Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [46]
I jumped on the front of Davood’s motorcycle. I’d driven a motorcycle through the streets of Tehran many times when I was a kid, but it had been a long time ago. I drove away from the demonstration as fast as I could, until I reached Islamic Republic Avenue. Behind me, Davood was still wailing. I pulled up at the office of a friend. He agreed to send my footage to Channel 4 News in London as soon as he could.
After Davood’s eyes felt better, we returned to the area near Freedom Avenue. There were no longer many protestors, just swarms of police officers. The protestors hadn’t gone home, however—they had dispersed throughout the city. Groups of young people were hiding in side streets, looking for any opportunity to attack the military. Afraid of getting into one-on-one fights with the youths, the guardsmen and the police stuck together, and attacked isolated protestors in groups.
When we turned from Freedom Street onto Imam’s Legacy Highway, neither of us was ready for what we saw. About thirty guardsmen were being off-loaded from five armored vehicles. They blocked the traffic and cornered a group of men and women of different ages who were chanting “Mijangim, mimirim, zellat nemipazirim”: We fight, we die, but we don’t accept humiliation. The guardsmen took out their electric batons and started to beat the demonstrators viciously. I had never seen anything even close to the anger the Guards displayed at that moment. Everyone who was stuck in traffic at the intersection was clearly disturbed by the violence. People started to voice their objections quietly to one another; then they began to shout in protest. They cursed the guardsmen and the government and honked their horns. The guardsmen turned toward the stalled traffic, and a few of them fired their guns in the air to disperse the crowd. They yelled at the drivers to turn around, but police officers had put up barriers blocking the surrounding streets. There was nowhere to go.
Next to us, a man in a white hatchback honked his horn. In the seat beside him, his wife gestured toward a guardsman standing nearby.
“Agha mariz darim,” she told him. “We have a patient in here, sir.” I didn’t get a chance to see if there was anyone in the backseat before three guardsmen surrounded the car and began to attack it with their clubs. Two of them beat on the hood of the car while the other broke the windshield, then jumped onto the hood and, through the broken windshield, kicked the man’s face with his military boot. He then cleared the shards from the frame with his club and yanked the unconscious driver out through the open frame. Still holding the man’s hair in his hand, the guardsman jumped off the hood. As he was dragging the driver’s bent and bloodied body out of the car, another guardsman jumped onto the hood and started to kick the man’s wife through the windshield.
“Khafeh sho zanikeh!” he yelled repeatedly. “Shut up, you woman!”
When the traffic started to move again, we were forced to drive away. Still the guardsman continued to kick the woman. The last sentence I heard from him was “Daseto bendaz!” These were the words that would stay with me for months afterward. The guardsman was demanding that the woman put down her hands—that she not touch him because it was un-Islamic for a woman to touch a man who was not her husband, father, or brother. As he beat this helpless, innocent woman, he was careful to adhere to the rules of his religion.
Witnessing the beating of the couple was the last straw. I felt dizzy and couldn’t even stand on my feet. I asked Davood to take me home. The