A few hours after I was born, my mother and I were taken back to prison. It was September 1983, four years after the Iranian revolution and three years into a war with Iraq that the Islamic Republic was using to tighten its machinery of repression. My mother was bleeding heavily from a tear sustained during labor, but the Sister – the prison guards went by ‘Sister’ and ‘Brother’ – ignored the doctor’s plea for her to remain in hospital overnight.

Blindfolded, handcuffed, barely able to stand: she could not possibly carry me. It was the Sister who held me in her arms as we were driven through rush-hour traffic back to Evin, a penitentiary complex that sits in the idyllic foothills of the Alborz Mountains in north Tehran. We arrived in the afternoon. As the Sister opened the door, my mother’s cellmates rushed forward, dressed in their best, as if it were Nowruz. The floor of the overcrowded cell had been swept; a bouquet of early autumn leaves shined in an aluminum jar. The women clapped and sang as we entered. The Sister shouted for silence, but they ignored her: laughing, crying, ululating, passing me from one pair of arms to another.

The tender welcome startled my mother, a leftist serving a two-year sentence for political activism. Most days, her cellmates could hardly stand one another and barely spoke at all. They were among the tens of thousands of activists – ranging from socialists and communists to Islamist-Marxists – who the Islamic Republic had imprisoned. Many had helped bring down the Western-backed Shah, only to find themselves, not long after, behind another set of walls. Each came from a different camp; each held the others, to some degree, responsible for a revolution gone astray and for the tyranny that followed. And yet, on that day, they set aside their differences and gathered around something more immediate: a new life.

The fall of the monarchy in 1979 did not end dictatorship; it transformed it. King became Supreme Leader; SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, gave way to the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia. The jails filled again.

Evin Prison spanned both eras. Constructed in 1971 by the Shah as a high-security detention centre for dissidents, it served that same purpose during the revolution and its long, violent aftermaths. Many Iranians jokingly refer to it as the University of Evin, for the many intellectuals, writers, teachers, students, poets, activists and artists who have passed through its bounds. In our collective consciousness, Evin is not only a notorious site of repression but also, above all, a place of resilience, where a language of resistance is articulated and passed down from one generation to the next.

Today, that legacy persists, though under the harshest conditions. Evin was first bombed in June 2025, during the Twelve Day War, when Israeli missiles killed not only staff and guards but also prisoners, visiting relatives, social workers and a five-year-old child. It was hit again during the 2026 US-Israeli attacks, when nearby blasts tore through its wards. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic has launched its own war on prisoners. Conditions inside Evin, like in many jails across the country, are catastrophic: overcrowded, filthy, and infested with insects. Food and water are scarce, electricity and hot water are frequently shut off, and medical care is denied.

This is all part of a wider crackdown. The state’s endurance through the US-Israeli assault has left it both emboldened and paranoid – a lethal combination for a dictatorship rejected by much of its citizens. In the last three months alone, thousands have been arrested under the pretext of national security. Sham trials are held behind closed doors. Detainees are charged without evidence or independent legal counsel, and then prosecuted almost entirely on the basis of coerced confessions. They are paraded on national television, bruises still visible on their faces, to “confess” to “collaborating with the enemy” and “waging war against God”. Nearly every day brings news of another protester or dissident sent to the gallows. In a familiar pattern, Kurds, Baloch, Azeris, Lurs, Gilaks and other ethnic minorities have been disproportionately targeted.

A ceasefire, of a kind, between the US, Israel and Iran has been in place for weeks; the world’s attention is already drifting elsewhere. But there is another war still being waged, by the Islamic Republic against activists, dissidents and political prisoners. The US-Israeli attacks, ostensibly undertaken in the name of “freeing” the Iranian people, have only exposed them to deeper repression, intensified fear and surveillance – and set back decades of collective struggle. If Iran’s internal war remains largely hidden, that is because the state has imposed its longest, most severe information blackout.

Modern Iranian history has seldom been free of repression. In 1988, under the shadow of the war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic killed thousands of political prisoners in a single summer. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves. My uncle, Mohsen Delijani – and the fathers and uncles of many I grew up with – were among the victims.

Those mass executions marked a turning point in post-revolutionary Iran, consolidating a power structure rooted in purges and institutionalised violence against civilian protest. The Islamic Republic has since silenced every voice that rose against it. It has imprisoned and executed, tortured and assassinated; expelled dissenters from universities, barred them from work, and driven them out of public life – or out of the country, as it did to my family in 1996.

