Introducing Mira Nassiri, Canadian Iranian Dissident

Posted by Geoffrey Clarfield

Mira Nassiri was in Israel last week. She is an Iranian-born Canadian dissident who shows how members of the Iranian dictatorship prosper in Canada and censor both Iranian and expatriate communities advocating for democracy and a Persian Israeli alliance. She is a young hero deserving of a wide audience. Today’s Canadian Government is the “bad guy” in this story of bravery and perseverance.

“I was 15 when I started blogging with a fake name, Sarah Shams,” she told The Jerusalem Post last week while visiting Israel. “Sarah was my aunt’s name, and Shams was an Arab lady who sang on TV.

Mira Nassiri was 15 years old when she began writing under a name that was not her own. To express her true thoughts freely, she needed to adopt a pseudonym and a surrogate character. That character, Iranian blogger Sarah Shams, existed only online. There was no record of her in school, nor any official trace of a person by that name, but the blog posts were real, and so were the ideas that Nassiri was trying to put across.

The Iranian system, she wrote, could not be fixed through reform. Elections were more or less a farce, with only those permitted by the Supreme Leader allowed to take part, and the space for dissent was narrowing.Nassiri grew up in Isfahan, in a country where political discussion was carefully monitored, and the internet, at that point, still offered some space. It was not open, but it was open enough.At first, the blog was cautious, but over time, it became more direct. Nassiri wrote about politics, about power, and about what she saw as a widening gap between what people were told and what they were actually living inside the Islamic Republic, and from the beginning, she said, she rejected the idea that Iran’s political system could be changed through elections.“I tried to let people know that no matter how many elections you contribute to, the Islamic regime system is not going to change,” she said. “And the new president will be the new puppet of the Islamic regime.”

For a while, the fake name protected her. She would change the blog’s address when it was filtered, moving from one version of “Sarah Shams” to another so readers could keep finding it. But the blog began to attract attention from people within the system.

“I received messages from people who were claiming that they are working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), but they are not with them,” she said. “They were forced to work with the IRGC because they were sent to military service.”

One of them, she said, sent her confidential letters from a military base in southeastern Iran. The letters contained orders relating to the torture of Baloch people suspected of links to Jundallah.

“It shocked me because this person trusted me with his life,” she said.

She published the material, and then the warnings began to come, stating that the authorities were doing their utmost to find out who “Sarah Shams” was.

By 2009, Nassiri was still a high school student, but she was already joining university students in protests in Isfahan. . . It was at one of these protests that Nassiri was first arrested.

That night, she said, BBC Persian reported that the protest in Isfahan had begun after a girl was struck by security forces.

“Me and my mom were watching it,” she said. “And my dad was like, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible. I hope nothing happens to this girl.’ And me and my mom, we knew that it started with me.”

A girl living in the same student residence recognized Nassiri and reported her. It was the principal, she recalled, who warned her to leave immediately, as the authorities closed in from all sides.

While she was running, a friend gave her a phone. Somehow, she said, the authorities found the number.

“They called that phone,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You’re coming to the Islamic Revolutionary Court tomorrow, 7 a.m., or we’re going to come and get you.’”

She ran again and for a month and a half, was on the move, with even her family unaware of her whereabouts. Eventually, a contact warned her to get out of Iran or face either execution or a long jail sentence.

Friends arranged her transfer to Kurdistan. She stayed there for 10 days before crossing the border into Turkey. . . but eventually, Nassiri reached Van, the refugee system, and later Canada.

Canada offered safety, but Nassiri said it also revealed a different face of the Islamic Republic’s reach, when she began to discover “that many of the people who are related to the Islamic regime are actually residing in Canada.”

In cities like Vancouver, she saw members of the Iranian diaspora living stable, often comfortable lives, with businesses, properties, and access to systems far removed from conditions inside Iran.

She began looking into institutions and networks she believed were connected to Tehran, and protesting outside the Iranian embassy in Ottawa.

“From the first week, I started going, driving up to Ottawa every Thursday and having a protest in front of the embassy, requesting the Canadian government to shut down the spy house of the Islamic regime.”

“One of the people who was working at the embassy came out threatening us, threatening us that they were going to go after our families,” she said.

Nassiri’s work as an independent investigative journalist later focused on relatives of senior Iranian officials in Canada, including members of the Larijani family. . . “When I realized that they are still in Canada, I started doing more research to find out the chain,” she said. “Who else?”

For Nassiri, her visits to Israel brought an emotional response from Iranians watching from afar.

“I’m receiving a lot of messages from people,” she said. Hundreds of messages from people saying, “Please tell them not to stop. Don’t take away the hope from us.”

She also said many Iranians see Israel not as an enemy, but as a country confronting the regime that has oppressed them, and thanked Israelis for what she described as solidarity with the Iranian people.

For Nassiri, her journey has taken her from a teenage blogger hiding under a pseudonym in Isfahan to thousands of miles away on Canada’s Pacific coast – but the target has always been the same. To investigate and publicize the crimes of those connected to the Islamic Republic regime.

As she told the Post defiantly, “I’m not going to stop.”