How two teenagers became the new faces of Iran’s protests

As unrest erupted across Iran calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule last month, with young women in big cities and small towns tossing their headscarves on to bonfires to chants of “Women, Life, Freedom,” two teenage girls left their homes to join the protesters.

It was the last time their relatives would see them alive. One family searched frantically for their daughter for 10 days, posting desperate appeals for information on social media; the other found out the fate of their daughter within hours of her disappearance.

But the grim result was the same. The missing teenagers had been killed by the security forces, their families and human rights groups said. One girl’s skull was smashed, and the other girl’s head was cracked by baton blows. Their bodies were handed back to their families bruised and disfigured. They were both just 16.

The two teenagers – Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh – have become the new faces of the protests that have convulsed the country for the past month, the largest and most sustained bout of civil unrest to grip Iran since 2009. Their images appear on posters secretly plastered on walls in cities across Iran and on banners carried by protesters, their names a rallying cry for the fury being directed against the rulers of the Islamic Republic.

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Women and girls have been conspicuous on the front lines of the protests, which erupted almost a month ago, as have young people, with even high school students taking part, braving repeated crackdowns by the security services.

[ Iran Protests: ‘The government do their best to brainwash you’ ]

The crackdowns have taken a deadly toll: Iran’s Committee to Protect Children’s Rights says 28 children and adolescents have been killed and that many have been detained. The United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, said this week it was “extremely concerned” by the reports.

The families of the two teenagers and human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, say the two girls were killed by security forces after taking part in different protests in late September, Nika in Iran’s capital of Tehran, and Sarina in the city of Karaj, outside the capital. Security forces smashed Nika’s skull, broke her teeth and dislocated her cheekbone, her mother has said in interviews; Sarina’s head was fractured after she was hit repeatedly with a baton until she bled to death.

The government has said that the two teenagers took their own lives by jumping from rooftops. Family members have repeated that official narrative on state TV, but relatives say those appearances were coerced, and that they have been threatened and even jailed to deter them from saying what really happened to Nika and Sarina.

In life, Nika and Sarina were happy teenagers who sang and danced, giggled with friends, roamed shopping malls and posed for selfies, according to videos they shared. In death, their faces have come to symbolise a national uprising to topple the Islamic Republic that has thousands of young people on its front lines, and a young woman, Mahsa Amini (22), who died in the custody of the morality police last month, as its inspirational spark.

Young people like Nika and Sarina at the centre of the uprising pose one of the biggest challenges for Iran’s ruling clerics. They are tech savvy, and many are detached from the political and religious ideology that defined the previous generations.

[ ‘We need happiness’: Iran’s teenage girls on the front line of protests ]

Authorities have tried to crush them with violence and throttle them by disrupting the internet and blocking popular social media platforms such as Instagram.

It hasn’t worked. Protests have spread from streets to university campuses and to high schools. High school girls across Iran have stripped off their hijabs, ripped up pictures of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and booed and chased away a guest speaker from the feared Basij militia, videos posted on social media show.

Rear Adm Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said last week that the average age of detained protesters was 15. Yousef Nouri, the minister of education, said on Tuesday that high school students who had been arrested had been sent to “psychiatric centres to undergo education and behavioural reform”.

Amini, whose death on September16th in the custody of the morality police sparked the protests, had been arrested on charges of not properly observing the hijab law, which mandates a head covering for women. Her family has rejected the government’s claim that she died from a heart attack and said she suffered a head injury after being beaten by police.

Four days after Amini’s death, Nika dashed out the door of her home in Tehran to join the protesters massing on the streets. She stood defiantly on top of a refuse can, her black hair tied in a pony tail, and waved a hijab she had set ablaze as a crowd of young people around her chanted “death to the dictator,” according to a video that her family has confirmed as authentic to Iranian journalists.

Nika lived with her aunt and worked part-time at a cafe training as a barista. She dreamed of going abroad after high school and loved to sing. A video from a school ceremony shows her standing onstage and holding a microphone, giggling. She then sings a well-known Iranian song, with the lyrics: “One heart says go, go, and another heart says don’t go, don’t go. My heart cannot endure, what to do without you?”

[ Iranian women’s fight for freedom ]

Nika disappeared on the night of September 20th from a central Tehran boulevard where security forces clashed with protesters. Her mother said in a video message published by Radio Farda that Nika’s last phone call was shortly before midnight and that she could hear protesters and security forces shouting in the background.

The family searched for her in detention centres but without success. Her aunt, Atash Shakarami, with whom she lived, posted Nika’s photograph on her Instagram page seeking help finding her. Ten days later, her family received a call from authorities: they could collect her body from a morgue in downtown Tehran.

Nassrin Shakarami , Nika’s mother, reached by phone in Tehran on Wednesday, said she wanted to publicise her daughter’s story and was living under “difficult conditions”. Nika’s aunt and uncle were both detained for days to pressure the family into silence, and the aunt was forced to repeat the official cause of death on state TV, Shakarami said.

“They are threatening me. I have said the things I needed to say to explain what happened,” said Shakarami referring to the message published by Radio Farda in which she said the security forces had killed her daughter and were pressuring her to call it a suicide.

Her conversation with the New York Times was abruptly disrupted, and a recorded message from the state telecommunications company said her phone number had been disconnected.

Shakarami said in her video message that security forces had seized Nika’s body as the family was arranging a funeral service and had buried her without the family’s knowledge or presence. After a public backlash, state television aired video of a young woman they claimed was Nika entering a building from which they said she jumped. Her mother says the woman in the video was not her daughter.

[ Iranian students find their voice in anti-regime protests ]

Two days after Nika disappeared, on September 22nd, Sarina Esmailzadeh joined protests in Karaj, a satellite city west of Tehran, along with some classmates, according to rights groups and two Iranian journalists, Fereshteh Ghazi from Radio Farda and Farzad Seifikaran from Radio Zamaneh, who both interviewed relatives.

Sarina studied at a high school in Karaj for the gifted and talented, and she chronicled on YouTube the daily life and musings of a typical teenager; trying on makeup for the first time, making pizza and singing pop songs in the back of the car.

“We need joy and fun, we need good spirit, good vibes and good energy,” Sarina said in one video. “But in order to have all of these, you need to have freedom.”

At the protest, security forces grabbed Sarina and struck her head with a baton over and over, according to Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights. She was taken to the hospital, but there was little the doctors in the emergency room could do. She had already bled to death.

Sarina’s mother, who is receiving treatment for a brain tumour, received a phone call from authorities around midnight to go to the hospital and identify her daughter’s body, according to the two journalists who interviewed the family and a report on Sarina by Iran Human Rights. Sarina’s father died when she was a child and she lived with her mother and older brother. At the hospital they were not allowed to see Sarina.

At the funeral the next day security forces brought Sarina’s body, wrapped in a customary white cloth, and allowed the mother a short glimpse at her face before they buried her. But it was long enough to notice that one side of her forehead had been smashed.

Sarina’s mother, looking disoriented, appeared twice on state television, including on Tuesday, where she repeated the official line that Sarina had jumped from a building. Iran’s state TV has a history of broadcasting coerced interviews of political dissidents and families of people who have been killed.

Ghazi, who has been in contact with Sarina’s relatives, said the security forces had threatened that if Sarina’s mother did not confirm the official account, they would harm her son, her only other child.

The grim aftermath of Sarina’s death could not have been at greater contrast with the youthful exuberance of her life. “What’s a better feeling than being free and careless?” Sarina said in a video after finishing an exam and buying herself a bottled iced coffee as a treat. “It’s finished, it feels so great, Goodbye.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.