It was during one of the nights of recent protests in the northern Iranian city where he has lived most of his life.
He was among the young rowdy women and men throwing rocks and bottles and lighting fires, enraged over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – a Kurdish Iranian who died while in the custody of the despised morality police – and a lifetime of repression and hypocrisy at the hands of the regime. Through the smoke and the darkness, he eyed the line of plainclothes regime enforcers and Basiji militiamen facing them.
