what they wanted to do. I didn’t know,” he said. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that he worked for Iran’s Red Crescent organization—the Muslim version of the Red Cross. He and his colleagues had each been called at home the night before and had been told to be ready for a showdown.
    I said good-bye and kept walking until I found a man on a motorcycle who agreed to take me to my mother’s house. As we bounced over the rocky streets, I felt a sharp pain in my back, and noticed that my right arm where I’d been hit with the club had gone numb.
    ·   ·   ·
    As soon as I got home, I swallowed a few painkillers, hoping that my arm was not fractured. The government had issued aban on reporting about any postelection demonstrations, and I knew that many reporters would be afraid to disobey the ban. But I felt differently. Given my knowledge of Iran, my contacts in the government, and my sources in the foreign media, I was in a unique position to report on the disputed election and the chaos that followed.
    I wanted to talk to Paola, but I was afraid to call her; I didn’t want her to hear the pain or fear in my voice. I was also anxious about what I knew I was going to have to tell her eventually: that I wouldn’t be coming home in a few days, as we had planned. If things were going to get violent, I had to stay and report on them. Unlike many stories I had covered in the past, I cared very deeply, on a personal level, about this one. A voice inside me, maybe my father’s or Maryam’s, was urging me to stay and witness what would be the result of the turmoil that had taken over our country.
    I was relieved to find my mother asleep in her bedroom. I had Reza’s blood on my shirt, and I didn’t want her to see it. I quietly closed the door, washed my shirt, and turned the television on. Khamenei’s picture filled the screen. A narrator was reading his letter to Ahmadinejad on the occasion of his victory. “Enemies may want to spoil the sweetness of this event with some kind of ill-intentioned provocations,” the voice said over different close-ups of Khamenei’s solemn face.
    I hit Mute and watched in silence as images of the triumphant Ahmadinejad and self-satisfied Khamenei saturated the airwaves. I brought my laptop to the living room and began a story for
Newsweek
. “If an electoral fraud, tantamount to a coup, has indeed happened, most people believe that it was staged with Khamenei’s blessing,” I wrote.
    That evening, the Ministry of Interior released the final count: Ahmadinejad had