Canada Archives - The Sentinel by Yuvoice

Iran to the Interstellars: Can You Hear Us?

Posted on January 22, 2026February 6, 2026 by [email protected]

This is a message to interstellar powers.
If you think you are a “Human,” do not read on.

Hi there,
I hope you can hear me.

I am calling you from Iran, a country on Planet Earth, in the Milky Way Galaxy. I am a cosmologist, and I know how to address other galaxies in the classifications that we have prepared, but I do not know your system. So I hope you know where Earth is. If you can find Earth, it is easy to find Iran. It is the saddest country on this planet now.

The population of this planet stands at around nine billion people, and you probably wonder why, instead of just talking with them, I am reaching out to you. Because here, although we have ears and eyes, in critical times we close them. We do not have time to hear and see the grief of OTHERS. Yes, “others.” On this planet, we are strangers.

We have several instruments to contact you with, but I always say to myself that even if you hear our signals, and even if you find us with your equipment, you will not respond or contact us — because this planet, although it looks blue, is in reality red, the color of blood. We look civilized, with satellites, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the ability to travel to the Moon, but we are unable to communicate with each other.

When I was younger, I dreamed of traveling to other planets out of curiosity and out of wonder, but always in the certainty of returning to Earth, my home. But now I want to escape it.

That is why I am reaching out to you, and I am asking for your help.

Two weeks ago, another uprising started in my beloved country, Iran. We Iranians call it a revolution, but here no one believes it. Do you know what “revolution” means, or should I explain?

The regime that has governed us for forty-seven years (Earth years, which are equal to 365 days,) has been murdering us. We do not even know how many have been slain, because all communication with our country has been blocked for twelve days. You may wonder how I am able to write to you. I can, because I am one of the millions of Iranians who left home, who left their loved ones to live in a free world, but whose roots and hearts are still in Iran.

In the last twelve days, we tried to be the voice of our people by any means we had. On this planet, there are many languages, and we do not know them all, but we used a new technology called AI to translate our messages, and social media too. But it isn’t working, because no one is listening. Even with this advanced technology, we are still voiceless. I do not know which language you speak, but I am writing to you in English, which is not my mother tongue.

On this planet, we have satellite internet and Starlink to communicate, but these technologies are not for Iranians. We are sanctioned by the rest of the world and denied access to technology because our regime is oppressive. Can you imagine that the people of a country are being punished because of a regime they have stood up against several times, and that they have been murdered in droves for doing so? How do you punish regimes in your galaxy? Do you have sanctions? I hope not.

There is a country on this planet called the USA. You have probably heard of it, because on this planet everyone knows it — even a child in a remote village. Its president promised Iranians that help was on its way, and now it has been ten days that we are waiting. Imagine a nation asking another country for support to kill a dictator.

Do you know what a dictator is? We have had several here on Earth. The most famous and brutal one was Hitler, who wanted to dominate the whole planet. That was eighty years ago. But if you ask me, the dictator of Iran is running a close second, because he kills in the name of God. He believes he represents God, and therefore he can do anything, because God can do anything. Do you also believe in God? Do you also label your people by religion?

I was telling you about the help from the US. That country is far from Iran, and its planes take hours to reach us. Although they feature advanced military technology, they are not fast.

Here, killing is very fast.
Saving is very slow.

As a physicist, I know that the speed of light is the highest possible speed, and the nearest star to us is more than four light-years away. So it would take at least four years if you decide to help my people. I should probably have sent this message in 1979, when this brutal regime occupied my country and held my people hostage. But I was not born then.

Still, many do not believe this regime should go. They believe in reform. They do not believe dictators don’t change. They fail.

I do not know how I can convince you to help, because on this planet it has not been possible to grab the attention of humans. I can tell you that in two days, 16,500 people were murdered, 330,000 were injured, and at least 8,000 lost their eyes. We Iranians call it genocide. Do you know what that means? If you say no, I would not be surprised, because even here, no one believes it.

Here, politicians say that even if the US saves us by killing the dictator, it would only be because of our resources. Iran has oil, gas, and plenty of other valuable natural resources. Do you need them? If we offer all of them to you, will you come and save my people? We need these resources only if we are alive. Dead people need nothing.

Here, politicians remain silent and say it is an “internal issue.” Imagine: a dictator can kill all the people he governs, and no one questions it because it’s an internal issue. If you have such a rule — not to interfere in the affairs of other galaxies — then I am wasting my time writing to you.

I do not know what more to add.

Here, we have human rights. Perhaps you have interstellar rights. I hope your laws cover us as well, because here we aren’t equal under these rights, and countless human rights organizations are spineless.

Please come and save my people, even if it takes years to reach us.
We Iranians have done what we could.
Children are still being born in our country.
They deserve to live in freedom.

