Lessons from my friend’s execution in Iran’s Evin Prison

This year, more than ever, it’s impossible not to think about the execution of my best friend, Shirin Alamhooli, on May 9, 2010. I met Shirin in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison where I had been arrested and sentenced to death by hanging because of converting to Christianity, a “crime” the Islamic regime calls “apostasy” and which carries a death penalty. I was arrested in March 2009. Shirin had already been in prison for some time as a political Kurdish prisoner.

As a Christian, I had many people advocating for my freedom from the first day, and miraculously, I was released that November, and then came to America where I have become a proud U.S. citizen. Unfortunately, neither the world nor the terrorist Islamic regime cared about the life of a 28-year-old Kurdish woman. Shirin spent months being brutally tortured: repeatedly kicked in her stomach, bashing her head against the wall until she passed out, hanging her from the ceiling for hours on end, and beating her with a cable. They would only stop the torture for the Islamic prayer, to dedicate their savage acts to Allah. To satisfy him.

For months Shirin could not walk because the skin was torn from the bottom of her feet during the torture. Most of the time we would sit together and from a small window looked at the mountains beyond the walls of prison. She would sing a beautiful Kurdish song. She wished just to walk to the mountains freely, to fly away like a bird one more time.

We ate and talked together almost daily. She asked me to promise her that if I got released and she didn’t, to never stop fighting against the evil Islamic regime.

From the first day of my release, I started fighting for her release, even though I remained in mortal danger myself. I will never forget that horrific day I got a call from one of my cellmates still in prison: “Marzi, Shirin was executed,” then uncontrollable crying.

I felt like I had died. I hung up the phone, and for a few hours I felt as if all my internal organs had frozen. My whole body froze. I could not move, talk, or think.

Along with my roommate, Maryam, with whom I had also been arrested and sentenced to death and then released, we went outside the prison with Shirin’s brother, pleading just to get her body to bury her with dignity. The prison authorities lied. They told us her body had been sent to the cemetery. We rushed there, and they said they never received Shirin’s body. We returned to Evin Prison, begging them to give us her body. They refused, mocking us and any sense of justice. Today, nobody knows her burial place, if she even has one.

Even 15 years later, Shirin’s execution is one of the most painful things in my life. Growing up in the Islamic Republic, there were many. This year we must take a lesson from her murder, as the Islamic regime remains the greatest threat to the U.S., and the world. I am pained that leaders in my adopted country, which I love and am so grateful for, are being deceived by the notion that the ayatollahs can be rationalized with, that negotiation is anything more than a fool’s errand.

Indeed, the Iranian Islamic Republic cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Ever. Under any circumstances. Negotiation will only give them time to bury their centrifuge deeper and to hide the enriched uranium that has no civilian purpose. To be clear: If the Islamic Republic is able to acquire a nuclear weapon, they will use it. They will threaten the U.S. and Israel, the “Great Satan,” and the “Little Satan.” They will establish a nuclear umbrella that will let them blackmail and terrorize the rest of the world. There is no doubt about this, yet too many in the West don’t realize it.

While all this is horrible and threatening, and cause enough to do everything possible to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, no less horrible is the cancerous threat of spreading of their evil, extremist Islamic ideology – in the U.S. and the rest of the world. A nuclear bomb can kill millions instantaneously, but their dangerous ideology infects the whole world, spreading like a virus, and destroying and threatening millions from within over decades.

My friend Shirin is evidence of that. Arrested, tortured and executed, she was one of millions of Iranians who are victims of this extremist ideology. While no level of torture is out of bounds in the Islamic Republic, according to their strict following of Islamic laws, it’s not allowable to execute a virgin. It is a known practice for women like Shirin, and others, that before being executed they are brutally raped, taking the level of obscenity beyond imagination. That’s another example of why negotiations are futile, and they can never be trusted.

I was supposed to be one of its victims too. Outside Iran, through its terrorist proxies around the world including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Syrian Assad regime, Kataib Hezbollah and more, millions of others have been killed and maimed. Vast “no-go” neighborhoods of major European cities have become dangerous cesspools of Islamic hate.

The U.S. and the world must be saved from this threat. But there’s another reason as well. For more than 46 years, 85 million Iranians have been held captive, hostage to the ayatollahs, victims of their lies. They have been repeatedly let down by the West looking to make a deal. The worst of these examples was President Obama who, while I was in prison, not only abandoned the Iranian people during the Green Movement, but sent billions of dollars to Iran, thinking that he could pay off the ayatollahs. Still today, Iranians consider Obama as having betrayed them.

There have been reports of Islamic Republic, today, offering the U.S. billions in contracts to rebuild Iran, but that is nothing more than extortion. In fact, the U.S. can achieve unlimited potential and billions in contracts rebuilding Iran by doing everything possible to bring down the Islamic regime, making Iran and Iranians free, and eliminating the world’s greatest source of terror and war.

This is what needs to be done. While it cannot bring back Shirin, it will at least fulfill her wishes for a free Iran, and those of so many others who have suffered their brutality.