They’d select the ladies who have been fairly and suited their urge for food …
… then the officer would take one in all them from the cell to a smaller, personal room.”
“They would sexually assault them there.”
CNN Special Report
Covert testimonies reveal sexual assaults 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 individuals passes by means of 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 protest for over two months.
A portrait of the founding father of Iran’s clerical regime, Ruhollah Khomeini, looms in opposition to 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 threat the journey. Some of the few who cross say the noose is tightening: protesters gunned down, curfews within the border villages and nighttime raids on houses.
In hushed tones, they converse of feminine protesters particularly, and the horrors they are saying some have endured in Iran’s infamous detention services.
Iran’s authorities has closed the nation off to non-accredited overseas journalists, recurrently shuts down the web and suppresses dissidents’ voices with mass arrests. An excessive local weather of worry prevails in Iran because the crackdown intensifies.
One Kurdish-Iranian girl, whom CNN is asking Hana for her security, says she each witnessed and suffered sexual violence whereas detained. “There were girls who were sexually assaulted and then transferred to other cities,” she mentioned. “They are scared to talk about these things.”
Iranian protesters set their headscarves on hearth whereas marching down a road on October 1, 2022 in Tehran, Iran. Getty Images
Women have performed a central function in Iran’s rebellion because it ignited two months in the past. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” reverberates by means of anti-regime demonstrations in its unique Kurdish (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi) and in Persian (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi). It is a nod to the 22-year-old Kurdish girl whose loss of life sparked the protests — Jina (Mahsa) Amini was believed to have been brutally overwhelmed by Iran’s morality police for improper hijab and died days later.
The rights of ladies have additionally been on the coronary heart of debate amongst Iran’s clerical institution because the protests started. Some clerics and politicians have referred to as for the stress-free of social guidelines, whereas others doubled down, conflating the feminine protesters with what they name “loose women” who have been merely pawns in a plot hatched by Western governments.
In current weeks, social media movies have emerged allegedly displaying Iranian safety forces sexually assaulting feminine demonstrators on the streets. Reports of sexual violence in opposition to activists in prisons started to floor.
With media entry inside Iran severely constrained, CNN went to the area close to Iraq’s border with Iran, interviewing eyewitnesses who’d left the nation and verifying accounts from survivors and sources each in and outdoors Iran. CNN corroborated a number of experiences of sexual violence in opposition to protesters and heard accounts of many extra. At least one in all these induced extreme damage, and one other concerned the rape of an underage boy. In among the circumstances CNN uncovered, the sexual assault was filmed and used to blackmail the protesters into silence, in response to sources who spoke to the victims.
Iranian officers haven’t but responded to CNN’s request for touch upon the abuses alleged on this report.
Armita Abbasi, 20, bore all of the hallmarks of a Gen Z-er. Her edgy hairdo was dyed platinum blonde and he or she had an eyebrow piercing. She wore coloured contact lenses, and filmed TikToks along with her cats from her front room.
The rebellion modified her life, and Iran’s safety forces seem to have subjected her to among the worst of their brutality.
After the protests started, social media posts underneath Abbasi’s identify turned charged with unrestrained criticism of Iran’s regime. It is unclear if she participated within the protests. Yet, in contrast to most Iranian dissidents contained in the nation, she didn’t anonymize her anti-regime posts.
A protest in Abbasi’s hometown of Karaj which has been a flashpoint within the nationwide rebellion. IranWire
She was arrested in her hometown of Karaj, simply west of Tehran, almost a month after the onset of the demonstrations. In an October 29 assertion, the federal government claimed she was “the leader of the riots” and that police found “10 Molotov cocktails” in her condo.
It was an ominous assertion that appeared to indicate that Iran’s justice system would reserve a harsh punishment for the 20-year-old. But it additionally served as a denial of a collection of leaked accounts on Instagram that had induced uproar on social media within the days since her arrest, and which turned Abbasi — like Amini and Nika Shahkarami earlier than her — into a logo of Iran’s protest motion.
The contents of the leaked accounts — conversations between medics on Instagram’s personal messaging service — recommended that Iranian safety forces tortured and sexually assaulted Abbasi.
On October 17, Abbasi was rushed to the Imam Ali hospital in Karaj, accompanied by plainclothes officers, in response to leaks from that hospital. Her head had been shaved and he or she was shaking violently. In the accounts, the medical employees attending to her spoke of the horror they felt once they noticed proof of brutal rape.
An insider at Imam Ali hospital confirmed the veracity of these 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 medical employees in one of many messages.
“After the truth became obvious to all, they changed the whole script,” wrote the medic. CNN can verify that 4 to 5 medics leaked the messages to social media. All of them mentioned they believed she was 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 assertion, the Iranian authorities mentioned Abbasi was handled for “digestive problems.” Medics on the Imam Ali hospital mentioned the declare didn’t tally with the signs Abbasi exhibited. Abbasi was additionally handled by a gynecologist and a psychiatrist, which the medics mentioned was additionally inconsistent with the federal government’s account.
CNN has offered the leaked accounts of Abbasi’s accidents to an Iranian physician exterior Iran who mentioned the signs as described indicated brutal sexual assault.
“She was feeling so bad we thought she had cancer.”
