Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — On the third day of the Iran war, air strikes destroyed the detention centre in western Iran where Wyra Hassan was tortured.

For 102 days, agents of Iran’s state security apparatus held Hassan at the building in Sanandaj.

So when he heard it had been razed, he was glad.

Now he’s hoping the Islamic regime that persecuted him for expressing his opinions will soon be gone too.

But with the war launched by the U.S. and Israel into its third week, that remains an uncertain outcome of the conflict, which the Trump administration said on Sunday would “end in the next few weeks.”

While Iran’s military has suffered significant losses since the attacks began on Feb. 28, hardline clerics and politicians still control the country.

Should they remain in power, Iran will be the equivalent of a car that needed a new engine but only got a tire change, according to Hassan.

“If the war ends without removing the regime, it will be a disaster for the Iranian people,” he told Global News in an interview in the book shop he now runs in Sulaymaniyah.

Born three years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought a theocracy to power, Hassan is one of many Iranians who have experienced the brutality the state uses to crush dissent.

A journalist and member of the country’s persecuted Kurdish minority, he was arrested in 2006, accused of organizing an International Women’s Day demonstration.

When the police were done torturing him, they told him he would be released but that he had to leave Sanandaj and was forbidden from writing.

Unable to accept such shackles, he escaped to Sulaymaniyah, a city ringed by mountains in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, just 100 kilometres from the Iran border.

He became the director of the Jamal Erfan Cultural Foundation, a hangout for book lovers that was built on the site of one of Saddam Hussein’s torture centres.

Once a place where Iraq’s late dictator forcibly stifled ideas and freedoms, it is now dedicated to the free flow of ideas.

Many of the books are in the Kurdish language, which has been suppressed in Iran as part of an effort to eliminate the minority’s distinct identity.

Hassan said Iran’s response to the mass protests that erupted in January, and the war that began the following month, have shown the true face of the Iranian regime.

Pro-regime forces quashed the uprising by opening fire on demonstrators, killing thousands.

Were the regime to emerge from the war still in government, conditions for activists will only deteriorate, Hassan said.

“We know if the regime is allowed to rebuild and get its strength back, they will crack down worse than ever,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched hundreds of missiles and drones at neighboring countries.

Unless it falls, the regime will continue to pose a threat to not only Iranians but the entire region as well, Hassan said.

He hopes that won’t happen.

He wants to return to Sanandaj to open another book centre, this one at the site of the detention facility where he was once held.

“I want to go back there and establish the same library in the same place that I was tortured,” he said.

2:30
Iranian protester’s daring video condemning regime was ‘price of freedom’

Three hours away in Erbil, another refugee forced to flee Iran for expressing his views sits in a hotel lounge streaming the Instagram video that got him in trouble.

In the video, Ali Rezaei Majd began by introducing himself as a young person “living under fear and oppression every single day.”

Iranians want freedom and a better future, he said before appealing to the United States to “stand with the people of Iran, help us bring back light to our country before it’s too late.”

Posted on Jan. 6, the video ended the life he had known.

When it went viral amid growing protests against Iran’s regime, he heard from friends that security officers were looking for him.

He packed a bag and fled to Iraq.

Two months later, Majd acknowledged in an interview with Global News that he probably hadn’t given enough thought to the consequences of his words.

He also seemed incredulous at what his country had become: a place that would not even indulge a heartfelt video lasting less than two minutes.

Majd said he joined the opposition movement after struggling with authorities over his Christian faith and his business, a gym in Dorud, an industrial city in western Iran.

But it was U.S. President Donald Trump who tipped the balance, he said.

On Jan. 2, Trump posted on social media that if Iran killed protesters, the U.S. would “come to their rescue,” writing “we are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Encouraged by the president’s words, Majd stood on the railroad tracks in Dorud and recorded two videos — one in Persian, another in English.

Global News verified the videos by geolocating them to a spot near the Dorud train station, where Majd said a friend helped him make the recordings.

“Today I am growing up in darkness,” he said in the video. “Our voices are silenced, our dreams are being destroyed, and our people are suffering, not because we did something wrong but because we want to live free.”

He said Iran was not America’s enemy and that if the U.S. helped Iranians regain their freedom, they would never stop repaying the debt.

“Please don’t forget us. Stand with the people of Iran.”

As the video racked up more than 800,000 likes, Majd got word from friends that security agents were asking about him. Fearing he was about to be arrested, he went into hiding, he said.

As he made his way to the border, he said he witnessed the violent crackdown on demonstrators on Jan. 8 and 9, and eventually found a group of smugglers who helped him cross to Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah.

From his current refuge in Erbil, he has followed the war to see if it will mark the exit of the government he believes Iranians should have tossed out long ago.

But while Trump initially said the regime had to go, and that he wanted a say in selecting its next leader, he has since appeared to backed off from those statements.

Instead, the Trump administration seems to have shifted the goal of the war to degrading the nuclear, military and missile threats posed by Iran.

Majd said he was unsure Iranians would be able to easily take back their country. Even in its weakened state, the regime shows no limits when its feels threatened, he said.

“I think they will fight to the death and we have to be prepared,” he said.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca