'I'm happy I gave my eye for Iran': Victims of the Islamic Republic’s brutal crackdown on dissent
ITV News' Lucy Watson spoke to the people shot after protesting the Iranian regime - all of whom have lost sight in one eye permanently
Mercedeh Shahinkar is 39. She was shot in the street in Iran as she stood next to her mother at a Woman Life Freedom protest last October. She was blinded in her right eye.
Zaniyar Tondro was 17 when he was fired at 11 times by Iran’s military. He can see nothing out of his right eye either. Their bullets are still in his brain.
Ali Delpasand is the father of nine-year-old Respina. When they were shot at in their car, the last sound he heard before falling unconscious were her screams.
The night before he had posted an anti-regime message on social media. Officials had called him and told him “people were out looking for him.” Twelve hours later he was blinded. He sees only black in his left eye now.
They are three Iranians robbed of their sight in the Islamic Republic’s brutal crackdown on dissent.
Three people who have to move through the world in a different way now as a result.
They had simply voiced their desire for a “different” Iran, and a freer life.
Ali and his family got to Germany just a few weeks ago, on humanitarian visas.
They fled their jobs, their family and friends and their country after they were shot and injured by the country’s security forces.
They were parked outside their daughter’s dance class, beeping their horn in solidarity with protesters, when two officers sped up to their car on motorbikes and took aim.
We joined Ali, his wife and Respina as they met with a doctor in Munich for the first time. Ali told me that he will never forget the evening he was attacked.
"I remember hearing the guns explode, the car windows shatter," he said. "I put my hands on my face and then I passed out. I thought, I’m dead. I’m gone."
Ali was so afraid that night he didn’t know which hospital was safe from the regime or where to go. He has 100 pellet bullets still left in his body.
His wife, Bahar, was also hurt. She was hit by 16 bullets in her face, and Respina’s arm was injured too.
Ali’s eye wasn’t treated correctly for 24 hours after the shooting, which was six months ago.
The medic treating them is Professor Amir Mobarez Parasta - an Iranian who’s lived in Munich for 20 years.
He’s helped Ali, Zaniyar and Mercedeh and many others get appropriate visas and travel to Germany for surgery.
He set up an NGO called “Munich Circle” when the uprising first began, last September.
He has since helped many protesters who’ve fled abroad in fear of their lives.
Ali came to meet Professor Parasta to get a prognosis and find out if his eye could be operated on or if his sight would ever return.
All of us watched his eyes be examined, his documents be sifted through and we waited together to find out what the verdict would be.
Professor Parasta went through the detailed images with us all, and explained that in Ali’s left eye “there are 2,600 cells and in the left there are none, they are all gone.”
It was heartbreaking to watch Ali’s wife, Bahar, weep as she sat next to him hearing the news.
Not only will Ali’s sight in his left eye never return, the vision in his right eye will deteriorate far quicker than normal too.
Bahar told me later: "I never imagined something like this would happen to Ali. One minute we were smiling and the second after, our life was changed forever. I am so upset because I still had hope that his eye might come back and they might not need to remove his eyeball.”
But, as Ali looked at his eyes in the mirror, he turned to me and said: "This is life. Life must go on. I am happy I gave my eye for Iran, for the cause I believe in.
"I lost part of my body, that’s very difficult and I’m dealing with it and living with it. For my Respina, this is a new life. To live in a free country is what we have wanted for 44 years but now, she has it.”
No answer was expected from Respina but unprompted the nine-year old said: “My Daddy is Iran’s hero.”
They are all far away from the Islamic Republic’s brutality now, but they are hampered and haunted in unimaginable ways.
Zaniyah Tondro is feeling his way through the darkness too. We met him the night before his eye operation, and he explained what had happened to him the second time he went out onto the streets last year.
“I went out protesting with my friends and there were so many people," he said.
"Then, the Basijis and revolutionary guards started arriving. As soon as they turned up, they started shooting at people. They shot them in the head, the eyes, anywhere they could.
"They shot me in the right shoulder, in both my eyes, my throat, my head. I felt like a bomb had gone off in my head. I was a 17-year-old boy who couldn’t walk, talk, or go to the toilet by himself.”
After Zaniyah was attacked and injured at the protest, he was bundled into a car.
“When I was shot at, I tried to stand up a few times, but I just couldn't because of the pellet bullets in my brain. Blood was coming from everywhere.
"Those who shot me came up to me and dragged me to a car. I had scars on my stomach and on my hands and arms because of how they dragged me along the floor.
"When they put me in the car, I'm tall, so my legs kept getting trapped in the doors. They couldn't close the door. They kept slamming it against my legs.
"A few seconds after they put me in the vehicle, I started vomiting blood because of the bullets in my throat. I thought they might think I was dying from internal bleeding.
"They just threw me out of the car, and people on the streets took me to the hospital. They saved my life."
In the following days and weeks, Iran’s government forces regularly came to his family home to threaten them.
Zaniyah’s life was in danger so they sold everything and escaped to Turkey.
His father then paid traffickers to get Zaniyah, his brother and his sisters to Europe. He spent his 18th birthday onboard a small boat floating in the sea, in the hope of reaching safety.
“Six days we were on a dinghy with no food and very little to drink," he said.
"There were 50 people on a 16-metre boat. I left Iran to survive. I didn’t set out to come to Germany.
"We just came where we could get medical help, but on that boat, I would look at my sisters and think, I have destroyed their lives. I wasn’t thinking about me or my eye at all.”
The day after we met Zaniyah, he had surgery to have his right eyeball removed. Soon, he will have a prosthetic eye fitted. What has happened to him has taken a huge toll.
“I used to be a great sportsman. I wanted to be a pilot. Now, all my dreams are destroyed. Forget about the physical pain, the emotional suffering is much worse.
"I still have the pellet bullets in my head. The slightest touch to my head means I could become paralyzed on the left side.
"I can’t even hold a glass with my left hand.”
Professor Parasta trained as a doctor in Germany after his own brother was blinded for his opposition to the regime back in the 1980s.
He came to Munich when he was 13 and struggles to compute what the Islamic Republic has done to his patients.
“These injuries were all done within 10 metres," Professor Parasta said.
"They were shot directly in the face. They were aimed. These are not human beings who do this.
"It makes you angry but also it is so shocking, actually. The protesters go out onto the streets believing they will either get a better life or die.
"They don’t imagine a worse life. This is what the Islamic Republic want."
There are sights and sounds around Mercedeh, Ali and Zaniyah that are positive though, and there is hope that a new and a good life will be possible for them all.
Mercedeh, who is furthest down the line in terms of her treatment, has made a decision to choose optimism over despair: "I’ve always had the spirit of a warrior, but I am even stronger now."
I was honestly staggered when she said this to me, having seen the videos on her phone of when she was first operated on, and the agony she has been through.
Mercedeh was shot in the legs and blinded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. She has since endured three long operations on her eye, and has been in Germany since August, but she did admit, “the cold weather, warm weather, the light - they all hurt my eye."
"When I walk along the street, I bump into people. There is such a big difference between having two eyes and one.”
Despite the difficulties, she sees the rising dawn and not the setting sun, and has no regrets.
She showed me a photograph of her, just moments after she was shot, with her eye bleeding.
Even then she was making the “victory V” sign with her fingers.
“Even at that moment I didn’t regret what I did. I did it knowingly. I knew what I wanted. Freedom for Iran. I come from a country where the government suppresses women.
"One of the reasons I left was for my daughter’s future. She has a beautiful voice, but you’re not even allowed to sing in Iran. I want Rosa to live somewhere her talents can blossom."
We then went to meet Rosa after school. She sang for us, she played on the park’s climbing frame, and she smiled and laughed a lot. Rosa is speaking German with ease already.
She is rising to the challenge of life in a new country while mother has her own to face, but both are confronting fear and the unknown with strength.
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