Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa by Michael J. Totten

Iranians couldn’t buck the party line on certain topics, but they were brave enough, or just barely free enough, to protest the government to its face. “When [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad spoke to students,” Mohtadi pointed out, “hundreds of students stood up and called him a fascist and burned his picture.”
     
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    Sealing the rugged Iran-Iraq border is all but impossible in the north, where like-minded Kurds live on both sides of it. People, as well as goods, cross every hour. Alcohol is smuggled into Iran. Gasoline and drugs are smuggled out. Komala’s location in the area made it the perfect place for a vast, sprawling safe house. Activists, underground party members and dissidents from Iran—from the Persian heartland as well as from Iranian Kurdistan—slipped through the mountains to visit every day.
    I’ve stood on the border myself and contemplated walking undetected into Iran. Komala leaders even offered to take me across and embed me. “We can get you inside Iran and leave you for weeks, if you want, among our supporters and among our people,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”
    If I were caught in Iran without a visa or an entry stamp in my passport, I would almost surely be jailed as a spy. Tempting as the offer was, I had to pass. Anyway, I could speak to Iranian dissidents, if not necessarily ordinary Iranians, in the Komala camp just as easily as I could have inside Iran. As it happened, a famous Persian writer and dissident had arrived there just before I did.
    Kianoosh Sanjari was a member of the United Student Front in Tehran. At 23, he had been been imprisoned and tortured many times. His most recent arrest was on October 7, 2006, after he wrote about clashes between the Revolutionary Guards and supporters of the liberal cleric Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi. Charged with “acting against state security” and “propaganda against the system,” he was released on $100,000 bail the previous December. Some months later, he fled to Iraq and moved to the Komala camp.
    Unlike most Iranian visitors who used Komala as a safe house, Sanjari didn’t bother to remain anonymous. He told me his real name and said I could publish his picture. “I’m just now coming out of Iran,” he said. “It’s a hell there. I know the sufferings. I am inclined to accept any tactic that helps overthrow this regime.”
    “Does that include an American invasion of Iran?” I asked.
    “Maybe intellectuals who just talk about things are not in favor of that kind of military attack,” he said. “But I have spoken to people in taxis, in public places. They are praying for an external outside power to do something for them and get rid of the mullahs. Personally, it’s not acceptable for me if the United States crosses the Iranian border. I like the independence of Iran and respect the independence of my country. But my generation doesn’t care about this.”
    Sanjari had fierce and intimidating eyes, the eyes not of a fanatic but of a dead-serious person who is not to be messed with. He spoke slowly and with great force. “They repress people in the name of religion,” he said. “They torture people in the name of religion. They kill people in the name of religion. The young generation now wants to distance themselves from religion itself.”
    Islamists seem to fail wherever they succeed. Perhaps Islamic law looks good on paper to Muslims who live in oppressive secular states, but few seem to think so after they actually have to put up with it.
    More than 100,000 Algerians were killed during the 1990s in a horrific civil war between religious insurgents and the secular Soviet-style police state. As a consequence, Islamists became more hated in Algeria than at any time since they rose up. Al-Qaeda tried to reignite the war there, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
    Iraqis turned against al-Qaeda faster and harder than Iranians turned against the Islamic Republic. Harsh as the Islamic