a house church in Thran, a small group of mostly young people, many of them former Muslims, meeting in apartments that rotated regularly, sharing the Bible, worshiping Jesus together at great personal risk.

When I walked into that gathering for the first time, I was broken open.

I am not a man who cries easily, or I was not then.

But something about being in a room with other Iranians who had made the same journey, who understood the precise cost and the precise miracle of it, who were doing something so dangerous out of love for someone so real to them that broke through everything.

I attended these gatherings for 2 years while maintaining my mosque position and my public identity.

My wife did not know.

My children did not know.

I told myself I was protecting them by keeping them out of it, which was partly true, but I was also protecting myself and I knew it.

The end came in late 2010.

I do not know precisely who reported me.

In that system, suspicion spreads through quiet observation and quiet reporting, and anyone around you can become the source.

Not necessarily out of malice, but out of fear, or out of a complicated loyalty to the system, or simply because they were themselves under pressure and needed to give a name to survive.

It could have been someone at the mosque who had noticed something different in my sermons over the preceding months.

It could have been someone connected to the house church who was compromised.

It could have been someone in my extended family who had observed changes in me they could not explain and reported out of what they thought was concern.

I genuinely do not know.

What I know is that a trusted friend found a way to reach me with a warning in November of 2010.

The message was simple.

My name had been given to the intelligence services.

I had been identified as a convert.

The response was not going to be a conversation or a chance to recant.

The response was already decided.

I had hours, not days.

I need you to try to understand what it means to have a few hours to leave your life.

Everything you see when you look around your home, your books, your furniture, your photographs, the smell of your children’s rooms, the particular way the light falls in the kitchen in the morning.

All of it is about to be left permanently.

Siren, you know it.

And there is no time to grieve it and no way to explain it to the people you love the most.

My children were asleep.

I stood in the doorway of their room.

My son was 8 years old.

My daughter was five.

I stood there and I looked at them and I could not wake them because if they woke and made noise or if they were frightened and cried, every second of additional time in that apartment was a second closer to the people coming through the door.

I could not explain
and I could not say goodbye.

I just looked at them.

I left my wife a note short because there was no time and because the less she knew, the safer she was.

I told her I loved her and the children.

I told her I was in danger and that I had to go.

I told her the less she knew, the better.

I told her I was sorry.

I asked her to take care of our children.

I put the note somewhere she would find it after I was gone and not before.

I took almost nothing.

Some cash I had been quietly accumulating over the preceding months.

A kind of preparation I’d been making without fully admitting to myself what I was preparing for.

my identity documents and my small farsy bible which had started all of this.

The journey out of Iran took several weeks.

It moved through difficult terrain and dangerous conditions and required help from people I will not name and will not describe in any identifying way.

I crossed into Turkey.

I made my way to Istanbul.

From there, through a process of registration with international organizations and through the help of Christian networks that specifically assist people in exactly my situation, I was eventually processed and resettled in Germany.

I arrived in 2012.

I was 41 years old.

I had no German.

I had a small bag of almost nothing.

I had left behind a wife, two children, a career, an identity, a country, a family in Mashhad who did not know what had happened to me, and a life that had taken 41 years to build in less than one night to leave.

What I also had, and what I want to say clearly and without embellishment, because it is the most important fact about this part of the story, was Jesus.

Not as a feeling, not as a comfort I was constructing for myself in the absence of everything else, but as a presence, real, consistent, present in the exhaustion and the grief and the loneliness and the cold.

Present in the small German apartment and the confusion of the language and the months of processing and paperwork and the ache of separation from my children.

He was there every morning, every night.

In the prayers I said quietly before I slept.

In the psalms I read when I had no words of my own.

In the faces of the Iranian Christian community I eventually found in the city where I was placed.

People who became my family in the years that followed.

I want to tell you something about exile.

People who have not experienced it.

sometimes romanticize it as freedom, as escape.

It is neither.

It is a specific kind of grief that does not fully resolve.

You carry your country inside you like a wound that heals over but never disappears.

You carry your children in photographs that someone occasionally manages to get to you.

You watch them grow up in small images on a phone screen.

A son who looks more like you every year.

A daughter whose smile you last saw when she was 5 years old.

You dream in Farsy that you wake up in Germany.

Every morning is a small reminder of the distance between where you are and where you belong.

But God was in it.

I want to say that with the same plainness I am saying everything else.

Not every day felt like God was in it because I am a human being and some days just feel like loss.

But when I look back over those 14 years from 2012 to 2026, what I see is a thread, a continuous thread of presence and provision and preparation.

The community that became my family.

The work I found helping other refugees that gave my days structure and meaning.

The prayer life that went deeper in exile than it had ever gone when I was living a comfortable double life.

The slow process of becoming honest, of becoming the same person inside and outside, of having nothing to hide or perform.