Witnessing the Unthinkable in Iran

Posted on January 14, 2026January 14, 2026 by [email protected]

There is a Persian proverb that says, “Hearing is not the same as seeing.”
These days, I can no longer trust even my eyes.

On one side, I see the vast uprising of my people in Iran — the largest since the establishment of this inhuman regime. On the other, I see the rare and fragmented videos that manage to escape the media blackout: bodies piled at the Legal Medicine Organization. If I did not hear Persian voices or see Persian writing in these videos, I would refuse to believe this is Iran. My mind instinctively rejects them.

I was born three years after the 1979 revolution. Until the Green Movement of 2009 [a non-violent protest seeking democratization that spread throughout Iran] — when I was a student in Germany — I had only vaguely heard about the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s. I had never read about them. There was no accessible documentation, no social media, no independent platforms. At home, politics was never discussed; my family was entirely non-political.

In 2009, as I gradually began to understand what that revolution truly was, I was shocked. When I learned that young women — virgins — were raped before execution because their executioners believed virgins would otherwise go to heaven, I was rendered speechless. Even today, my mind resists fully processing this. Rape is a major crime under Islamic law, punishable by death. And yet it was systematically committed by those who claimed moral and religious authority.

It was then that I also began to realize that a compulsory hijab was not rooted in Islam. But I had been deeply indoctrinated: I genuinely believed that if I showed my hair, I would be punished in hell. It took three years of reading, research, and painful self-deconstruction — despite extremely limited access to information — before I accepted that the hijab is not mandated by Islam. I removed it and made a promise to myself: I would never wear it outside Iran.

I later returned to Iran after my PhD, and became a professor. Inside the country, I complied with the law. Outside Iran — at conferences and research visits — I never wore the hijab. I knew I was risking the career I had struggled so hard to build. But that was my dignity.

That is why, in 2022, when Mahsa Amini was killed for a few strands of hair, I resigned from my faculty position. I could not accept that a human being could be murdered because of hair.

From 2012 to 2022, before my exile following that resignation, I lived in Iran and witnessed the country’s steady collapse: the freefall of the national currency, exponential inflation, deepening poverty, and the visible anger and exhaustion of the people. Multiple uprisings occurred during those years. One in 2018, was crushed within days.

Then came November 2019 — the first time the regime shut down the internet nationwide for five days. I remember it vividly. I was waiting for a visa to attend a conference in Europe. The embassy called me — something they never do — because they could not email me. My visa was ready, but I could not book a flight. There was no internet. During those five days, more than 1,500 people were killed. That was when we learned that we could be killed in total silence.

In January 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down. For three days, the regime lied, calling it an accident. Again, my mind resisted the truth. One hundred and seventy-six innocent people — including an unborn child — were killed. It was the first time in history that a state killed its own citizens in its own airspace. I remember thinking: This will not be the last crime. This regime is capable of anything.

Then came COVID-19. Once again, Iranians died in silence. The Supreme Leader — today mockingly called MoushAli by the people (moush meaning mouse, after he hid for days during the June 2025 Iran–Israel war) — banned vaccines from the US and the UK, and insisted on domestic production. To this day, we do not know how many Iranians died because of that decision.

September 2022 marked the turning point of my life. I became the first faculty member to resign publicly. Threatened by the regime, I did not return to Iran from my scientific travels, and have remained in exile ever since. Given my activities over the past three years, I know that if I return one day, I will be executed.

Because I had studied this regime’s brutality closely — both historically and through lived experience — I knew that the next uprising would be met with unimaginable violence. I feared how many lives would be taken. It took thirty-nine months for the next uprising to ignite. And still, I am unable to comprehend the scale of the brutality.

Since January 8, all communications — phones included — have been completely severed. We experienced similar blackouts during the June 2025 war. Once again, we had no news of our loved ones. Today, reports suggest that 12,000 people have been killed in just two days: on January 8 and 9. My mind rejects this number. I cannot even cry. Those who have lost someone understand this state: when you cannot accept the loss, grief does not yet take the form of tears. I cannot accept the death of humanity itself.

Today I saw a video of blood being washed from the streets while bodies lay piled nearby. Evidence erased in real time. I still cannot believe it — not because this regime is incapable of such crimes, but because the perpetrators speak Persian. They are part of my people. How did they become this evil, within a civilization thousands of years old? Are they children of Iran? Are they human? How do they kill, go home, sleep, and return the next day to do it again?

Will this nightmare end? My mind feels as if it is collapsing.

For forty months in exile, my mother was the one person I spoke to about all this grief. January 7 was the last time I heard her voice. I already missed her smell, her hug, her kiss. Now I miss her voice too.

