Arab News | Iran’s peace laureate Narges Mohammadi ‘fears never seeing her children again’

PARIS: Iranian Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi’s biggest fear is dying without seeing her teenaged twin children again after more than a decade apart, she says in a new memoir published on Thursday.

In the book, “A Woman Never Stops Fighting,” Mohammadi recalls the day in July 2015 when she said goodbye to Kiana and Ali, then aged 8 and now 19, before they left for Paris while their mother remained in Evin prison in Tehran. “I felt as though a vast void had opened inside me,” she writes.

As the children’s plane took off, she “knew that for their sake, the kids had to be taken out of Iran,” she says. “It wasn’t safe for them.

“But at the same time, I was a mother, and I was drowning. I would likely not see Kiana and Ali again, at least not for a long time. And how could I live without seeing my children?”

Mohammadi, 54, was released from prison on health grounds in May. She was also jailed during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, during mass demonstrations this year, and when the US-Iran war began on Feb. 28.

When the sound of bombing echoed around Tehran, Mohammadi “feared that I might have to leave this world without ever seeing my children again.”

She says: “I had promised myself that I would survive. I had to stay alive so that Kiana and Ali would never have to endure that unbearable moment — the moment of learning of their mother’s death.”