The Betrayal of the Iranian People

On the night of January 8, in the low-slung, industrial city of Karaj, just northwest of Tehran, a 17-year-old boy named Sam Afshari was killed by Iran’s security services. He and his friends were peacefully protesting when the streetlights suddenly went dark. Witnesses saw members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia on the beds of trucks charge up behind demonstrators, firing .50-caliber machine guns indiscriminately into the crowd. Sam was shot in the back, just below his kidneys, and brought to a hospital alive for surgery. He had a breathing tube in his mouth when, the family believes, IRGC agents visited the hospital and administered Sam a “finishing shot” to the back of the head.I wish I could tell you that this was the end of the story of his family’s torment. It was not. Sam’s mother and uncle located his remains in the overflowing morgue of Behesht-e Sakineh, Karaj’s primary public cemetery. Sam’s face was mutilated beyond recognition; his mother identified him by a tattoo on his chest that read Mother, and promptly collapsed. The IRGC men running the morgue called her a prostitute and told her that her son was a terrorist.Then they brought her a form to sign attesting that Sam had been a member of the Basij militia: The state would officially add him to its tally of “martyrs” killed by violent protesters, rather than honestly account for another nonviolent demonstrator killed by its own men. If she refused to sign it, they told her, they would not release the body to her for burial. They also demanded that she pay $1,400 for the bullet that killed her son. Otherwise, Sam would be buried in an unmarked mass grave, as hundreds of others collected at Behesht-e Sakineh reportedly were.[Read: ‘You want to leave us alone with Mojitba?’]Sam’s family did what they had to do to secure his remains. Even at that, they were permitted no funeral gathering, obituary, or public notice of any kind. They found a grave site for Sam to share with just