There was a grace in the stripping.

A painful, costly, real grace, but grace.

I turned 50 in 2021.

I had been in Germany 9 years.

I had German citizenship by then.

I had a small but real life.

And I prayed every single day for Iran, for my children, for the converts in the house churches, for the country that I loved and that had tried to destroy me.

Every day the same prayer.

God be with Iran.

God do not forget Iran.

God have mercy on Iran.

What I did not know in those years of daily prayer is that the answer was already being prepared.

And that part of it was going to come through me in a way I could never have anticipated.

By February of 2026, I had been in Germany for 14 years, and my life had settled into a shape that I was grateful for, even though gratitude and grief often sat together in my chest without canceling each other out.

Though I was 54 years old, my German was good.

I had built something real from almost nothing, which is something I do not say to congratulate myself, but to acknowledge the mercy in it, because I had arrived in this country with next to nothing, and with a grief so heavy I was not always sure I would survive it.

Survival had come.

And more than survival, I had a small apartment that felt like home in the quiet, accumulated way that places become home when you have lived honestly inside them for long enough.

I had work I found meaningful.

a part-time position with a nonprofit connected to a church, helping newly arrived refugees, mostly Iranians and Afghans, navigate the early chaos of resettlement.

The work put me in the path of people who were where I had been 14 years earlier, frightened and disoriented and carrying enormous loss.

And I could be useful to them in specific ways that came from having been exactly there myself.

I had a community, a group of Iranian Christians, some of them exiles like me, some of them second generation Iranians who had grown up in Germany.

All of them people who carried Iran in a particular way.

We met regularly.

We prayed together.

We ate together.

We sat with each other through the hard things that exile and displacement and longing for home produc in people over time.

These people were my family in the truest functional sense of that word.

Not the family I was born into, most of whom I had been unable to contact safely for years, but the family I had been given.

I was deeply grateful for them.

I stayed in contact with my children through whatever means were possible and safe.

And the channels for this shifted over the years as the situation inside Iran evolved.

Sometimes I had more access, sometimes less.

I had photographs.

I had occasional messages relayed through people I trusted.

My son was 23 years old by 2026.

My daughter was 20.

They had grown up without me.

I had missed all of it.

The graduations, the ordinary dinners, the arguments, the moments that make up the texture of a childhood.

I missed all of it.

And I knew I had missed it.

And that knowledge was a companion I had learned to carry without letting it crush me mostly.

I knew about the broader situation in Iran through the extensive networks of communication that the Iranian diaspora maintains.

We were always talking to each other, always sharing news and analysis side always trying to understand what was happening inside the country through the fragments that got out despite the regime’s efforts to control information.

The year 2025 had been volatile inside Iran.

There had been more protests, more crackdowns, more young people being killed or imprisoned for the crime of wanting a different country.

The economy had continued its long deterioration.

The regime had continued its long pattern of responding to every crisis with more repression and more religious justification for the repression.

The house church movement, by all accounts that reached us, had continued to grow despite everything done to stop it.

The underground Christianity was not small anymore.

It was enormous, a running through Iranian society like a river beneath the surface that no amount of concrete poured on top of it had been able to stop.

Kam himself had appeared increasingly unwell in the months before February 2026.

There had been rumors for years about his health, and in the final months, the photographs that were released officially looked different.

He was thinner.

There was something in his appearance that told a story the regime was not interested in telling publicly.

The question of succession had been an open wound in Iranian politics for years.

Kam had never officially designated a successor.

The mechanisms for choosing a new supreme leader were deliberately vague in ways that gave the most powerful factions, primarily the revolutionary guard, enormous latitude to shape the outcome.

None of this prepared me for February 28th.

I was at work that morning.

It was a Thursday.

I was sitting at my desk reviewing paperwork for a family that had arrived from Afghanistan the previous week when my phone began producing the specific pattern of vibrations that tells you something large has happened in the world.

In exile communities, news arrives in a particular sequence.

The first signal is always fragments.

A voice note, a short message without explanation, someone forwarding something without commentary because the thing itself is too big for commentary.

Then the fragments multiply and the picture assembles itself piece by piece in the space of minutes.

I stepped outside the office building into the cold February air of the German morning and I looked at my phone.

Kamina had been killed.

Israeli air strikes.

Thran confirmed dead.

I stood on the pavement and I read the messages and I did not move.

I’m not sure for how long.

long enough that a colleague who passed by on the pavement looked at my face and asked if I was all right.

And I said yes without being certain it was true.

Let me try to tell you what that information did to me because it was not simple and it was not what most people might expect.

People who have not been hunted by a regime, who have not had their lives destroyed by one, who have not lost their children and their country to one, might assume that the death of the man responsible would produce something clean and clear.

