How two teens became the faces of Iran’s protests
As unrest erupted across Iran calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule last month, with young women in big cities and small towns tossing their headscarves onto bonfires to chants of “Women, Life, Freedom,” two teenage girls left their homes to join the protesters.
It was the last time their relatives would see them alive. One family searched frantically for their daughter for 10 days, posting desperate appeals for information on social media; the other found out the fate of their daughter within hours of her disappearance.
But the grim result was the same. The missing teenagers had been killed by the security forces, their families and human rights groups said. One girl’s skull was smashed, and the other girl’s head was cracked by baton blows. Their bodies were handed back to their families bruised and disfigured. They were both just 16.
The two teenagers — Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh — have become the new faces of the protests that have convulsed the country for the past month, the largest and most sustained bout of civil unrest to grip Iran since 2009.
Their images appear on posters secretly plastered on walls in cities across Iran and on banners carried by protesters, their names a rallying cry for the fury being directed against the rulers of the Islamic Republic.
Women and girls have been conspicuous on the front lines of the protests, which erupted almost a month ago, as have young people, with even high school students taking part, braving repeated crackdowns by the security services.
The crackdowns have taken a deadly toll: Iran’s Committee to Protect Children’s Rights says 28 children and adolescents have been killed and that many have been detained. The United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, said this week it was “extremely concerned” by the reports.
The families of the two teenagers and human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, say the two girls were killed by security forces after taking part in different protests in late September, Nika in Iran’s capital of Tehran, and Sarina in the city of Karaj, outside the capital.
Security forces smashed Nika’s skull, broke her teeth and dislocated her cheekbone, her mother has said in interviews; Sarina’s head was fractured after she was hit repeatedly with a baton until she bled to death.
The government has said that the two teenagers committed suicide by jumping from rooftops. Family members have repeated that official narrative on state TV, but relatives say those appearances were coerced, and that they have been threatened and even jailed to deter them from saying what really happened to Nika and Sarina.
In life, Nika and Sarina were happy teenagers who sang and danced, giggled with friends, roamed shopping malls and posed for selfies, according to videos they shared.
In death, their faces have come to symbolise a national uprising to topple the Islamic Republic that has thousands of young people on its front lines, and a young woman, Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in the custody of the morality police last month, as its inspirational spark.
Young people such as Nika and Sarina at the centre of the uprising pose one of the biggest challenges for Iran’s ruling clerics. They are tech savvy, and many are detached from political and religious ideology that defined the previous generations.
Authorities have tried to crush them with violence and throttle them by disrupting the internet and blocking popular social media platforms such as Instagram.
It hasn’t worked. Protests have spread from streets to university campuses and to high schools. High school girls across Iran have stripped off their hijabs, ripped up pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and booed and chased away a guest speaker from the feared Basij militia, videos posted on social media show.
Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said last week that the average age of detained protesters was 15. Yousef Nouri, the minister of education, said Wednesday that high school students who had been arrested had been sent to “psychiatric centres to undergo education and behavioral reform”.
Amini, whose death September 16 in the custody of the morality police sparked the protests, had been arrested on charges of not properly observing the hijab law, which mandates a head covering for women. Her family has rejected the government’s claim that she died from a heart attack and said she suffered a head injury after being beaten by police.