This is what it means to stand against a dictator who is still in power — whose machine gun is still firing.

How long this will last, I do not know.
No one knows.

Counting the Days Until Freedom in Iran

Posted on January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 by [email protected]

These days, with the eyes of the world on widespread protests in Iran, my mind returns to September 2022.

I left Iran just three weeks before the killing of Mahsa Amini, intending to spend three months abroad on a scientific visit. Now, more than three years later, I have yet to return.

My grief following Amini’s brutal murder while in state custody was so deep that I know with certainty that had I been in Iran, I would have been in the streets. Shouting for freedom. For dignity. For humanity. Things that had been systematically stripped away under a brutal regime for decades. But I was far away. And so, one week later, I resigned publicly from my academic position. It was the only way I could stand with my people.

At that time, we did not call it a revolution. We did not even call it “Woman, Life, Freedom”. This was the name given to the uprising later on, in tribute to a Kurdish slogan chanted at the funeral of Mahsa Amini, who was of Kurdish origin. The rebellion unfolded gradually. But in truth, it was a revolution for the most basic rights of women.

By “basic,” I mean the right to choose not to cover our hair.

Not even the right to dress freely, because even today, forty months later, women in Iran cannot walk in the streets wearing a T-shirt, short trousers, or a skirt. Access to school, university, work, and public services is still under hijab law. So whatever you hear about “hijab freedom” in Iran is a lie.

Iranian girls and women still risk their education and their jobs for appearing without a hijab in public. Their “lifestyle violations” are recorded in official files and used against them in evaluations. If this regime survives, these records will haunt them for life.

And it is not just a hijab.

Under the Islamic regime, women are forbidden to sing.

Every Iranian woman singer you know lives in exile, not because she committed a crime, but because she wanted to sing. Even sharing a singing video on your social media as a female singer inside Iran can lead to arrest. For forty-seven years, not a single female singing voice (Iranian or non-Iranian) has been broadcast on state television or radio.

Do not ask me for the reason. As a scientist, I cannot explain what I cannot understand.

I share something in common with those women singers. I, too, have been living in exile since September 2022. My resignation was seen as a threat to the regime. My family was threatened. For my safety, I was forced not to return home.

In the past forty months, I have moved across four countries. Not by choice, but because of visa restrictions, sanctions, and the impossibility of finding stable work as an Iranian in exile.

And now, once again, my country is on fire. Waves of protests have erupted across dozens of cities in Iran, with citizens demanding freedom, equality, and an end to the regime’s repressive policies. The demonstrations began on December 28, 2025, in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, sparked by the collapse of the national currency. Although many think economic woes drive these protests, they are also about women’s rights and general freedom

And since then, my heart has lived in my throat. In 2022, even from afar, I knew how to act. Today, I do not. All I can do is write; write as someone in exile while a revolution unfolds at home.

A person who wakes up, eight and a half hours away, to videos of people being beaten and shot with live ammunition.

And who goes to sleep in tears, wondering how the arrested survived the night, how the families of the murdered are enduring their loss.

My friends in Iran and in the diaspora say, “This is the end.”

I hope it is.

But even if it is not — (and may the universe never hear this) — I am proud. Proud that Iranian women rose in 2022 and fought for their rights. No future regime will ever be able to say it granted these rights to women. Iranian women already got their rights.

Equality is one of the core demands of this uprising/movement/revolution, whatever name history gives it. We still have a long way to go. The price has been unbearably high. But we learned something irreversible: In a society where women and men are not equal, there is no freedom.

We learned to fight for our rights because, from now on, if any regime, system, law, or ideology tries to take them away, we will stand and resist.

In 1979, only a few women resisted. Many rights — such as access to education, the ability to work, freedom of travel, the ability to obtain a divorce, and political participation — had been granted from above during modernization, not won through struggle. Society was not ready. So when the Islamic regime took them away, too many accepted it since they were not even aware of them.

This time it is different.

We paid the price. And because of that, we will never forget.

So keep your eyes on Iran. What you are witnessing is a revolution against one of the most brutal religious totalitarian regimes in history. You may think I am exaggerating. You are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Even Iranians themselves will ask how they endured this regime for so long.

Books will be written. Films will be made. But none will truly convey the suffering, just as we can never fully feel the suffering of those who lived through World War II. That is why history repeats itself.

But one thing I know with certainty: Religion will never again rule Iran. And Islam will not be the name of the country. What is now the Islamic Republic of Iran will soon just be Iran.

I count the days until I return home, along with millions of Iranians in exile.

The Persian poet, Houshang Ebtehaj, who himself died in exile, once wrote:

می‌بینم
آن شکفتنِ شادی را
پروازِ بلندِ آدمیزادی را
آن جشنِ بزرگِ روزِ آزادی را

I see
the blossoming of joy,
the high flight of humanity,
the great celebration of the day of freedom.

