I gave the orders.

I watched cities burn.

I told myself it was holy.

Then Jesus walked into my darkness and called me by name.

They told me I was a soldier of God.

But the night my heart is stopped, God showed me who I was really serving.

What I saw on the other side of death destroyed everything I believed.

Stay with me because what happened next changed not just my life, but the lives of thousands watching that night.

My name is Davar Husseini.

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I am 33 years old and I was born in Thran, Iran.

Today I am speaking to you from an undisclosed location in Western Europe.

I was a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Cors.

I carried weapons.

I gave orders that ended lives and I did all of it believing with every bone in my body that I was serving the will of God.

This is the story of how Jesus Christ proved me wrong.

I did not choose the IRGC.

The IRGC chose me.

That is the honest truth of how it begins for most young men in Iran.

You do not wake up one morning and decide to become a soldier of the Islamic Republic.

You grow up inside a system that shapes every thought you have, every prayer you say, every dream you are allowed to dream.

By the time you are old enough to make choices for yourself, you have already been made into something, something useful to the state, something dangerous to the world outside.

I was born in 1991 in a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Thyran.

My father, Mean Husini, was a civil engineer who worked for the city government.

He was a quiet man who went to the mosque every Friday and paid his taxes and kept his opinions to himself.

He had learned early in life that the safest way to survive in the Islamic Republic was to stay small and stay silent.

He never criticized the government.

He never asked questions that might attract attention.

He did his job and came home and ate dinner with his family and went to bed.

He was not a brave man, but he was a good man who loved us the only way he knew how.

My mother, Nasarin, was different.

She was passionate and loud and deeply religious in a way that went far beyond simply following the rules.

She prayed five times a day without fail.

She fasted through Ramadan with a discipline that I have never seen matched by anyone else in my life.

She read the Quran constantly and she believed every word of it with an intensity that filled our entire home with the weight of her conviction.

She did not just practice Islam.

She breathed it.

She lived inside it the way other people live inside their own skin.

From the time I was old enough to understand words, my mother taught me that we were part of something larger than ourselves.

She taught me that the Islamic Republic was not just a government.

It was the fulfillment of a divine promise.

She taught me that the Supreme Leader was guided by God himself in his decisions.

She taught me that Iran was surrounded by enemies who wanted to destroy Islam and that every faithful Muslim had a duty to stand against those enemies with whatever they had.

She filled my head with these ideas the way you fill a container with water completely until there was no room for anything else.

I was a serious student in school.

I was good at mathematics and science and I had the kind of focused mind that teachers noticed and remembered.

When I was 15, one of my teachers recommended me for a program run by the Bazi, which was the youth paramilitary organization connected to the IRGC.

The program was presented as an honor, a recognition of talent and dedication.

My mother cried with pride when she heard the news.

My father said nothing, which in our house meant the same as approval.

The passage program was where they began building the soldier inside me.

We trained in the mornings before school started.

We ran and did physical exercises and learned basic military drills.

We studied the history of the Islamic Revolution and the life of Imam Kumeni and the theology of resistance against America and Israel.

We were taught that the greatest enemies of Islam were not just foreign armies but also the corruptest values of western culture that were trying to infect Muslim minds through movies and music and social media.

We were taught that a true believer had to be on guard every moment against these invisible enemies as much as against visible ones.

By the time I was 18, I had been so thoroughly shaped by this system that joining the IRGC full-time felt less like a decision and more like the natural next step in a path that had already been laid out for me.

I signed my papers in the spring of 2009, the same year that millions of Iranians poured into the streets to protest the disputed presidential election.

While those protesters were being beaten in the streets by security forces, I was in a training camp learning how to become one of those security forces.

I did not see the contradiction at the time.

I had been taught not to see it.

My training was intense in ways that I did not fully understand until years later when I had enough distance to look back honestly.

They did not just train our bodies.

They trained our minds in a very specific direction.

They taught us to identify the enemy in every phase that did not look like ours.

