Iran’s True Colors: Exiles in Albania Recall Torture and Death inside Regime Prisons

‘I couldn’t believe my eyes — that a Muslim government was doing this to other Muslims.’

Tirana, Albania — It is the stuff of wild nightmares.

Despite the passage of three decades, for Iranian dissidents residing in a sprawling Albanian compound — far from their homeland — the torture and trauma of life inside an Iranian regime prison is still raw.

“I was a university student, almost seven months pregnant, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came,” Kobra Jowkar, now 59, says softly. “They raided our home at midnight and were very ruthless.”

That ruthlessness, she claims, included kicking her around like a soccer ball — and walking on her bulging belly. The worst would come later, behind bars in Tehran’s Evin Prison, when guards mauled her raw flesh with cables and sticks in front of her husband, knowing he could do nothing but watch, unable to protect his young wife and unborn first child.

Their crime? Suspicion of supporting the anti-Iranian regime Mojahedin-e-Khalq organization, better known by its abbreviation, MEK.

Jowkar’s husband was soon executed in the dilapidated prison courtyard. She gave birth inside a filthy, infested cell with the help of a fellow prisoner around her mother’s age.

The trauma she suffered is seemingly generational. “My son is a grown man now, an engineer, in Sweden, but he has had to undergo an operation for his pelvis, and one leg that was growing shorter than the other,” Jowkar explains, adjusting her neatly tied silk headscarf, shifting uncomfortably like a little girl herself.

Her baby boy was hardly the only child to grow up in the confines of political imprisonment in Iran during the tumultuous decade following the 1979 revolution. There were dozens of newborns, Jowkar says, cared for by malnourished mothers who could not produce milk. She took other infants to breastfeed them with whatever excess she could produce.

There are many stories like this. Some have been downplayed in press accounts over the years, in part due to the controversial reputation acquired by MEK — which remains a designated terrorist organization in Iran and was a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in the United States for 15 years. In 1997, the Clinton administration slapped the anti-Tehran group with the label, essentially freezing its assets and imposing travel bans on its members. This was widely considered a “goodwill gesture to Iran,” in which Tehran pledged to label the growing Lebanese militia Hezbollah with the same terrorist title on its turf, only that promise never materialized. The U.S. lifted the designation in 2012.

No matter what one thinks of the opposition outfit, its brutal treatment at the hands of the regime only adds to the pile of evidence of gross human-rights abuses inside the country that the Biden administration continues to try to negotiate with in order to revive a nuclear deal. The accounts of prisoners, now in exile, show the other side of a government whose representatives are typically seen in formal settings, alongside other dignitaries, presenting the cleanest image of the regime. Their conduct, even on social media, tends to shatter that image, including after the recent stabbing of author Salman Rushdie in New York. The accounts of these prisoners provide further illumination, and they should not be considered mere history.

Why many of the former detainees are in Albania today requires some additional backstory to understand:

Even during their time as part of an FTO, MEK’s members were deemed “protected persons” by Washington under the Geneva Convention, given that a large number of members — who would have faced death in Iran — fled to camps “Ashraf 1” and “Ashraf 2” in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was ousted during the U.S. invasion in 2003, the encampments came under the protection of the U.S. military, and American troops stood guard at the gates.

But after the protection designation expired in 2009, the U.S. handed full sovereignty to the Shia-dominated new Iraqi government. As a result, the MEK soon found itself in the line of fire by its new “protectors,” Iraqi forces, who were closely tied to Tehran. Bombs, missiles, and bullets rained down on the unarmed compounds from 2009 until 2016, in what the organization claims were assaults at the behest of Iran, with Iraqi complicity. Washington and the United Nations later embarked on finding a new base for the dissidents.

In 2017, the group built “Ashraf 3” in the quiet plains of the Albanian countryside with the welcoming of a Tirana leadership seeking to enhance ties with D.C.