– A medic who witnessed Abbasi’s accidents in hospital
The leaks level to a extremely secretive course of closely managed by Iranian safety forces. One medic mentioned on social media that police prevented employees from chatting with Abbasi, and that the hospital management’s account of her medical situation saved altering. When CNN referred to as the Imam Ali Hospital, a employees member mentioned they’d no file of her, regardless of the federal government’s acknowledgement that she was handled there.
According to the leaked accounts, safety forces eliminated Abbasi from the hospital by means of a rear entrance simply earlier than her household arrived to see her. “My heart which saw her and couldn’t free her is driving me crazy,” wrote one medic.
Abbasi is presently being held in Karaj’s infamous Fardis jail, in response to the Iranian authorities. CNN has been unable to achieve her or her relations for remark.
Before Hana was arrested, she had been warned that girls in Iranian prisons have been “being treated very badly.” Her mom acquired a telephone name from her neighbor — a high-level official in Mahabad jail within the nation’s northwest — urging her to not let her daughters out of their residence “under any circumstances,” Hana tells CNN.
Hana says she was undeterred. She joined the protests and, like many different feminine demonstrators, she spun round and danced as she waved her scarf within the air earlier than burning it, in what has grow to be a ritualistic function of the nationwide protests.
When she was arrested, Iranian police mentioned they noticed her torching her scarf in surveillance footage, she says.
Hana says she was held in a detention heart at a police station in Iran’s northwestern metropolis of Urmia for twenty-four hours.
Unlike most of her fellow activists, Hana fled Iran. For days, she and her uncle’s household adopted a bunch of Kurdish smugglers as they weaved by means of the border area’s mountains. Only a handful of protesters have launched into the perilous journey. That’s as a result of the Iranian facet of the border is closely militarized, and safety forces recurrently shoot-to-kill those that cross, and smuggle items, illegally.
Hana now lives along with her kin in a mountain city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her jet-black hair tumbles right down to her waist. A white scarf is wound round her neck on the day CNN speaks along with her. It covers a purple mark the place a safety officer pressured himself on her, she says, and violently kissed her.
Outside the tiny interrogation cell 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 battle 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 lady had been corralled into one other interrogation room as her teenage brother demanded he be a part of her to verify nothing “was happening to her.” Hana describes the police beating the boy with batons. He lay on the bottom, wounded and having dirty himself through the beating, she recollects. Meanwhile, his sister was screaming within the interrogation room. Hana says she believes the lady was being sexually assaulted.
Her feminine cellmates informed 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 minutes, her father had come to bail her out, saving her, she believes, from the worst.
Other girls weren’t so fortunate, she says. Many of these held on the station have been denied bail and disappeared right into a labyrinthine jail system which incorporates secret detention facilities in army bases, in response to sources and rights teams. Kurdish rights teams have repeatedly reported that a whole lot of individuals have been forcibly disappeared within the Kurdish areas of Iran, and have documented proof of secret detention facilities in army bases.
Video: Watch CNN’s interview with a girls who tells how she endured sexual assault in an Iranian jail. 06:31
Most of the experiences of sexual violence reviewed by CNN because the protests sparked by Amini’s loss of life started got here from the west of the nation, the place massive swathes of the area are predominantly Kurdish. Throughout this investigation, CNN has spoken to sources in varied flashpoints of the nation’s protests, together with rights teams and activists linked to the Kurdish-majority areas, activists in common contact with feminine detainees in key prisons, equivalent to Evin jail in Tehran, and a Baluchi activist community linked to the southeast Baluch majority of the nation.
Alongside the authorities’ widespread detention of protesters, the media blackout within the nation has worsened. The stigma hooked up to victims of sexual violence provides one other layer of secrecy to what’s unfolding.
Despite the issue of investigating these claims and the dangers run by victims who report them, CNN has realized of 11 incidents — generally involving a number of victims — of sexual violence in opposition to protesters in Iranian prisons and has corroborated almost half of them. Almost all occurred within the Kurdish areas.
In one case, CNN acquired the audio testimony of a 17-year-old boy who mentioned he and his pals have been raped and electrocuted in detention after they have been arrested within the protests. Testimonies heard by CNN recommend that the sexual assault of the underage boy was not 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 informed 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 teams Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have additionally mentioned that they recorded a number of cases of sexual assault in prisons because the onset of the protests in mid-September.
The head of the Kurdistan Human Rights community, Rebin Rahmani, informed CNN that two girls in detention, with whom he spoke, have been threatened with the rape of their teenage sisters as a method of pressuring them into giving a pressured TV confession. In a type of incidents, safety forces introduced the lady’s teenage sister to the interrogation room and requested her if she was “prepared” to allow them to rape her sister, he mentioned, citing the lady’s account. The girl gave in and made the confession, she informed 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 grow to be public information if the medics had not leaked the small print to the press and to social media.
“I’m not trying to spread fear and horror,” wrote one medic from Imam Ali hospital in a social media submit. “But this is the truth. A crime is happening and I can’t remain silent.”
Correction: This article has been up to date to take away a reference to a criticism about protesters allegedly made by Zeinab Soleimani, the daughter of the late basic Qassem Soleimani, the authenticity of which couldn’t be independently confirmed by CNN.