SULAIMANIA, Iraq – On the third day of the Iran-Iran war, airstrikes destroyed the detention center in western Iran where Vaira Hassan was tortured.
For 102 days, agents of Iran’s state security apparatus held Hassan in a building in Sanandaj.
So he was happy when he heard that it was demolished.
Now they are hoping that the Islamic regime that persecuted them for expressing their views will soon go away.
But with the war between the US and Israel entering its third week, it 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 February 28, hardline clerics and politicians still control the country.
If he were to stay in power, Iran would be the equivalent of a car that needs a new engine but only gets 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 at the bookstore he now runs in Sulaimaniyah.
Born three years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought the theocracy to power, Hassan is one of many Iranians who have experienced the brutality the state uses to suppress dissent.
A journalist and member of the country’s persecuted Kurdish minority, he was arrested in 2006 for organizing a demonstration to mark International Women’s Day.
When the police finished torturing him, they said they would release him but he had to leave Sanandaj and was banned from writing.
Unable to accept such shackles, he escaped to Sulaymaniyah, a city surrounded by mountains in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, just 100 kilometers from the Iranian border.
He became the director of the Jamal Erfan Cultural Foundation, a book lovers’ hangout built on the site of Saddam Hussein’s torture center.
Once a place where ideas and freedoms were forcibly suppressed by Iraq’s late dictator, it is now dedicated to the free flow of ideas.
Many of the books are in the Kurdish language, which is suppressed in Iran as part of efforts to eliminate the minority’s distinctive identity.
Hassan said Iran’s response to the mass protests that erupted in January and the war that began the following month showed the true face of the Iranian regime.
Pro-regime forces opened fire on protesters, quashing the uprising that killed thousands.
If the administration still emerges from war in the government, the conditions of workers will worsen, Hassan said.
“If the regime is allowed to rebuild and regain its power, 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 poses a threat not only to Iranians but to the entire region, Hassan said.
He hopes that won’t happen.
He wants to return to Sanandaj and open another book center, which is where he was once imprisoned.
“I want to go back there and set up the same library in the same place where I was tortured,” he said.
Wanted for Instagram post
Three hours away in Erbil, another refugee forced to flee Iran for expressing his views sat in a hotel lounge and streamed an Instagram video that landed him in trouble.
In the video, Ali Rezai Majd begins by introducing himself as a young man “living in fear and oppression every 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 the light back to our country before it’s too late.”
The video, posted on January 6, ended life as he knew it.
When it went viral amid growing protests against Iran’s regime, he heard from friends that security officials were looking for him.
He packed a bag and fled to Iraq.
Ali Rezaei Majd posted this Instagram video recorded in Dorud, Iran on January 6, 2026.
Two months later, Majd admitted in an interview with Global News that he had not thought enough about the implications of his words.
He was incredulous about what his country had become: a place where not even a heartfelt video of less than two minutes could be made.
Majd said he joined the opposition movement after fighting with authorities over his Christian faith and his business at a gym in Dorud, an industrial city in western Iran.
But US President Donald Trump showed balance, he said.
On January 2, Trump wrote on social media that if Iran kills protesters, the US will “come to their rescue,” adding that “we’re locked and loaded and ready to go.”
Encouraged by the president’s words, Majd stood on the train tracks in Dorud and recorded two videos – one in Persian, the other in English.
Global News verified the videos by geolocating them to a location near the Dorud train station, where a friend helped make the recordings, Majd said.
“Today I’m growing up in the dark,” he said in the video. “Our voices are silenced, our dreams are being destroyed and our people are suffering, not because we have done anything wrong but because we want to live free.”
Iran is not America’s enemy and if the US helps Iranians regain their freedom, they will never stop repaying the debt, he said.
“Please don’t forget us. Stand with the Iranian people.”
As the video gained more than 800,000 likes, Majd received word from a friend that security agents were asking about him. He said he was hiding because he was afraid of being arrested.
As he made his way to the border, he said he witnessed a violent crackdown on protesters on January 8 and 9 and eventually found a group of smugglers who helped him cross into Sulaimaniyah, Iraq.
From his current refuge in Erbil, he has followed the war to see if it marks the departure of a government he believes Iranians should have ousted long ago.
But while Trump initially said he wanted the administration to go and have a say in choosing its next leader, he has since backtracked on those statements.
Instead, the Trump administration appears to downplay the nuclear, military and missile threats posed by Iran as a war target.
Majd said he was not sure the Iranians would be able to take back their country easily. Even in its weakest state, the administration shows no restraint when it feels threatened, he said.
“I think they will fight to the death and we have to be ready,” he said.
Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca
(tags to translate)Iran
