I told him that Jesus had spoken to me and shown me the blood on my hands.

I told him that I wanted to follow Jesus, but I did not know how.

And when I finished speaking, Darush did something I did not expect.

He began to weep.

He told me that he and his house church had been praying for years that God would reach the powerful men of Iran.

They had prayed specifically that the men who funded violence and terrorism would have encounters with Jesus that would transform their hearts.

He said that my standing in his apartment was an answer to years of faithful prayer.

He gave me a Bible in Farsy and he began teaching me how to read it and understand it.

Over the following months, I met with Darush secretly whenever I could.

He taught me about grace and forgiveness and the love of God.

He taught me about the life of Jesus and his teachings and his death and resurrection.

He introduced me to other believers in his house church who welcomed me with open arms despite knowing who I was and what I had done.

For the first time in my life, I experienced genuine community and genuine love from people who expected nothing from me in return.

As the months passed and my faith grew stronger, I began to quietly withdraw from my role as Hezbollah’s financeier.

I did not make any dramatic announcements or sudden moves.

I simply began slowing down the flow of money through my networks.

I made excuses about my health and told the IRGC context that my heart attack had weakened me and that I needed to reduce my workload.

I told them that some of my shell companies were having difficulties and that the money would take longer to process.

I told them that international sanctions were making it harder to move funds without being detected.

I used every excuse I could think of to gradually reuse reduce my involvement without raising too many red flags.

At first, they accepted my explanations with sympathy and understanding.

They told me to take care of my health and not to worry about the financial operations.

They said other people could handle things while I recovered.

But by the middle of 2023, the patients of the IRGC and Hezbollah began to run out.

Then the money I was providing had slowed to a trickle compared to what it had been before my heart attack.

Operations were being delayed because of funding shortages.

Commanders in Lebanon were complaining that they were not receiving the resources they needed.

Questions were being asked about what was happening with the financial networks that I had built and controlled for decades.

Men from the intelligence services began visiting my home, asking polite but pointed questions about my business operations and my health.

They looked at me with suspicion in their eyes even as they smiled and wished me well.

I could feel the walls closing in around me.

I know that it was only a matter of time before they discovered the truth about what had happened to me and what I was planning to do.

I began secretly transferring portions of my wealth out of Iran during the second half of 2023.

I moved money to accounts that only I knew about in countries where the Iranian government could not reach it.

I liquidated assets and converted them into gold and cryptocurrency that could be moved without leaving a paper trail.

I worked slowly and carefully because I knew that any sudden large movements of money would trigger alarms in the financial monitoring systems that the government used to track wealthy individuals.

I also began making preparations for my physical escape from Iran.

I contacted people who could obtain forged travel documents.

I studied routes out of the country that would allow me to leave without passing through official border checkpoints where my name and face would be flagged.

I knew that when I finally left Iran, I would be leaving behind everything.

My mansion, my businesses, my remaining assets, my reputation, my entire life.

And most painfully of all, I would be leaving behind my wife Sora and my children who did not yet know anything about my transformation.

In early 2024, I made the hardest decision of my life.

I decided that I had to leave Iran immediately because the intelligence services were getting too close to discovering the truth.

I could not tell Sora everything because I was afraid that she would try to stop me or that she would accidentally reveal my plans to someone who would inform the authorities.

So I told her that I needed to travel to Turkey for urgent business matters related to one of my companies.

She did not question this because I had made similar trips many times before over the years.

I packed a small bag with only the essentials.

I took my Farsy Bible that Darush had given me and I hid it inside the lining of my suitcase.

I kissed my wife goodbye and told her I would be back in a week.

Then I walked out of my mansion for the last time and drove to the airport where a private charter flight was waiting to take me to Istanbul.

I used forged documents that identified me as a Turkish businessman to a avoid detection by the border security systems.

The flight took 3 hours and when I landed in Istanbul, I felt the weight of 40 years of darkness beginning to lift from my shoulders.

I was out of Iran.

I was free.

But the cost of that freedom was everything I had ever known and everyone I had ever loved.

If from Istanbul, I traveled to the island of Cyprus where underground Christian networks had arranged for me to stay in a safe house near the city of Limasol.

Cypress has a significant Iranian diaspora community which made it easier for me to blend in without attracting too much attention.

I arrived exhausted and broken and carrying nothing but my small bag and my Bible.

The believers who received me in Cyprus treated me with the same love and kindness that Dario and his house church had shown me in Tehran.

They gave me a room and food and time to rest and healed.

They connected me with Pastor Darush Kariman, an Iranian Christian leader in exile who had been helping persecuted believers escape from Iran for years.

Darush Karimian became my mentor and my spiritual father during those difficult months.

He helped me process the grief of leaving my family behind.

