A woman who endured torture under the Islamic Republic argues that the killing of Khamenei and the destruction wrought on Iranian civilians only deepens injustice — and that Iran's political future must be determined by Iranians alone.
As US and Israeli airstrikes continue to pound Iran, one of the conflict's most striking voices comes not from a government briefing room or a military headquarters, but from a woman who survived arrest, imprisonment and torture inside Evin Prison under the Islamic Republic. Writing in The New Arab, Nasrin Parvaz — a torture survivor of Khomeini's regime and a long-standing human rights advocate — offers a searing rebuke of the war, challenging both the Islamic Republic and the foreign powers now bombing her country of origin.
Parvaz does not mourn Ayatollah Khamenei. She acknowledges that many Iranians, herself included, experienced something close to relief at his death — a reaction that may appear jarring to outside observers, but which she says is entirely comprehensible given decades of imprisonment, torture, executions and systematic suppression of dissent carried out under his rule. Yet she is categorical that his killing by foreign military force is not justice. What she and countless other survivors wanted, she writes in The New Arab, was to see Khamenei and those around him face accountability in a courtroom — confronted by the families of those whose lives he helped destroy — not eliminated by Israeli missiles.
The destruction of civilian life is at the centre of Parvaz's indictment of the campaign. She draws particular attention to the 28 February airstrike on a girls' elementary school in Minab — an incident that, despite local reports placing scores of children among the dead and wounded, has received scant sustained coverage in Western media. Strikes near medical facilities in Tehran followed days later. For people still inside Iran, she argues, these incidents are coalescing into a conviction that civilian life itself has become a target.
Among Parvaz's most urgent warning is the transfer of political prisoners away from Evin Prison. For former detainees with direct experience of how the Islamic Republic behaves under existential pressure, this is a deeply familiar and terrifying signal. She invokes two historical precedents: the quiet executions of prisoners at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, and the mass killings of more than 5,000 political detainees in 1988 following summary proceedings, with victims buried in unmarked graves and families left permanently without answers. She fears that the current conflict is creating identical conditions — a moment when prisoners can be made to disappear without witnesses or accountability, while the world's attention is fixed elsewhere.
On the question of Iran's political future, Parvaz is unequivocal: it cannot be designed in Washington or Tel Aviv. She dismisses the prospect of exiled strongmen or armed factions being installed as Western-backed alternatives, pointing to the wreckage left by comparable interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran, she insists, requires a future shaped by its own people — not by bombs overhead or by a leadership figure selected or imposed by foreign governments.
Parvaz closes her essay with a direct appeal to citizens in countries like Britain, whose governments are enabling the war with tax revenues and diplomatic cover. Silence, she cautions, functions as consent. Stopping the war, she concludes, is not solely a matter of justice for Iranians — it is a condition for the safety of everyone in an increasingly destabilised region.
Graphic: Perplexity