Exactly 13 years ago I started the day with terrible news.
In recent years I have begun to wonder what my friend who delivered the news was really thinking? How she felt when she decided to call me in the morning to “send her condolences” without first finding out if I was even aware of my loss.
Of course, she was (and is) a member of the cult. A cult that lives on sensationalism and propaganda of martyrs.
My older brother had become a” martyr” just hours before. In the hands of the sect. The witnesses I spoke to afterwards, without knowing what I suspected and experienced from a distance, confirmed it exactly as I thought. That my brother was ordered to run toward the shotguns to die. Who else films an unprotected, unarmed and terrified person his last seconds before getting brutally killed and puts it on YouTube?
In the promotion of the People’s Mujahedin sect, anything is done to get the attention of the outside world. ANYTHING.
13 years ago I had already taken a distance to mujahedin but, like most others even to this day, I had chosen silence. Chosen to just withdraw quietly and live my life in peace.
Today, I know that that friend who called me didn’t give a damn about my brother’s death or about me. She only cared about being the first to call so that she could post on Facebook with her back free, blaming my brothers murder on the Iranian regime and boasting about the Mujahedin as the answer to freedom and justice.
Without any thought about what shock she left me to deal with after we hung up.
Atefeh Sebdani