The documentary Children of Camp Ashraf is shown on SVT
Atefeh Sebdani takes part in the documentary The Children of Camp Ashraf, which is shown on SVT. It is about the militant organization Mujahedin-e Khalq and a number of child soldiers with different fates. During the early 1990s, hundreds of children were sent from the camp in Iraq to be raised by sympathizers in other countries. They would then return to overthrow the regime in Iran.
Amir, Parwin, Hanif and Atefeh are four of the children who ended up in Sweden, and in Sara Moein’s deeply engaging documentary, they tell rich archive material about their experiences. They are also trying to reconnect with the organization and their parents, who are now in Albania.
About Atefeh Sendani
Atefeh Sebdani, born in 1986 in Esfahan, Iran, is an engineer and has worked as a digital strategist and business developer in tech. She lives in Stockholm, is an award-winning lecturer and runs the Instagram account @atefeh_sebdani. In August 2022, she published her autobiographical book “My hand in mine”.
About My hand in mine
“She had promised me that it would always be me and her. Us against the world, us in the world. Now she was crying too and there were people around us watching. ‘Please . . . mother. . . stop . . . please mom . . . I do not want to.’ ”
Why do you abandon your children? Atefeh is five years old when her mother hugs her goodbye outside a worn-out bus on a dusty desert road. Together with his two younger brothers, Atefeh is smuggled to Europe. The parents are soldiers in an Iranian resistance movement and remain in the organization’s military camp. In a stroke, the five-year-old is the mother of her brothers.
My hand in mine is a story about growing up with no one to hold on to but yourself, of abuses skillfully cleaned up and of a society that fails to see the vulnerable child. But it is also a story of a stubborn burning vitality, and of the courage to finally break free.