Something like justice arrived, something like relief or vindication or even joy.

I want to be honest with you.

None of those things came, at least not in any pure form.

What came instead was something more like a tremor.

Kam was not simply a man I hated, though I had very good reasons to hate him.

He was the defining structure of the entire world I had been formed in.

He had been the supreme authority of the Islamic Republic since I was 18 years old.

Every year of my formation in K had happened under his authority.

Every sermon I gave in the mosque in Thran had been given within the framework of legitimacy his position provided.

Every harsh thing the system did to people including to people like me had been done with his authority and in many cases with his direct sanction.

He was woven into the fabric of my entire history as the man I had served and then as the man who had hunted me.

And the announcement of his death was like a piece of the fabric of the world being removed.

And not a pleasant removal, a disorienting one.

I went back inside, but I was not able to work.

My colleague, a German woman who knew something of my background, looked at my face and told me to go home.

She did not need more information than my face provided.

I went home and I sat down in front of my television and I began watching.

The international news channels were covering the story with the incomplete patchy information that was coming in from multiple sources.

The Iranian state channels were in a visible state of institutional shock.

The anchors doing what state media anchors always do in those situations, reading scripted statements in controlled voices while clearly not knowing what the full picture was.

But social media was something else entirely.

The footage coming out of Iranian cities filmed by ordinary people at great risk to themselves and transmitted out through VPNs and encrypted channels was something I watched for hours and could not stop watching.

People were in the streets and what I saw in those streets was not one thing.

I saw grief.

There were people, particularly in the more religiously conservative areas, who were genuinely and deeply grieving.

This man had been their religious authority for decades.

He had been the person through whom they understood God’s will and God’s order.

His death was not just a political event to them.

It was a rupture in the fabric of how they understood the world.

I did not mock that grief.

I understood it because I had once been a version of that person.

But I also saw something else.

And this is what I watched with tears running down my face for reasons I could not have fully articulated to anyone standing beside me.

I saw people celebrating, young people mostly, the generation that had grown up under Kam and had been beaten in the streets and imprisoned and killed and silenced and watched their friends disappear and their futures shrink to nothing inside the system he built.

These young people were in the streets, not performing celebration for a camera, but actually celebrating.

Music was being played in public.

Women were removing their headscarves in public places in broad daylight.

People were embracing strangers.

Some were crying, but not with grief.

with something else that I recognized from a place so deep in me I did not have immediate access to the word for it.

They were crying with relief uh with the overwhelming recognition that something they had not fully believed they would live to see had happened in front of them.

I cried with them by myself in my apartment in Germany.

I sat and watched the footage and cried.

I cried for the ones who had waited for this and not survived the waiting.

For the woman killed in 2022, whose death set off a movement and whose name had become a rallying cry.

For the people who died in the streets during the protests that followed her.

For the people who were in prison when this news broke and who heard it through the walls from guards who could not fully contain what was happening outside.

For the house church believers who had been meeting in rotating apartments for years with their hearts in their throats.

For the man in the room in 2004 who had shown me a piece I could not explain.

for my own years of hiding and running and losing.

I called a friend of mine in the Netherlands, an Iranian Christian man who had fled several years after me and who had become one of the people I was closest to in the diaspora.

We talked for a long time.

We did not analyze.

We did not make political predictions.

We mostly just stayed on the phone together and let the enormity of the day be what it was.

Two men who had each lost everything to the system that had just lost its head.

Sitting together in the weight of it.

He said to me at one point that he had been praying every day for 20 years and that days like this were why.

I agreed.

The calls and messages continued throughout the day.

Iranians from across Europe, from North America, from Australia, members of our community here in Germany, friends from comm who had found me over the years and with whom I had maintained careful contact, people still inside Iran who were watching their streets transform in real time and who needed to share what they were seeing with someone outside.

One woman called me, someone I had helped resettle 3 years earlier.

A woman who had lost a brother in the crackdowns of 2019.

She was crying so hard when I answered that it took several minutes before she could form a sentence.

She said her brother’s name.

She said he should have been alive to see this.

We stayed on the phone for a long time.

I ate something in the evening.

I could not tell you what.

I sat with the television still on, but the volume turned low.

I read the Psalms for a while, which is always where I go when my own words have run out.

I prayed something simple and direct.

I asked God to be with Iran to protect the people in those streets to cover the young people who were celebrating in public and who were still in a country where the mechanisms of repression had not yet fully collapsed.

I asked him to have mercy on the grieving.

I asked him to do whatever it was he was going to do with this moment in history and to do it with the mercy I had learned to expect from him.

I do not know exactly when I fell asleep sometime after 10:00 in the evening.

I think I had moved from the chair to the couch at some point without intending to.

The television was still going, the images still changing, the world still processing what had happened that day.

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