They taught us that doubt was a form of weakness and weakness was a form of betrayal.

They taught us that the orders of the commanders came from God through the supreme leader and that questioning those orders was the same as questioning God himself.

They made obedience feel like worship.

They made violence feel like prayer.

I rose through the ranks quickly because I was intelligent and disciplined and completely committed.

By the time I was 25, I was already a midlevel commander overseeing a unit of 40 men.

We were stationed primarily in western Iran near the Iraqi border, but we also conducted operations in Syria when the civil war there began pulling Iranian forces deeper into the conflict.

Syria was where I first understood what war actually looked like up close.

Not the clean heroic version I had been taught about in training.

The real version with real bodies and real blood and real families sitting in the rubble of buildings that used to be their homes.

I remember the first time I led my unit into a Syrian village that had been held by opposition forces.

We had been told that the village was a stronghold of terrorists backed by foreign enemies who wanted to destroy the legitimate government.

We had been told that the people supporting these terrorists were enemies of God and that clearing the village was a sacred mission.

So we went in with our weapons and our certainty and we did what we had been told to do.

What I found in that village was not what I had been told I would find.

I found families.

I found old men who could barely walk and women holding babies and children who ran away from screaming because they were terrified.

I found a school that had already been partially destroyed by bombing.

I found a mosque where ordinary people had been praying, not planning attacks.

I found evidence of ordinary human life that had been shattered by a war that these people had not started and did not want.

I pushed what I saw in that village into the back of my mind the same way I had been trained to push uncomfortable things.

I told myself that what I felt looking at those terrified faces was a weakness that I needed to overcome.

I told myself that my commanders had information I did not have.

I told myself that the bigger picture justified the actions we were taking on the ground.

I told myself every comforting lie I had been given the tools to tell.

and I continued doing my job, but the village stayed with me.

It lived in a corner of my mind that I could not fully shut off no matter how hard I tried.

It appeared in my dreams at night when my guard was down.

It sent questions whispering through my head during quiet moments that I could not silence completely.

What if we were wrong? What if what I had been told about who the enemies were was not the full truth? What if the certainty I felt about everything was not the same as being right? I buried those questions under more training and more missions and more promotions.

By the time I was 30, I was a senior commander with significant responsibilities.

I had men under my command who trusted me completely.

I had superiors who valued my effectiveness and my loyalty.

I had a reputation within the IRGC as someone who got things done without hesitation and without complaint.

I was exactly what the system had designed me to be and I was completely lost.

The year I turned in 31 was when everything began to crack.

It started with a mission that I am not going to describe in a specific detail because the details are not what matter for this testimony.

What matters is what happened inside me as a result.

I was given an order that required me to authorize an action that I knew would result in civilian casualties.

Not possibly.

Not as an unfortunate side effect that we were trying to avoid deliberately.

The intelligence report I received made it clear that the target was a location used by both combatants and civilians.

My commanders knew this.

They authorized the mission anyway.

And then they passed that authorization down to me and expected me to pass it down to my men.

I remember sitting alone in my quarters the night before the mission was scheduled.

The room was small and plain in the way that military quarters always are.

There was a metal framed bed and a small desk and a single window that looked out onto a concrete yard lit by security lights.

I sat at that desk with the mission file in front of me and I felt something I had not felt in years.

I felt afraid, not afraid of physical danger.

I had been in physical danger many times and I had learned to manage that kind of fear.

This was a different kind of fear.

This was the fear of a man who is beginning to suspect that everything he has built his life on might be wrong.

I prayed that night.

I prayed the way I had always prayed in Arabic with the words I had memorized as a child, facing in the direction I had always been told to face.

But the words felt hollow in a way they never had before.

I was asking God to bless a mission that I was no longer sure God would bless.

I was asking for divine protection for anam action that I was no longer sure deserve it divine protection.

I finished my prayer and I went to sleep and in the morning I gave the order and the mission went ahead and people died who should not have died and I added that to the collection of things I was carrying in the back of my mind where the uncomfortable truths lived.