But even that — some 2,200 miles from Tehran — has come under threat. Albanian police in 2018 unearthed what they believe was an “active terrorist cell” operated by a foreign wing of the IRGC, intent on attacking MEK members on Tehran’s orders. Authorities later said they had foiled several planned regime-linked assaults on the group by individuals claiming to be former members, subsequently straining diplomatic ties between Tirana and Tehran.

The illusion of serenity here, however, pervades. A long driveway leads to the storied bivouac on the sleepy outskirts of the capital. As the call to prayer rings out, the aroma of Persian cooking wafts through the streets. In honor of the dead, there are Iranian flags everywhere and memorials dotted with red poppies, as well as a large museum. The self-sustained camp resembles a small city, complete with dwellings for the several thousand residents, a gymnasium, bakeries, a mosque, and a grocery store.

Those dwelling here carry memories just as Kobra Jowkar does.

Hengameh Haj-Hassan, now 65, worked as a nurse in Tehran during the rise of the new religious regime. Although a devout Muslim and scarf-adorned herself, she recalls taking to the streets in protest of new hijab mandates in 1980.

“If a woman did not observe the veil, [authorities] splashed acid on them or cut their face with razors,” Hassan claims. “Some even received a thumbtack through the forehead to make sure the scarf was kept on their head.”

Soon, religious police wielding clubs also dragged the young medical professional into Evin, she says. Within the notorious gulag, still considered one of the worst in the world, guards took Hassan for interrogation, where the beatings immediately began.

“There were many women, and I saw they all had calves lacerated,” she recalls. “I thought they had been shot in the leg. But I later found out everyone had been flogged with cables. I couldn’t believe my eyes — that a Muslim government was doing this to other Muslims.”

Over the course of their long and arduous years behind bars, detainees describe being routinely transferred from prison to prison, from the horrifying to horrendous. But the most gut-wrenching moment buried deep in Hassan’s graveyard of memories was when a six-month-old baby was taken away for “medical help” and never returned.

“The mother was crying and asking for her child,” Hassan claims, her voice cracking. “It took them a long time, but eventually guards finally told her that her child had died, but nobody knew how.”

When the topic of sexual violence is brought up, a group of five female survivors huddled together in uniform-like blazers with knotted navy and red headscarves seem to drift into dream-like states. One victim slowly stands up and begins pacing aimlessly around the room, unable to stay still as the stories are brought back to life.

Hassan describes an incident in which a young woman threw herself out of the cell window after allegedly being raped. Another girl, in a fit of rage, threw her clothes against the wall, she recalls.

“Another time, 15 or 16 guards took one very beautiful girl into a room, and you could hear her screaming,” Hassan tells me, a hint of bitterness creeping into her gentle voice. “They wanted to make sure she didn’t die a virgin. So then she was executed.”

Often, torture victims recount the modes of torment they endured with a kind of distant stoicism, as if talking about a life that isn’t really theirs, perhaps to blunt the twinge of muscle memory. In Hassan’s case, she chronicles the brutality of being blindfolded and summoned inside “the cage” — a narrow enclosure just big enough for her body to curl into with her head hung low.

She says she remained there for eight months, allowed to shower only on rare occasions, and let out just long enough to pray.

The men also speak of horrors that are hard to imagine that humans could inflict on other humans.

“The first day I arrived, they shaved my head and eyebrows and forced me to eat them,” Mahmoud Royaei alleges.

Many point to one individual, Ebrahim Raisi — a top Iranian legal official in the 1980s and 1990s — as the architect of the “kangaroo courts,” which resulted in countless people being shot or being taken to the gallows within minutes. The inmates dubbed him “The Butcher.” The exact number of executions during the turbulent decade is hard to verify, but MEK officials estimate that the figure likely exceeds 30,000.

