These women left Iran to escape oppression. They say the regime has made its way to Australian shores

Sahar Gholizadeh remembers the exact moment she received the strange message demanding she make a fake confession.

She was struggling to process what she was being ordered to do.

“I have to confess and I have to come clean and I have to say that I’ve been brainwashed,” she remembers the message saying.

The order came after she used social media to out members of the regime allegedly involved in violent reprisal attacks on protesters back in Iran.

The Iranian-Australian nurse had spent the past few years helping vulnerable people in Melbourne survive through the pandemic.

She would soon be inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll for Women for her services to the community.

“I felt honoured. I felt proud. But at the same time I felt sad because of what was happening back home,” she said.

Since September, hundreds of protesters have been killed on the streets of Iran as a violent crackdown on dissent widens.

The demonstrations were sparked by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, who passed away in hospital three days after being detained by Tehran’s morality police.

Sahar Gholizadeh is one of multiple members of the local Iranian community who have spoken to Background Briefing about how the regime is using intimidation tactics and monitoring protests in Australia in an attempt to silence its critics.

“I dedicated the award to Mahsa Amini. I said, ‘I want to use this to raise awareness and raise our voice,'” Sahar said.

By speaking out now, she’s taking significant risks.

The eye of Iran

In a bid to quell the popular protest movement, the Iranian government has started blocking major internet platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp.

From her home in suburban Melbourne, Sahar began reaching out to demonstrators back in Iran and reposting their messages and videos, as a means of subverting government censorship.

She describes the power of the Iranian regime as “very scary”.

“I started broadcasting on my social media saying that I will be your voice because the government shut down the internet,” Sahar explains.

As dissidents back in Iran alerted her to allegations of police brutality, Sahar began publishing the names of officials involved, and outing them on her social media accounts.

“I posted one list of names that I had been sent. A list of names of officials with a series of videos.”

She continues to have family living in Iran, and knows all too well the risk they face because of her decision to continue speaking out.

She says officials have spoken to her sister, warning she could be taken into custody as a result of Sahar’s actions.

Her brother-in-law is a lecturer who was threatened that he could lose his job if she kept posting.

“They went to my parents and they said that you have to ask your daughter to stop,” Sahar said. “Last week three men visited my father and said they would burn his properties down if I didn’t stop.”

In the end, Sahar refused to post a fake confession. She says she has her family’s support, even in the face of serious risks.

“Even as a kid, every time that I was stressed at night I had this nightmare that I don’t have a voice. I want to talk, but I don’t have a voice,” she says.

“And now here in Australia, I found my voice.”

‘We need to take a stand’

The tactics she describes are consistent with a warning made by ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess earlier this year.

“Foreign governments will often monitor and intimidate members of diaspora communities who are critics of the foreign government or express views at odds with the regime’s policies,” he said in his annual threat assessment last February.

“It’s unacceptable that people who live in your street — and mine — might be subjected to the strongarm — and long arm — of a foreign state.”

Several Australian-Iranian protesters have told the ABC about how informants often attend anti-regime demonstrations in Australia and film the participants.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British expert on Islamic studies, agrees the domestic threat posed by the Iranian regime is real.

“I have had some of my events monitored by Iranian individuals in a suspicious way who’ve asked questions of other Iranian audience members at my events that were also highly suspicious,” she told Background Briefing.

“There are Iranian intelligence and also Iranians who are sympathetic to the regime who could provide information or inform on their compatriots in Australia, even if they’re not trained up members of the intelligence.”

From September 2018 to November 2020, Dr Moore-Gilbert was imprisoned in Iran on a charge of espionage after visiting the country to attend an academic conference.

She and the Australian government rejected the charges against her as baseless and politically motivated.

Like Sahar Gholizadeh, Dr Moore-Gilbert says it is important the Australian government stops doing trade with the Iranian government.

“We need to take a stand. We need to know what our values are,” Dr Moore-Gilbert said.

“It’s not good enough that we say, ‘Oh, we have trade interests,’ or ‘We have diplomatic interests maintaining good relations with Iran.'”

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson told Background Briefing it has raised its concerns directly with the Iranian embassy.

“The Australian Government strongly condemns the ongoing heavy-handed repression of protests by Iranian authorities,” the spokesperson said.

The Iranian embassy in Canberra did not respond to specific questions.

Instead, it provided a series of statements defending the government’s handling of the protests, saying a few violent rioters had turned the peaceful gatherings into “riots”, further egged on by terrorist groups.

The statements also accused the US and other Western countries of openly interfering in Iran’s domestic affairs.

The embassy denied the internet was shut down across Iran and said the restrictions in place were “completely limited and temporary” and only affected some platforms.

A recognisable face

In a statement announcing sanctions last month, the US government said the man responsible for the shutdown of Iran’s Internet access was Eisa Zarepour, Tehran’s minister of communications.

US treasury secretary Antony J Blinken condemned the censorship of the internet, arguing the US government acted “to advance internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people”.

Last month the European Union joined the United States in imposing sanctions, including travel bans and assets freezes, against Dr Zarepour. 

The Council of the EU said: “In his position, he played a key role in the Iranian government’s decision to systemically violate the Iranian people’s freedom of opinion and expression by imposing restrictions on internet access during the protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022.”

But before Dr Zarepour became the man the White House and the EU blamed for silencing Iranian voices, he was a talented student in Sydney’s UNSW Campus.

Between 2012 and 2015 he completed a PhD on nanotechnology at its Kensington campus, and even won an innovation award for his research there.

Sahar Gholizadeh is now calling on the Australian government to join its international partners in announcing sanctions against Iranian government figures.

A DFAT spokesperson told the ABC the Australian government would not comment publicly on potential sanctions.

The ABC contacted Dr Zarepour for a response.