After that mission, something shifted in me that I could not shift back.

The questions that I had been suppressing for years began coming more frequently and with more force.

I started noticing things that I had previously looked past.

I noticed the fear on the faces of ordinary people whenever I RGC units moved through civilian areas.

I noticed the way the language we used in our briefings was specifically designed to dehumanize the people on the other side of our operations.

I noticed that the religious justifications offered by the clerics attached to our units seemed to be constructed after the fact to justify decisions that had already been made for political reasons rather than theological ones.

I began reading more, not the approved texts and the approved interpretations that I had been consuming my entire life.

I started seeking out information that I had previously been trained to dismiss as enemy propaganda.

I read accounts from civilians who had experienced the conflicts I had been part of from the other side.

I read historical analyses that told a more complicated story than the simple narrative of faithful Muslims defending themselves against evil Western and Zionist forces.

I read perspectives from Islamic scholars who interpreted the same texts I had been taught completely differently.

None of this was safe reading for a man in my position.

I kept it hidden.

I deleted browser histories.

I used encrypted applications.

I was careful in the way that anyone inside a surveillance state learns to be careful when they begin thinking thoughts that the state does not approve of.

But I kept reading because I could not stop.

The questions were too loud now to answer with silence.

The loneliness of that period is something I find very difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it.

I was surrounded by men every day.

I commanded a unit of soldiers who respected me and followed my orders without question.

I had colleagues and friends I had known for years.

I attended dinners and meeting and briefings.

My days were full of human contact.

But I was completely alone because the thing happening inside me was something I could not share with a single person in my life without risking everything.

My wife Sharin noticed that something was wrong.

She was a quiet and perceptive woman who had grown up in a religious family in Isfahan and who loved me genuinely even though our marriage had been largely arranged through family connections in the traditional way.

She would watch me sometimes across the dinner table with a look in her eyes that told me she could see that I was troubled.

She asked me once gently whether everything was all right.

Now I told her I was tired from work.

She accepted this answer, but I could tell she did not entirely believe it.

I had two children by this point.

My son Arman was 7 years old and my daughter Sabah was four.

They were the purest joy in my life during those dark years.

When I came home from missions that had left stains on my conscience that no amount of official justification could remove, I would go into their room while they were sleeping.

And I would stand in the doorway looking at their small faces in the dark.

Something about seeing them sleeping so peacefully and so innocently broke something open in my chest that all the ideological training in the world could not seal shut again.

I thought about those children in the Syrian village.

I thought about them every time I looked at Arman and Sabah.

I thought about what their parents must have felt looking at their sleeping faces before the night our unit came through.

I thought about whether those children were still alive.

I thought about whether their parents were still alive.

I thought about what kind of man I had become that I could carry these thoughts and still put on my uniform and go back to work every morning.

The answer of course was that I had become exactly the kind of man the system wanted me to be.

Effective, obedient, productive, dangerous.

A man who had learned to separate the part of himself that felt things from the part of himself that did things.

A man who had been so thoroughly trained in the art of suppression that he could commit violence with his hands while his heart screamed somewhere in a locked room where no one could hear it.

But but the locked room was getting louder and the key was getting harder to find.

It was during this period of internal crisis that I first encountered content from Christian satellite channels.

I was not looking for Christianity.

I was not searching for Jesus.

I was not open to any kind of religious conversion.

I was a Muslim man born into a Muslim country inside a Muslim military structure.

Jesus was not a figure I associated with anything relevant to my life.

He was a prophet in our tradition, respected but distant, a historical figure who had come and gone long before the revelation of the Quran.

He was not someone I expected to hear from.

But I was desperate for something real.

I was exhausted by the performance of faith I had been maintaining my entire life.

I wanted to hear someone speak about GD in a way that did not feel like it was being used to justify a political agenda.

I wanted to find something that had not been weaponized.

I stumbled onto a Persian language Christian broadcast late one night while searching online for something I cannot even remember now.