He helped me grow deeper in my understanding of the Bible and my relationship with Jesus.

He helped me see that my story was not over but was actually just beginning.

The months I spent in Cyprus were the most transformative of my entire life.

For the first time in 72 years, I was living without the weight of secrets and lies pressing down on my shoulders.

I woke up each morning in my small room in the safe house near Limasul.

And I thanked Jesus for giving me another day.

I read my Bible for hours at the time, absorbing every word like a man who had been starving his entire life and had finally been given food.

Pastor Darish Karimian met with me several times each week to study the scriptures together and to help me understand the depth of what God had done in my life.

He was patient with me in ways that I did not deserve.

He answered my endless questions without ever growing tired or frustrated.

He helped me understand that the journey from darkness to light was not something that happened overnight.

It was a process that would continue for the rest of my life.

One of the hardest parts of those early months in exile was dealing with the separation from my family.

My wife, Sora, had been trying to reach me since I left Tehran.

She had called my phone hundreds of times before I finally changed my number for security reasons.

Through a trusted intermediary, I managed to send her a message telling her that I was safe, but that I could not return to Iran.

I did not tell her the full truth about my conversion because I was afraid of what the consequences might be for her and our children if the government found out.

She was angry and confused and heartbroken.

She thought I had abandoned her for another woman or that I had lost my mind from the heart attack.

My eldest son Amir sent me a furious message through the same intermediary calling me a coward and a traitor for leaving the family.

His words cut me deeper than any knife ever could.

My daughter Leila was different.

She sent me a message that was short but filled with something that gave me hope.

She wrote that she did not understand what was happening, but that she loved me and wanted to know the truth.

She asked me to tell her everything when I was ready.

She said she would not judge me no matter what.

Her words brought tears to my eyes because I could feel that God was working in her heart even though she did not know it yet.

I prayed for her every single day.

I prayed for Sarah and Amir and all my family members.

I asked Jesus to protect them and to open their eyes to the truth.

I asked him to give me the opportunity to share my story with them one day face to face.

But I knew that they might never come.

I knew that going back to Iran would mean certain death.

And I knew that my family might never forgive me for what I had done.

As 2024 turned into 2025, something began stirring in my heart that I could not ignore.

I had been living quietly in Cyprus for nearly a year.

I had grown strong in my faith.

I had studied the Bible extensively with Pastor Dario.

I had connected with other Iranian believers in exile who had their own incredible stories of encountering Jesus.

But I felt that Jesus was calling me to do something more.

He had not saved me from death just so I could live quietly and comfortably in a Mediterranean island for the rest of my days.

He had saved me for a purpose.

He had given me a testimony that the world needed to hear.

He wanted me to speak publicly about what I had seen and experienced.

He wanted me to expose the truth about the system I had served for 40 years.

He wanted me to stand before the camera and confess everything to the whole world.

The thought terrified me more than anything I had ever faced in my life.

I talked to Pastor Darish about what I was feeling.

He listened carefully and then told me something that confirmed everything in my heart.

He told me that he had been praying about the same thing for months.

He said he believed that God was calling me to share my testimony publicly through Christian satellite television.

He mentioned S87, a Christian broadcasting network that transmits programs in Arabic and Farsy and Turkish across the entire Middle East and North Africa.

Millions of people in Iran and Lebanon and Syria and other countries watched S87 secretly using satellite dishes even though the government tried to ban them.

Pastor Darush said that if I shared my testimony on this network, it would reach the exact people who needed to hear it most.

It would reach Muslims who were questioning their faith.

It would reach Iranians who were tired of the lies and oppression.

It would reach people connected to Hezbollah and the IRGC who might be having the same doubts that I had experienced before my encounter with Jesus.

I knew that going on television would make me the most wanted man in Iran.

The IRGC would put a price on my head.

Hezbollah would send assassins to find me and silence me permanently.

My family in Iran would face intense scrutiny and possibly punishment for my actions.

Everything about this decision was dangerous and potentially fatal.

But I kept thinking about what Jesus had told me during my near death experience.

He told me that I had spent 40 years funding the destruction of his children.

Now he was asking me to spend whatever years I had left telling the world about his love.

How could I refuse him after everything he had done for me? How could I stay silent when millions of people were trapped in the same darkness I had been trapped in? How could I choose my own safety over the truth that had set me free? I could not.

I would not.

I told Pastor Darish that I was ready.

I told him to make the arrangements.

I would go on television and confess everything.

The preparations took several weeks.

The producers at the network worked carefully to arrange a secure broadcast that would protect my physical location while still allowing me to appear live on camera.

They set up a small studio in an undisclosed location in Cyprus with cameras and lighting and sound equipment.

Security measures were put in place to prevent anyone from tracing the broadcast signal back to my actual location.

