From Protester to Fighter: Fleeing Iran’s Brutal Crackdown To Take up Arms Over the Border

CNN’s Chief International Investigative Correspondent Nima Elbagir travels to a remote area in Northern Iraq’s Kurdish region where Iranian Kurdish women who fled Iran's brutal crackdown on protests have taken up arms and are patrolling the heavily militarized Iraq-Iran border.

Elbagir meets a 19-year-old Iranian-Kurdish activist who fled her hometown of Sanandaj in western Iran as security forces were wreaking death and destruction on the protests sites.

Rezan – a pseudonym CNN is identifying her with for security purposes – took the long and perilous journey with smugglers to Iraq, where she decided to take up arms and enlist with the all-female fighting unit, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK).

“I knew that if an officer spotted us, we would die immediately,” said Rezan, who said Iranian security pulled her by her uncovered hair and dragged her down the street during the second week of protests.

“They pulled my hair. They beat me. They dragged me,” she said, recounting the brutal crackdown in the Kurdish-majority city. “At the same time, I could see the same thing happening to many other people, including children.”

 Rezan is one of multiple Iranian dissidents who fled the country in the last month, escaping the regime’s violent bid to quash demonstrations that erupted after the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa “Zhina” Amini during her detention by Iranian morality police for allegedly wearing a hijab improperly.

“(Here) I can get my rights to live as a woman. I want to fight for the rights of women. I want to fight for human rights,” she told Elbagir. “I carry a weapon because we want to show the Iranian Kurds that they have someone standing behind them. I want to protect the Kurds there because the Kurds are protecting themselves with rocks.”

After Rezan fled Iran, the authorities there called her family and threatened to arrest her siblings, she said. But her family supports her militancy, she said, with her mother vowing to bury every one of her children rather than hand them over to the authorities.

“From what I know, my family is part of the revolution and the revolution continues to this day,” said Rezan. “They are ready to die to get our rights.”