A man was speaking directly into the camera in Farsy with a calm and gentleness that stopped me from clicking away.

He was not angry.

He was not performing for an audience.

He was just talking about the love of God in a way that felt entirely different from anything I had ever heard inside the Islamic Republic.

He was talking about forgiveness.

Not forgiveness you had to earn through prayer and sacrifice and approved behavior.

Free forgiveness, undeserved forgiveness.

Forgiveness that came not because of what you had done, but because of what Jesus had done.

I watched it for 20 minutes.

Then I closed the browser and went to bed and told myself I would not think about it again.

But I thought about it again.

Every night for a week, I kept coming back to that same channel.

I watched other broadcasts.

I heard other testimonies.

I heard Iranians like me, people from my world who knew the language and the culture and the religious context speaking about encountering Jesus in ways that were impossible and impossible to dismiss.

At the same time, I heard former Muslims describing experiences of encountering a presence and a love that had shattered their understanding of who God was.

I listened and I pushed it away and I came back and I listened again.

I did not become a Christian that month.

I was not ready for that.

I was still a serving RGC commander.

I was still going to briefings and giving orders and wearing my uniform.

But something had been opened in me that I no longer had the ability to close.

A door had appeared in the wall of my locked room and light was coming through the crack.

The mission that finally broke me happened in the spring of my 32nd year.

I am not going to give you the specific location or the specific target because that information could still put people in danger.

What I will tell you is that I was assigned to lead a crossber intelligence operation that had been planned at the highest levels of the IRGC.

The operation involved coordinating with a proxy group in a neighboring country to eliminate a group of individuals that our intelligence had identified as threats to Iranian interests.

I had led operations like this before.

I understood what was being asked of me.

I had done it before and told myself it was justified and gone home and slept.

But this time in the days before the operation, I received information through a back channel from someone inside our own intelligence apparatus that several of the individuals on our target list were not combatants or operatives.

They were family members of a man who had spoken publicly against the Iranian government while living in exile.

The message I received told me that the operation had been expanded to include them as a warning, as a message sent to anyone else who might be thinking about speaking out.

They were not soldiers.

They were not threats to Iranian security in any military sense.

They were a man’s family, a mother, two brothers, a teenage nephew.

I cannot tell you the name of the man whose family was on that list because doing so would endanger people who are still living.

What I can tell you is that when I read those names and understood what I was being asked to authorize, something inside me that had been cracking for 2 years finally split completely open.

I did not sleep the night before that operation.

I lay in my bunk in the dark and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about Arman and Sabah sleeping in their beds at home in Thran.

I thought about the Syrian village and the faces I had seen there.

I thought about every mission and every order and every official justification I had ever accepted for actions that part of me had always known were wrong.

I thought about the man on that Perian Christian broadcast talking about forgiveness.

I thought about Jesus asking a question I could not answer.

Not yet.

But I could feel it forming in the air around me like something alive.

At some point in the early hours of the morning, I got out of my bunk and I went to the small desk in my quarters and I sat down and I did something I had never done before in my military career.

I wrote a report, not an official report, a private one.

I wrote down everything I knew about the expansion of the target list and why the civilians had been added and who had given the order.

Though I wrote it clearly and in detail, and I sealed it in an envelope, and I addressed it to the only person I trusted outside the IRGC, a cousin who lived in the Germany, who had no connection to the military or the government.

I wrote his address on the outside and I put it in my jacket pocket.

Then I went back to my bunk and I lay down again and I thought about what I had just done.

I had just created the most dangerous document of my life.

I had just committed what the IRGC would consider treason.

If that envelope was ever found, I would be imprisoned or executed.

My family would be punished.

Everything would fall apart.

But I could not make myself destroy it because destroying it felt like being complicit in what was about to happen to those people.

And I had already been complicit in too many things for too many years.

I did not lead the operation that day.

I reported to my commanding officer that I had developed a severe fever overnight and was physically unable to execute my duties.

He was annoyed.

He assigned the operation to another commander.

The mission went ahead without me.