And yet, time and again, people have taken to the streets to insist that the dictator must go. From the 1990s student revolts, to the 2009 Green Movement, to the nationwide strikes of 2018. From Bloody November 2019 – when state forces killed more than 1,500 protesters – to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, to the mass protests of January 2026, when they slaughtered thousands in just two days. The spark for each uprising may differ – press freedom, corruption and inflation, the policing of women’s bodies, stolen elections, rising prices – but beneath them runs the same current.

These mass uprisings are not merely a spontaneous outpouring of rage. Behind every act of popular rebellion, there is the persistent, unglamorous labor of organisers and dissidents, who have expanded the boundaries of what could be said, imagined, demanded and made possible. They have pursued change both through ever-narrowing legal openings – campaigning for reformist candidates; running student groups, NGOs and labor unions; writing in reformists newspapers and signing petitions to the Supreme Leader – and outside those boundaries: through strikes and protests, boycotts and sit-ins, documenting abuses, and defending political prisoners and their families.

Either way they faced the same brutal reprisals. The Islamic Republic has aimed not only to crush them but to turn them into examples – into warnings that spread beyond prison walls, making the whole of society feel the cost of dissent.

Outside of Iran, many of these activists and dissidents remain unknown. The state has worked relentlessly to erase them. Yet forced invisibility is not the same as absence. I want to give names and faces to some of these courageous, unyielding women and men. They are not, as they are sometimes made out to be in the West, a monolithic opposition. Like the society of which they are a part, they represent a plurality of political traditions, beliefs and strategies of resistance. While they often stand together, they do not necessarily agree on everything, including the implications of the US-Israeli attacks, which occurred at a moment when Iranian society was reeling from extreme poverty, corruption and repression.

These activists are the driving force behind the ongoing democratic struggle in Iran. No future liberation is possible without them. True change will not be imposed from the outside – through bombs or self-appointed saviours or descendants of kings – but will emerge from their lived, sustained labor.

The Nobel Committee conferred its 2023 peace prize to Narges Mohammadi. Perhaps the most prominent human rights defender in Iran, she helped found the Committee for the Defense of Free and Fair Elections and the Committee for Abolishing the Death Penalty for Children, among other organisations. Mohammadi has been arrested thirteen times and spent more than a decade in prison. “The silence was deathly,” she writes of solitary confinement in White Torture. “Sometimes I wished the door before me were just a wall, for a wall holds no promise.” Though her husband and children live in exile, she has refused to leave Iran.

Mohammadi was arrested most recently in December 2025 – at the memorial of another slain human rights lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi – and sentenced to seven years on charges of “assembly” and “propaganda”. Denied medical care for weeks after suffering from severe cardiac complications, she has temporarily returned home under close medical observation. Her husband has publicly stated that the US-Israeli attacks have negatively impacted Mohammadi. “This war is not bringing democracy to Iran,” he said. “It is worsening the situation.”

In 2018, 24-year-old journalist and workers’ rights activist Sepideh Qoliyan was arrested for reporting on labor protests; she endured thirty days of torture alongside the trade unionist Esmail Bakhshi. Qoliyan was beaten with cables, sexually threatened, and forced to confess on television to having connections both with the Trump administration and with exiled communist groups.

Upon her release, she spoke publicly of her imprisonment and torture – and was later sentenced to five more years in retaliation. The farce was repeated twice again. In March 2023, she was caught in a viral video chanting anti-regime slogans while leaving the prison grounds – and sent back inside a few hours later. After another release, she was arrested alongside Mohammadi at Alikordi’s memorial and has since been held incommunicado in Vakilabad prison in Mashhad. “Entire hallways are filled with young boys and girls and the roars of torturers,” she wrote in a letter 2023 letter from Evin. “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi [Woman, Life, Freedom] is not merely a slogan. It is an open wound, a scar etched into this land that, despite its pain, continuously gives birth to life.”

Esmail Bakhshi first came to national attention in 2018, when he was arrested for leading major strikes at the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company, demanding unpaid wages and better working conditions. Upon his release, he challenged the Intelligence Minister, Mahmoud Alavi, to a televised debate. “Today almost two months after those difficult days, I still feel pain in my broken ribs, kidneys, left ear and testicles,” he wrote on his Instagram account. “I have a question for His Excellency the Intelligence Minister, who happens to be a religious cleric: From an ethical and humanitarian perspective, what is Islam’s ruling on torturing a detainee?” Bakhshi has continued his labor organizing, even as he constantly harassed and shunted in and out of prison. On 3 April he wrote: “The people of Iran do not cheer for warmongers.”