I was given instructions on how to present myself and what to expect during the live interview.

But when I asked them what I should say, they told me something simple and powerful.

They told me to just tell the truth.

They said the truth was the most powerful weapon in the world and that no amount of preparation or scripting could match the impact of a man simply telling the truth about what God had done in his life.

On the day of the broadcast, I sat in a chair in front of a camera and looked into the lens knowing that millions of eyes would be watching me across the Middle East and beyond.

My hands were trembling.

My heart was racing.

I thought about turning around and walking out of the studio.

I thought about all the reasons why this was a terrible idea.

I thought about the assassins who would be dispatched to find me within hours of this broadcast going live.

I thought about my family in Iran and what they would think when they saw their father and husband confessing on Christian television.

But then I closed my eyes and I felt the presence of Jesus surrounding me with his peace.

The same peace I had felt when I stood before him during my near death experience.

The same love, the same warmth.

And I knew that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

I opened my eyes and I began to speak.

I told them everything.

I told them about my childhood in Thran and my father’s business empire and how the Islamic revolution had changed my family’s life.

I told them about the Iran Iraq war and how I had entered the world of arms dealing and made my first fortune from selling weapons of debt.

I told them about the private meeting with Ayatollah Kmeni in 1982 when I was recruited to finance Hezbollah.

I told them about the Quran versus the clerics had used to convince me that funding terrorism was a sacred religious duty.

I told them about the Beirut barracks bombing and the Amia bombing and the decades of violence that my money had paid for.

I told them about the billions of dollars I had moved through secret networks to fund the destruction of innocent lives across the Middle East.

I spoke without stopping and without holding anything back.

Every word was a confession.

Every sentence was an act of repentance.

Then I told them about Jesus.

I told them about my heart attack.

And the moment my heart stopped on the operating table.

I I told them about standing in that vast space of light and seeing Jesus walking toward me in his white robes.

I told them about the visions he showed me of every person my money had helped to kill.

I told them about his question that had shattered my heart.

Why have you been funding the destruction of my children? I told them about his offer of forgiveness and his invitation to follow him.

I told them about reaching out and taking his scarred hand and feeling the ocean of love wash over me.

I wept openly as I spoke these words on live television.

I did not care about looking strong or dignified or composed.

I was a broken man confessing his sins before the entire world.

And I was not ashamed of my tears because every tear was proof that Jesus had given me a new heart.

I looked directly into the camera and I spoke to the people of Iran.

I I told them that the the regime they lived under was built on lies and blood and fear.

I told them that the money they were told was being used to defend Islam was actually being used to murder innocent people in countries they had never visited and would never see.

I told them that the Quran verses being used to justify this violence were being twisted and distorted by men who cared more about power than about God.

I told them that I knew these things because I had been one of those men for 40 years.

I told them that there was a God who loved them more than they could imagine.

A God who did not demand blood and death and submission.

a God who offered forgiveness and grace and eternal life.

His name was Jesus and he was waiting for every single one of them with arms wide open.

Then I spoke to my family.

I looked into that camera knowing that Sora and Amir and Leila might be watching somewhere in Thran.

I told them that I was sorry for leaving without explaining everything.

I told them that I loved them more than words could express.

I told them that I had not abandoned them.

I had been called away by a power greater than anything on this earth.

I told Sia that she was the love of my life and that leaving her was the hardest thing I had ever done.

I told Amir that I understood his anger and that I did not blame him for calling me a traitor.

I told Ila that her message of love had kept me going during my darkest moments.

I told all of them that I prayed for them every single day and that I would never stop praying until we were reunited either in this world or in the next.

I told them about Jesus and I begged them to seek him for themselves.

I begged them to open their hearts to the truth that had set me free.

Finally, I spoke to anyone watching who was involved with Hezbollah or the IRG sa or any organization that used violence in the name of God.

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

I told them that the certainty they felt about their cause was the same certainty I had felt for 40 years.

I told them that it was possible to be completely sincere and completely wrong at the same time.

I told them that Jesus was not the enemy they had been taught to despise.

He was the savior they had been searching for without knowing it.

I told them that if Jesus could forgive a man like me, a man who had funed the debts of hundreds of innocent people, then he could forgive anyone.

No sin was too great.

No crime was too terrible.

No heart was too hard for the love of Jesus to break through.

I am cousin Muhammad.

I am 73 years old.

I am a former billionaire and a former chief financier of Hezbollah and I am alive today because Jesus visited me and showed me the blood on my hands and then he washed those hands clean with his own blood.

If this testimony has touched your heart, then write in the comments, “The blood has been washed away.

” Let it be a declaration.

Let it be a prayer.

Let it be the beginning of your own journey from darkness into the light of the risen Christ.

 

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