The people on that expanded list, the civilians whose names I had seen were killed as planned.

Their deaths were reported internally as the successful neutralization of security threats.

No one outside the operation knew who they really were.

I was back on duty 3 days later as if nothing had happened.

I attended briefings.

I reviewed reports.

I shook hands with colleagues.

I functioned.

But inside I was already gone.

The man who had signed up for the IRGC at 18 and built his life inside that structure was no longer there.

He had dissolved during those three days into something new that had not yet found its shape.

I began the process of extracting myself from the system with the kind of patience and care that the situation required.

I did not make sudden moves.

I did not say anything out of place.

I continued performing my duties adequately, not exceptionally because I needed to reduce my visibility without triggering suspicion.

I began quietly shifting personal assets.

I made careful contact with my cousin in Germany, not mentioning the envelope directly, but letting him know that I might need assistance in the coming months.

I began laying groundwork so quietly and so carefully that even now I am not comfortable describing all the details of how it was done.

What I will tell you about is what happened to me spiritually during those months because that is the part of this story that matters most.

The night of the mission, I had refused to lead.

I went back to the Christian broadcasts online.

This time, I did not close the browser after 20 minutes.

I watched for hours.

I found testimonies from former military men, former members of radical groups, former people who had done terrible things and who had encountered Jesus and been changed.

I found a Farsy speaking pastor who taught through the Gospel of John verse by verse with a clarity and a love that made me want to keep listening.

I started finding the specific passages in the Bible that addressed the things I was carrying.

I came across the story of Paul in the New Testament.

A man who had been a persecutor of Christians.

A man who had given his approval to violence against people he believed were enemies of God.

a man who was stopped on a road by a blinding light and a voice that asked him why he was persecuting innocent people.

And I sat in my military quarters in a base somewhere on the border of a country I had helped destabilize.

And I read this story in secret on an encrypted browser and I felt something happen in my chest that I did not have words for.

I was Paul.

I had been Paul my entire career.

I had been a sincere, committed, effective persecutor who believed he was doing God’s work.

And the question that had been forming in the air around me for months finally arrived in full, not as a whisper anymore, as something clear and direct and personal, as something that felt like it was being asked specifically to me.

Davar, why are you persecuting my children? I was alone in my quarters when that happened.

It was close to midnight.

I had not been drinking because I did not drink.

I was not dreaming because I was not asleep.

I was sitting at my desk in a plain military room reading words on a screen.

And those words reached off the screen and into my chest and grabbed something that had not been touched in 32 years of living.

I did not see a vision that night.

I did not have a near-death experience.

What I had was something quieter and in some ways more overwhelming because it was so completely clear.

It was a certainty that arrived without my permission.

The same way you cannot choose not to recognize a face.

You know, I recognized something true in that moment that I could not unrecognize.

Jesus was real.

Not a prophet who had come and gone.

Not a historical figure.

real present looking at me through those words on the screen and through the years of darkness I had been living in.

And he was not looking at me with the anger I deserved.

He was looking at me with something that I did not have a frame of reference for at that point in my life.

I had to find the word for it later.

In a Bible passage that someone showed me, the word was grace.

I sat at that desk and I wept for the first time since I was a child.

not the controlled permitted grief of a man who cries at the right moments in the right ways.

I wept like someone who had been holding his breath underwater for 32 years and had just broken the surface.

I wept for the people I had helped to harm.

I wept for the man I had become.

I wept because something was being offered to me in that moment that I had absolutely no right to receive and I could feel it being offered anyway.

I did not know exactly how to pray to Jesus.

I had never been taught.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I used plain words.

I said out loud in a whisper so that no one outside my room could hear.

Jesus, if you are real, I am sorry.

I am sorry for everything.

I want to follow you.

I do not know how.

Please show me.

That was my prayer.

Broken and incomplete and theologically unpolished.

But it was the most honest prayer I had offered in 32 years of life.

And something changed in the room after I said it.

I cannot prove this to you.

And I am not asking you to take it on faith without your own search.

