Around three years ago, Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, traveled to Kermanshah, Iran’s Kurdish region. He delivered a speech at the city’s university, Razi, where a young woman named Sheler, who was from a village in the region, was studying political science. In the speech, Khamenei asked the students how to prevent an Islamic regime from becoming fragile and old. Coincidently, at the time of his speech, around 80 students had signed a petition that was critical of the regime and 
characterised it as an old and fragile regime, primarily with regard to the university, but also society at large. Not knowing that Khamenei’s apparent openness to criticism was nothing but a façade, if not a trap, the students even read out part of their critical letter while he was present.
One of the signatories was Sheler (which in Kurdish means ‘wild tulip’), who was in her final term of university. The day after Khamenei’s visit, she was kidnapped by the regime’s security forces and disappeared for five months. They then called her father and asked him to come to Evin Prison in Tehran to pick up his daughter. The father, who was an Iran–Iraq war veteran, rushed to Tehran in order to take back his daughter. When he saw her he was horrified, as she had lost most of her weight and was not able to walk. With immense difficulty, he took her home. After a few months she was able to walk, but she never dared leave home for fear of having to respond to the villagers about what happened to her in prison.
Last year, Evin Prison contacted the family and gave them three days to return Sheler to prison. Sheler, being unable to face what was inflicted upon her during her imprisonment, found her grandfather’s hunting rifle and shot herself.
Sheler is gone, but the leader and the regime which committed, and continues to commit such savagery, are still in power.
The information in this article is extracted from the blog of a well-known film director, Nourizad: http://nurizad.info/?p=23545.
