Pakhshan Azizi, sentenced to death, wrote that her crime is being Kurdish and being a woman.
Iran’s Supreme Court Branch 9, by denying her lawyer’s request for a retrial on February 6, has paved the way for this most brave and compassionate woman to be hanged at any moment.
Pakhshan is a social worker who devoted more than ten years of her life to voluntary work serving refugee camps in Kurdish areas of Iraq and then Syria, where people suffered horrific attacks from both ISIS on one side and the Turkish government on the other. International organizations working in the area, like the Red Crescent, have sent letters verifying that her activity was voluntary social work, not militancy of any kind.
But at her family home in Iran in 2023, she was violently arrested, along with her family, and subjected to five months of solitary confinement and torture, which included numerous mock executions and being buried 10 meters underground, then dragged back out. In spite of this, she refused to confess to the lies her interrogators insisted on, that she was a member of a Kurdish opposition group with an armed wing, that she had returned to Iran during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022 in order to destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran in service of some foreign power.
In July 2024, she was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial which presented no proof whatsoever that she committed armed rebellion against the state (“Baghi”), nor of supposed membership in opposition parties with an armed wing. Her lawyer, Amir Raesian, pointed out bitingly that her spurious trial convicted her of membership in both the PJAK and Democratic parties, which are in opposition to each other: “How is it possible for her to be a member of both groups at the same time? The question of which rebel group our client was a member of for which the death sentence was issued has not been answered.” In early January 2025, the Iranian Supreme Court denied her appeal, and now has refused a request for retrial based on the blatant and well-documented injustices in the first trial. Mr. Raesian will file for a new trial, but, he said, “there is a risk of the sentence being executed at any moment.”
In her July 2024 letter from Evin Prison, Pakhshan wrote about experiencing oppression all her life, and how that has steeled her, describing herself in the third person.
[The interrogator’s] roar becomes a shout: ‘Why do you conceal the truth?!’
You have concealed the most profound social truth: the essence of womanhood, her identity, her Kurdishness, her life, and her freedom…
The first corpse she saw was Khadija, whose hands were tied and who was burned by her husband and brother. She vowed never to stop defending women’s rights. Thousands of women and children saw men beheaded before their eyes during ISIS attacks, and they were taken captive and raped. The culture of rape inflicted upon women, mothers holding their infants as their milk dried up, and barefoot children, hundreds of whom were laid chest to chest on the rocks of Shengal… Elsewhere, in Kobani and other places, dozens of women and children were burned and torn apart by Turkish airstrikes in Rojava [Kurdish region in Syria], their bodies dismembered by ISIS attacks…
All her activities and efforts have been in the aim of serving and fulfilling her historical duty towards her lived experiences and historical oppressions…
I am her. She is me. I am a mere drop in the ocean. You are the ocean. Our flow is inevitable. We are unconcealed.
Pakhshan Azizi
July 2024, Evin Prison
Don’t let this precious voice be silenced. Don’t allow the mullah regime to use their execution spree to try to cow the tens of thousands of women who threw off their compulsory hijab, and the tens of thousands of men who supported them, taking the streets heroically for five months in the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising.