But the weight that had been sitting on my chest for 2 years lifted.

Not completely, not permanently in that single moment, but enough.

Enough that I could breathe.

Enough that I knew something real had happened.

I fell asleep at my desk that night with the Bible app still open on my screen.

Getting out of Iran took eight months from the night I prayed at my desk.

Every week of those eight months required me to maintain a performance of normaly that exhausted me more than any physical mission I had ever undertaken.

I went to briefings.

I reviewed reports.

I attended official ceremonies.

I shook the hands of men I was planning to leave behind.

I smiled and spoke the expected words and gave the expected responses and all the while I was quietly, carefully, piece by piece building my way out.

My biggest fear during those months was not being caught by the intelligence services.

Though that fear was real and constant, my biggest fear was what was going to happen to Sharon and Arman and Sabah.

I could not bring them into my planning without risking everything.

If Sharon knew what I was doing and said something to her family or to anyone in our social circle, the consequences would be immediate and severe.

I had to protect her by keeping her unaware, which meant I also had to live with the knowledge that when I left, she would feel abandoned.

She would feel betrayed.

She would face questions from authorities that she would not be able to answer because she genuinely would not know the answers.

I have lived with that choice every day since I made it.

I do not ask for sympathy about it.

I made a decision that caused enormous pain to people I love.

I have to own that completely.

The route I took out of Iran went through the northwestern border which I will not describe in further detail.

I traveled with documents that identified me as a civilian businessman.

I left in early spring crossing into Turkey on a cold morning when the mountains between the two countries were still partly covered in snow.

I carried one bag.

Inside it was a change of clothes, some cash, my encrypted phone, and a small printed copy of the Gospel of John that one of the underground believers in Thrron had given me through a contact I had carefully developed during my last months in the country.

When I crossed that border, I sat down on the Turkish side in the cold morning air and I prayed properly this time with more words and more understanding than the broken whisper at my desk 8 months earlier.

I thanked Jesus for getting me out.

I asked him to protect my family.

I asked him to guide whatever came next.

And I made a promise that I have been trying to keep ever since.

I promised that if he gave me a platform to speak, I would not waste it on anything except the truth.

I made my way to Istanbul and then to the Netherlands where I applied for asylum and was connected with a network of Iranian Christian believers in exile who had been helping people like me find their footing in a completely new world.

The pastor who received me was a man who had himself left Iran 15 years earlier after being imprisoned for his faith.

He was patient and wise in the way that only people who have suffered can be.

He did not push me.

He gave me space to process what I had come from.

He gave me a community of people who welcomed me without requiring me to be anything other than what I was.

A broken man trying to find his way towards something true.

I spent my first year in the Netherlands in a state that I can only describe as spiritual reconstruction.

Everything I had known had been dismantled and I was learning to build a new understanding of God, of myself, of history, of everything from the ground up.

I read the entire Bible.

I asked endless questions.

I sat with other Iranian believers and we prayed together and wept together and laughed together in a way I had never experienced in any religious community I had been part of before.

The Islam of my upbringing had never given me this.

It had given me rules and obligations and a role to play.

This gave me relationship.

It gave me family.

My faith deepened month by month in ways I could feel.

The grace that had reached out and grabbed me at my military desk became something I understood more fully.

The forgiveness that Jesus offered was not abstract theology.

It was personal.

It was specific.

It applied to specific actions I had taken and the specific people I had harmed and the specific orders I had given.

And it was real, completely real.

Not because I deserved it, but because of what Jesus had done on the cross, which I came to understand as the most important event in human history.

Reconnecting with my family was the hardest part of the new life.

My wife Sharon eventually received a message from me through a trusted intermediary explaining that I was alive and safe and that I had left Iran because I had no choice.

I could not yet tell her about my conversion because I did not know how she would respond and because any communication that was intercepted could endanger her.

She was angry.

She was deeply hurt.

She thought I had broken our family for reasons she could not understand.