A physician, teacher, and educational publisher, Farhad Meysami was involved in a series of 2018 protests against compulsory hijab. For this he was arrested at his personal library and charged with acting against national security. Prosecutors cited buttons that had “I oppose compulsory hijab” printed on them in Farsi. Imprisoned in Evin, he launched two hunger strikes: first, to protest his own targeting, and second, for almost a year, in solidarity with Woman, Life, Freedom. After images of his emaciated body spread widely, he was offered release on bail – and refused. He was ultimately freed without posting the bail fee. In the aftermath of the January 2026 massacre, he wrote: “A society that only consumes its grief will implode. But a society that transforms grief into narrative and narrative into human connection will keep on living.”

Journalists Elaheh Mohammadi and Niloufar Hamedi were arrested for reporting on the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman killed by the morality police in 2022 for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely. Among the first to cover Amini’s persecution for the reformist daily Shargh, they published the now-iconic photo of Amini’s parents embracing upon learning of their daughter’s death. The journalists later travelled to Amini’s hometown in Kurdistan to cover the funeral that became the foundational uprising for Woman, Life, Freedom.

Both were sentenced to twelve years for being “foreign agents” engaged in “multi-dimensional wars” organized by “Western and Zionist intelligence agencies”. “I wanted to remain a journalist, even inside Evin Prison,” Elaheh Mohammadi wrote in June 2023 in Hammihan. “Because I believed then, and still believe, that the pen is our weapon, our refuge and our voice.” A year later, all charges were dropped and they were both released on bail. During the January 2026 uprising, judicial agents raided Elaheh Mohammadi’s home and confiscated her electronic devices.

Nasrin Sotoudeh has spent her life defending political prisoners, juveniles facing execution, and abused women and children. Ahead of the disputed 2009 presidential elections, she co-founded the Coalition of Women’s Rights movement, to bring women’s demands into the national political debate. During the crackdown that followed, she represented opposition activists and reformist politicians. For this work, she has herself been repeatedly arrested and spent decades in jail. In March 2019, she received a sentence totaling more than 38 years, on charges ranging from “propaganda against the state” to “encouraging corruption and prostitution” – the latter for appearing without a hijab and defending women who did the same. Her husband, Reza Khandan, also a human rights defender, has been detained since December 2024 for helping design and distribute badges reading “I oppose compulsory hijab.”

Sotoudeh gave an interview after the January massacres, calling for “a collective humanitarian intervention.” “What we are witnessing now is not the power of law, but the law of power,” she said. “When a society feels completely powerless against tyranny, it begins to look outward”. She was arrested and disappeared into detention for weeks before resurfacing under close medical supervision in a Tehran hospital.

Zia Nabavi was barred from continuing his studies because of his political activities. He co-founded the Council to Defend the Right to Education in response. After taking part in the 2009 Green Revolution protests, he was arrested and charged with offenses ranging from “propaganda against the system” to “enmity against God”, before receiving a ten-year sentence on the reduced charge of “creating unease in the public mind”. At Evin and other prisons, he endured prolonged solitary confinement and torture.

While behind bars, Nabavi took the doctoral entrance examination and ranked second nationally. He reflected on his imprisonment in his master’s thesis in sociology, The Phenomenology of the Prison Experience. “Contrary to popular belief,” he wrote, “prison is not a place without any sign of life, but a unique and different quality of life flows there that cannot be understood through the political lens through which we have chosen to view it.”

He spoke out against both the US-Israeli war on Iran and the state’s repression, refusing the false choice between foreign violence and domestic tyranny. “Tyranny, war, sanctions, executions, and imprisonment – all of these are tools for the destruction of Iran and the annihilation of its people’s lives,” he wrote. “The arrival of one does not mean the departure of another, and the hostilities between their agents do not change their ultimate function, which is against life itself.”

When speaking of the month she kept me in her Evin prison cell, my mother always said: “You did not have one mother, you had forty.” Some tore their own clothes to make garments for me. Others gave up their precious shower time so she could wash me. Others still took turns keeping watch at night, as my mother feared that, given the overcrowding and mental stress, a prisoner might hurt me in the dark.

I am here today, writing this essay, because so many women, imprisoned for dreaming of a different world, once also fought to keep me, a newborn, alive among them. That, in one way or another, is what every activist mentioned here – and countless others whose names have not appeared – has done across the last half century in Iran: kept alive a struggle that so often feels at the verge of extinction.