Shabnam 🦁 ☀️

Last night, Alireza Sepahi became a husband over a crackling prison phone line. This morning, they hanged him. He was 25 years old. Look at the calculated, monstrous sequence of what this occupying cartel did to him: First, they broke into his home and shot him four times in the legs. Then they dragged him to a cell and struck his fresh bullet wounds until they bled again. They forced his mother to listen to his screams—and then locked her away for five years for the crime of being his mother. Then they executed his cousin. Then they walked him to the gallows months ago, where his heart gave out under the terror. They revived him in a hospital—not out of mercy, but because they wanted the pleasure of killing him themselves. Then, last night, they granted his final request: to marry Mahshad, the love of his life, who is locked in a cell of her own. Two political prisoners reciting marriage vows through a receiver, praying for a final embrace they were denied. And before those vows could even fade from the wire, they dropped the trapdoor. Mahshad became a widow before she ever got to hold her husband as a free woman. Alireza was not a statistic to be added to some international tally sheet. He was a son. A cousin. A 25 yearold boy in love, who should have woken up this morning as a newlywed beneath the sun. I want to write out the sheer, suffocating pain in my chest, but language is too small to carry this kind of grief. Yet my silence is worse. I refuse to let this tyranny become just another headline. I refuse to let the butchering of our youth become normal. They are slaughtering us one by one in the dark, in the most brutal ways imaginable, while the world looks away. So I will shout his name into the void until my lungs bleed. Even if the words are insufficient. Even if the world remains stubbornly blind. May the pen that refuses to write what is being done to my people shatter into dust.