She was managing questions from IRGC contacts about my disappearance and trying to shield Arman and Sabah from the pressure of it all.

She was doing all of this alone and I was not there and there was nothing I could say through a carefully worded message that could make that okay.

Arman, my son, sent me a message through the intermediary that was short and direct.

He said that he had told his friend at school that his father was away on a long work mission.

He said he was waiting for me to come home.

That message was the hardest thing I read in those years.

My son was covering for me with his friends.

My seven-year-old was carrying the weight of my absence with a loyalty that I had not earned.

My daughter Sabah was too young to send messages.

But Sharon told me she still slept with a stuffed animal I had given her when she was two.

She carried it everywhere.

That detail came through in one of Sharon’s later messages when her anger had softened slightly into something more complicated.

She told me that Sabah asked it for me every night before she went to sleep and that she could not always find the right words to answer her.

I prayed for my family every single day.

I still do.

I asked Jesus to protect them and to open a way for us to be together again.

I asked him to reach Sharon the way he had reached me.

I asked him to let Arman and Saba grow up knowing their father was not a man who had abandoned them out of cowardice, but a man who had been changed so completely by something true that staying had become impossible.

The decision to go public came in my second year in the Netherlands.

I had been meeting regularly with a Persian Christian ministry that produced live broadcasts watched by Iranians across the diaspora and inside Iran itself through illegal satellite access.

The producer, a woman named Mariam, who had been broadcasting Persian Christian programming for over a decade, had heard part of my story through the network of believers I was connected to.

She came to me and sat across from me and she asked me directly if I would be willing to share my testimony on live television.

I told her I needed to think about it.

I knew what going public meant.

The IRGC would move against me.

Whatever protection my low profile had given me in Europe would be gone.

My family inside Iran would face intensified pressure.

There were people who had helped me get out whose safety could be compromised if my story was told in too much detail.

There were real significant physical dangers attached to every word I might say on camera.

I prayed about it for 3 weeks.

I talked to my pastor.

I talked to other Iranian believers who had gone public with their stories and who helped me understand both the costs and the impact of doing so.

I read the passage in Luke where Jesus says that whoever is ashamed of him before men will find that he himself will be ashamed of them before the angels of God.

And I read the passage in John where Jesus says that the truth will set you free.

I had been set free by the truth.

The question was whether I was willing to offer that freedom to others at cost to myself.

3 weeks after Miriam first asked me, I told her yes.

The preparation for the broadcast took six weeks.

Security arrangements were made to protect my physical location.

The production team set up a studio in a secure building.

Legal advisers reviewed what I could and could not say publicly without creating liability issues or endangering specific individuals still inside Iran.

I was briefed on what to expect during a live broadcast that would reach tens of thousands of viewers in real time.

On the night of the broadcast, I sat in a chair in front of a camera and I looked at the lens and I felt something I did not expect to feel.

Peace.

Not the absence of fear.

I was afraid.

My hands were trembling slightly and I had barely slept the night before.

But underneath the fear, there was a foundation of complete stillness that I recognized from that night at my desk in my military quarters.

the same presence, the same certainty that this was exactly where I was supposed to be.

The broadcast went live.

The producer in my earpiece told me that 25,000 viewers had connected in the first 3 minutes.

By the time I finished speaking 2 hours later, that number had climbed higher.

I told them everything.

I told them about growing up in Thran and the Bas program and the IRGC training that had shaped me into a tool of the state.

I told them about Syria and the missions that had left marks on my conscience that official justifications could not remove.

I told them about the night I read the target list that included civilians and what had broken in me when I did.

I told them about the months of doubt and the encrypted browser and the Persian Christian broadcasts that I had watched in secret.

I told them about praying a broken prayer at a military desk and feeling a weight lift from my chest for the first time in years.

I told them about Jesus.

I told them that I was a Muslim man from the Islamic Republic of Iran who had encountered Jesus Christ in the middle of the darkest season of his life and had been permanently changed.

I told them that Jesus had asked me a question that destroyed my certainty about everything I had built my life on.

