Dissident Provides Harrowing Account Of Iran's Prisons

The Middle East has been topping headlines recently as ISIS is being defeated in both Iraq and Syria, and Iran is playing a significantly destructive role in both campaigns and across the region.

All the while, the Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) is gearing up for its massive annual convention in Paris. The July 1^strally will be the stage of hundreds of prominent figures from four corners of the globe and most likely over 100,000 members of the Iranian Diaspora expressing support for the NCRI President Maryam Rajavi’s and her ten-point-plan platform for a future Iran without the mullahs.

I had a chance recently to sit down and talk with Shabnam Madadzadeh, a young Iranian woman and former political prisoner who just recently was able to exit Iran. She has written articles and delivered remarks in different events shedding light on Iran’s dungeons atrocious conditions.

I was a college student in Iran and like my brother I spent five years in the regime’s jails as a political prisoner. Long interrogations, solitary confinement, forced to witness my brother being beaten, deprived of any contact with my family, death threats and mock executions were the tortures I was placed through.

These methods are used by the Iranian regime to obtain so-called “confessions” and forge a case against you in court, while depriving you of legal representation. I was sentenced to prison and exiled in the notorious Gohardasht Prison in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran.

During my time behind bars I was deprived of any furlough. I witnessed many crimes by the regime authorities, many executions and tortures inflicted not only on political prisoners, but also ordinary inmates arrested on other charges.

In prison I was in a ward with hundreds of other women and up close I witnessed the human rights violations they suffered. Time and again in prison I was deprived of family visits and phone calls for informing the world about the harsh conditions those women went through and the circumstances inside the prison walls. I was also deprived of medical care.