Every Day Is Halloween in Iran

Posted on October 17, 2025December 28, 2025 by Jonathan

Halloween comes once a year for most. A night of masks, spooky movies, and pretend scares. But in Iran, under the rule of the mullahs, every day is Halloween.

The mullahs hide behind the mask of religion while practicing a reign of terror. They turn faith into fear and laws into lethal weapons. The world celebrates Halloween as a once-a-year fantasy. For Iranians, it is a daily horror.

I am Iranian. It was for me.

A death that sparked a movement

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, only 22 years old, died after being taken into custody by the frightening gasht-e ershad patrol — “Guidance” in Farsi, but we Persians call it the morality police.

She was arrested and taken to the notorious Vozara detention center because of her hair. Too much of it showed from beneath her hijab. Three days later, she was dead.

The regime insisted it was a heart attack, the people knew it was murder, something a UN report later confirmed. Protests swept across the country. People took to the streets with courage, but unlike in the West, they could not carry painted signs. In Iran, even holding a sign is enough to be detected, arrested, and imprisoned. The images of banners you may have seen come from protests abroad, where Iranians in exile have the freedom to speak in ways that are impossible inside the country. The government responded with full metal jackets.

More than 500 people were killed to prove that Mahsa’s death was not their fault. Proof this is the Islamic Republic within Iran.

Iran protest for Mahsa Amini - signs read “Women.Life.Freedom” - Santa Monica, CA - October 08, 2022 — (Image courtesy of Craig Melville via Unsplash)

Since then, executions have become the regime’s loudest weapon. More than 10 protesters have been executed since the uprising, their deaths meant as warnings. In just the first nine and a half months of 2025, more than 1172 people were executed, about three every single day. Imagine this in the 21st century: a state that takes lives on an industrial scale to prove its power. More proof.

The cruelty is not limited to the streets. On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards just minutes after takeoff from Tehran. All 176 people on board, men, women, children, even an unborn baby, were killed. Iran became the only country to shoot down its own civilian plane in its own airspace.

The horror stretches back to the beginning. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution (recall that the country became known as The People’s Islamic Republic of Iran), thousands were executed. Opposition to the regime was framed as opposition to God.

Graves of hundreds remain unknown.

In the 1980s, the Iran–Iraq war was prolonged. not to defend the nation but to silence dissent under the slogan of “wartime unity.” To this day, the true cost of human horror in that meaningless war is hidden.

A dried lake, a dried future

The regime’s brutality is not only against people, but even against nature. Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East and the place of childhood summers for many, has dried. Neglect, mismanagement, and corruption drained this natural treasure and place of cultural heritage, leaving behind salt plains and despair.

Even the land bears scars and wears the mask of this misrule, bereft and humiliated.

A real-life Halloween

What kind of regime kills its women for the way they wear their hair, shoots down its own people in the sky, drains its lakes, and executes three people a day, all while demanding respect?

I know this horror personally. As an academic, my work and my voice put me at risk. The same regime that silences women on the street has no tolerance for those who speak up in universities or in public life. In solidarity with the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, I resigned from my position in Iran in 2022. That act of conscience made me a target. Like so many others, I was forced into exile, not out of choice, but out of necessity, to protect both my life and my ability to continue my work.

Here in the West, I have witnessed Halloween in its sweetest form. Children knocking on doors in costumes, candy-filled buckets, laughter under streetlights. I have seen a tiny mermaid holding her father’s hand, a Glinda the Good Witch skipping along with friends, and even a toddler dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog racing up and down the sidewalk. This is what Halloween should be: play, imagination, and community.

Back in Iran, the most dangerous Halloween costume in the world is worn every day. This is the cloak of the mullahs, because behind it is not a happy face, but a machine of death.

The difference between once-a-year Halloween in the West and everyday life in Iran is simple: during Halloween, your fear is pretend. Your nights are filled with trick-or-treat candy and fun. Your daylight brings safety. In Iran, our nightmare does not end at dawn. It just continues to haunt.

Yet Iranians endure. Despite decades of brutality, they remain among the kindest, most resilient people. They hope that there will be light at the end of this darkness. One day, the mask will be torn away, so the nightmare will end.

This Halloween

Soon, I will stand at my door and see children on my street dressed as witches, superheroes, and fairy-tale characters; their laughter will no doubt echo into the night. Their joy in a world where fear is only pretend gives me hope. Hope that one day, children in Iran too will know only the sweet kind of fright, the kind that ends with candy at dusk and safety at dawn. And perhaps then, the mullahs and their reign of horror will be nothing more than a dark fairy tale told of the past.