I told them that he had offered me forgiveness that I had no right to receive and had given it anyway.

I wept on live television before 25,000 people.

I did not try to stop the tears because stopping them would have been the same as hiding the truth.

The truth was that I was a man who had spent 12 years helping to build and maintain a system of violence and control and that I had been forgiven for that by the God I had been invoking all along while serving something that had nothing to do with God at all.

I spoke directly to the Iranian people.

I told them that the men who gave orders in the name of God were not serving God.

I told them that I knew this because I had been one of those men.

I told them that the religious framework being used to justify the actions of the IRGC and the proxy operations across the Middle East was a construction designed to keep soldiers obedient and populations controlled.

I told them that the God who created them loved them with a love that none of the official structures of the Islamic Republic would ever offer them.

I spoke to my family.

I looked into the camera and I spoke to Shireen.

I told her that I was sorry for the way I had left.

I told her that I loved her more than I had ever been able to say properly in all the years of our marriage.

I told her that I had not left her because I did not love her.

I had left because staying would have destroyed me and eventually would have destroyed us.

I told her that Jesus had changed me into someone I hoped she would one day be able to recognize as better than the man she had married.

I spoke to Arman.

I told my son that his father had made terrible choices in his life and that one day when he was old enough to understand everything.

Then I would sit with him and explain it all honestly.

I told him that I was not the man his school friends thought I was when I was just away on a work mission.

I told him that I had been a man who had done wrong things and that I had been forgiven for them and that the most important thing he could ever know was that the same forgiveness was available to him no matter what he ever did.

I spoke to Sabah.

I told my daughter that her father loved her, that she could put down the stuffed animal if she wanted to or she could keep holding it.

that either way I was thinking of her every single day and that one day somehow we were going to be together again.

I spoke to IRGC soldiers watching the broadcast.

I knew some were watching.

Mariam had told me that their broadcasts were regularly monitored by Iranian intelligence.

So I spoke directly to those men.

I told them that I understood them because I had been them.

I told them that the certainty they felt about their mission and their identity and their role was something I had felt for 12 years and that it was possible to feel completely certain and be completely wrong.

At the same time, I told them that the doubts they were pushing down into the locked room inside themselves were not weaknesses.

They were the part of them that was still honest.

They were the part of them that was still reachable.

I told them that Jesus was not the enemy that they had been trained to see.

He was not a western tool or an imperialist project or a theological error.

He was the son of God who had gone to a cross and died for men who had given orders that got innocent people killed.

He had died for men exactly like us.

And he was alive and he was reaching for anyone who was willing to reach back.

By the time the broadcast ended, my hands had stopped trembling.

The fear I had carried into the studio was gone.

Not because the danger was gone.

Within 48 hours of the broadcast, I would receive credible information that the IRGC had opened the file on my location.

Within 2 weeks, Shirin would be questioned by intelligence agents at our former home in Thran.

The consequences of what I had done that night were real and they were serious and they were just beginning.

But I was not afraid because what I had said was the truth and the truth had already set me free long before I said it out loud.

My name is Davar Husseini.

I am 33 years old.

I was an IRGC commander for 12 years and I gave orders I will spend the rest of my life being grateful to be forgiven for.

I am alive today not because I was smart enough to get out of Iran.

I am alive today because Jesus Christ reached into a military barracks in the middle of the night and called a broken soldier by name and offered him something that no ideology and no government and no amount of religious performance had ever offered him.

He offered me the truth.

He offered me himself.

If you are watching this right now and you are carrying something in that logged room inside you, something you have been trained not to acknowledge, a doubt or a question or a face you cannot forget, then this message is for you.

You are not weak for carrying it.

You are human and the God who made you human loves you in a way that the systems built on top of you never will.

Seek Jesus.

Read the words he spoke.

Ask him the same broken prayer I asked it at a military desk in the dark.

He will answer.

Not because you deserve it, because that is who he is.

If this testimony has reached you, write in the comments.

He called me by name.

Let it be your