I fled Iran and swapped my headscarf for a Kalashnikov

With her ten-year-old sister’s hand clamped firmly in her own, Parya Ghaisary strode up to the Iranian border guards, wearing an expression of breezy confidence that she did not feel. The rest of her life, she knew, hung on this moment.

Would her name be on a list? Would they know that she had been protesting on the streets of her home town, running from bullets and tear gas, wearing a mask but no headscarf? Would she be arrested? Would her sister be left alone with no one to care for her?

She fought to keep her panic under control. Carrying a bag in one hand, the 20-year-old Kurdish university student pushed through the crowd with her sister until they reached the guards manning the border.

They glanced at her documents and waved her through. She stepped over the border into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and let her headscarf fall to her shoulders.

“It was the most wonderful feeling,” she told me when we met in a mountain encampment about 30 miles from the border.

For the past five weeks, protests have been boiling in all of Iran’s big cities — from Tehran in the north to the Baloch region in the southeast, where Amnesty International has said that at least 66 people, including children, were killed by the security services in one day at the end of last month.

Yet in the northwestern Kurdish-majority region, the protests have flared with particular intensity after the killing of one of their own: Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose family say she was beaten to death by the so-called morality police for not wearing a headscarf “correctly” while on holiday in Tehran.

After her death, people took to the streets shouting “Women! Life! Freedom!”, a chant that has its roots in Kurdish resistance movements. They have been met with bullets, tear gas and buckshot. Iranian Human Rights, a monitoring and advocacy group based in Norway, estimates that at least 215 people have been killed. The UN has said that 23 children are among them.

“Each of us is Mahsa, we were all in Mahsa’s situation,” Ghaisary said. “So when that happened to Mahsa, we felt that it was happening to us . . . there’s really something in the heart of our girls.”

The regime, terrified that news of its atrocities will seep out — or that images of the protests will inspire others to take to the streets — has tried to restrict access to the internet. Messaging and social media apps are blocked. Those who speak out are quickly silenced: an example was the climber, Elnaz Rekabi, reportedly placed under house arrest after competing in South Korea without a headscarf. Little information makes it out of Iran.

One of the few places where news seeps out is in the hazy, purple-tinged mountains of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. Here, hundreds cross every day through the border gates from Iran, while others are smuggled through the passes.

At the Iraqi Kurdish side of the Penjwen border crossing on Friday, a trickle of families and traders crossed back and forth in buses and beaten-up cars. On the other side of the border, through the haze of dust, an Iranian flag flew next to what a Kurdish border official said was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base.

“No one has any freedom at any time. They can put a bag on your head and take you away,” said one woman, who did not give her name. She had just crossed the border with her family, whipping off her headscarf as she walked. “The demonstrations are going on all the time. You can hear a lot of gunfire.”

She, like others who made it out of Iranian Kurdish cities last week, described a highly charged atmosphere, with protests breaking out in cities and towns at different times of day, with little predictability. The crackdowns are relentless: armed security forces, some in civilian clothes, use bullets and tear gas on protesters and passers-by, dragging those they can from the streets.

Ordinary people risk everything to open their doors to injured or fleeing protesters. At night, people chant from their rooftops for freedom, and for death to the regime’s leaders. Shops close in strikes.

“It’s really dangerous,” said Nusheen, 25, who crossed the border with her husband. Like many others, she refused to give her full name because of security concerns. “They’re shooting protesters. They’ll shoot you for anything, just for fighting for a very simple life.”

This is the life that Ghaisary wanted her sister to escape. Even at ten, she knew she would soon be forced to cover her hair to become part of a society in which Kurdish women are third-class citizens. “It was not a good life for us,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to show our hair, and if we did, they chased us. So many things.”

When the protests began, Ghaisary revelled in the freedom, terrifying as it was, going out without her headscarf, mingling with like-minded people on the streets demanding respect and dignity.

 “The demonstrations and Mahsa Amini’s death changed one big thing, which is the way that men’s eyes look at women,” she said. “Because before, if a woman wasn’t wearing the veil, they’d look at her like she was dishonourable or amoral. Now they can see we’re honourable and we’re fighting for our rights.”

The Kurdish region of Iran is one of the poorest and most oppressed parts of the country — held in a security and economic stranglehold by the state, which fears any sign of Kurdish militancy or nationalism.

Despite this, like many others, Ghaisary’s family had links to Kurdish armed opposition parties. This summer, her mother left the family in their home town of Sanandaj, 95 miles from the Iraqi border — and now a centre of the protests — to join Komala, a political and military group with Marxist-Leninist roots that has for decades campaigned for Kurdish Iranian independence.

As the protests escalated in Kurdish areas three weeks ago, the Iranian regime attacked several of these camps with drones and missiles. In one, belonging to the Kurdistan Freedom Party, nine people were killed.

Despite the risks of joining one of these groups, Ghaisary knew it was her only choice. Each day at the protests, she saw how the people around her were dragged away by the security forces. Others were shot and lay bleeding on the ground. One day she went to a hospital and saw how doctors were prevented from treating people injured in the protests.

“The police, who were in civilian clothes, started to beat the women and men, and they came in their cars and took them away,” she told me, adding: “I saw this with my own eyes.”

She knew she might be next. A week ago, not wanting her little sister to be left alone, she packed one bag for both of them and they crossed the border to Iraqi Kurdistan. There, she was given a Kalashnikov and a uniform, and sent to the mountains for training while her sister was taken care of in a nearby village.

“Once we’ve finished training my mother and I will live together with her,” she said, as we sat on the jagged edge of a hill overlooking the plains below.

Her gun, which she still handled like it was liable to explode at any moment, rested against the plastic chair. She had, she said, been working on getting over her crippling fear of heights, which made training in the mountains difficult.

None of the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq say they want to launch an offensive on Iran itself — nor would they be able to.

They are, diplomats in the region say, far less of a serious threat to the regime’s survival than the thousands in the streets of Iranian cities.

For Ghaisary, it is a place to bide her time until she can return to Iran as a free woman. She still has her headscarf, but now she uses it to tie up her shoulder when it aches after weapons training.

“My sister needs a better future,” she said. “We are all suffering for a better future.”