Raisi was elected last year as the new president of Iran in what many considered to be a farcical election process. Raisi reportedly was handpicked by Ayatollah Khamenei, and the move represented the regime’s shift to a more hard-line stance, months after President Biden came to power and discussions concerning the Iran nuclear deal resumed. Raisi is also the subject of a new lawsuit just filed by a related Iranian opposition group on behalf of victims who allege the now-president “personally ordered” their torture in 1988. The suit was filed in New York, where Raisi intends to attend the U.N. General Assembly next month, amid activist pressure to deny him a visa. The suit says that, should Raisi show up in the district, “he will be served” personally.

From Tehran’s perspective, the MEK remains a “terrorist cult.” The regime has long denied many of the claims alleged by the MEK, accusing its members of exaggerating, including about the number of prisoners executed.

According to a 2016 Human Rights Watch report, mass executions in 1988 betoken “a grim nadir in Iran’s recent human rights record,” as political prisoners were not even granted the “formalities of a show trial” and scores were “summarily executed” after having languished in jails for years. Other human-rights groups, such as Amnesty International, suggest that the number executed is closer to 5,000 but that the true numbers are not known.

The torture, both physical and psychological, is a constant in the accounts of those who lived through this period. I am told of the ominous “corridor of death,” a hall where prisoners lined up, bloodied and blindfolded, waiting for their execution orders. Akbar Samadi, now 55, believes he survived after a face-to-face encounter with Raisi only because his death-sentence mandate was left on the table, and his name was never called.

“Every half an hour, they would call a group of names and take them. One time, they read a name, and the guard became very anxious because the person did not answer, and they realized they had executed a person with a similar name by mistake,” Samadi says. “Because my name wasn’t there, and they did not know what to do with me, I was sent to solitary confinement instead.”

Asghar Mehdizadeh claims to be one of the few known survivors to have passed through the corridor, and then the “final will and letter-writing room,” before being dragged to the dark gallows called “the final stage” as a means of psychological suffering. Bloated corpses piled up on the floor, and twelve blindfolded men waited with nooses around their necks, he tells me.

“They started chanting and were kicking the chairs themselves,” Mehdizadeh whispers, emphasizing that the men would not allow the guards to determine the timing of the final moment on earth. “I started feeling dizzy, and I fainted.”

Mehdizadeh claims he was yanked out, having been shown the room as a warning.

While the MEK continues to be demonized by Tehran, the group makes no effort to hide its ultimate intention: to overthrow the regime in Iran. Day and night, women and men, young and old, move about carrying clipboards and backpacks, maneuvering from meeting to meeting. From their vantage point, there is no room for reform.

“It is a war over human dignity,” asserts another member, Hossein Farsi. “When I was released, I could not convince myself to go and have an ordinary life.”

Over the years, the MEK has had a mixed relationship with Washington officials and think tanks. The organization gained some footing under the Trump administration, given the administration’s push to isolate Tehran from the international playing field through a “maximum pressure” campaign with support from the likes of John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani. With Iran talks ongoing under the Biden White House, the MEK appears to have less pull in the current administration, and some think-tank critics maintain the outfit has limited ability to take down the Tehran government and liken its approach to a “cult.”

The group sharply rejects such a characterization when I raise it, insisting it has “every intention to return to Iran triumphantly,” relying heavily on its network in Iran. The MEK is often perceived to have little support within the country, but its devout members maintain this is another Tehran talking point. Indeed, a network of young activists affiliated with the group, calling itself “Resistance Units,” has taken increasingly daring swipes against state symbols and targets, posting the videos of those activities online.

While members say their revolution is nonviolent and could happen at any time, they consider the “small steps” inside their country to be moral victories.

Earlier this year, the regime unveiled a giant fiberglass statue days after the second anniversary of the death of Qasem Soleimani, the shadowy Iranian spymaster bombed in Baghdad on the orders of then-president Donald Trump. Hours after it was erected in the Iranian city of Shahrekord, mysterious assailants torched the monument to the ground.

“These acts are important,” one MEK member says with a smile. “People are no longer afraid.”