I watched Muchaba Ham scream in terror at something no one else in the room could see.

I was his personal bodyguard for three years.

I was trained to protect him from bullets and bombs and assassins, but I could not protect him from the figure of light that appeared to him in that bunker on the night his father was killed.

He screamed, “He is here.

The man in white.

Get him away from me.

” I looked around the room.

There was no one there.

But Muchaba was pointing at an empty corner with his eyes wide open and his body shaking like a child who had just seen a monster in the dark.

Except it was not a monster.

It was Jesus.

And what happened in the days after that night inside that bunker is something the new rulers of Iran will do everything in their power to make sure you never hear.

>> My name is Hussein Treezy.

I am 38 years old.

I am recording this from a house in a neighborhood I won’t even name in southeastern Turkey.

Sitting on a white plastic chair next to a small window that looks out onto a cobblestone street.

It has been 5 days since I crossed the Iranian border on foot through the mountains.

I arrived here with the clothes I was wearing, a pair of destroyed boots, and something inside my chest that won’t stop burning.

I am 38 years old, and I spent 15 of them serving in the special protection unit of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For the last 3 years of that period, I was personally assigned to protect Mojaba Kamune, the son of Ali Kam, the man who was being groomed to inherit the most powerful position in a country of 90 million people.

I was his shadow.

I slept in front of his bedroom door.

I rode in his armored car.

I tasted his food before it reached his table.

I filtered every person who came within 10 m of him.

I was trained to take a bullet for him without hesitation.

I would have died for him without a second thought.

It was my duty.

It was my identity.

It was all I was.

And now I am here.

I was born in the fall of 1987 in Tabris, the largest city in northwestern Iran in the province of East Azabaijan.

My family was Azeri Turkish, an ethnic minority that speaks its own language at home but uses Farsy for everything else.

My father, Karim Tabrizzi, worked in construction.

He was a large man with rough hands and a voice that silenced any room he entered.

He had fought in the war against Iraq when he was young, drafted as a conscript, and returned with a limp in his left leg caused by a mortar fragment that the army doctors were never able to completely remove.

He never spoke about the war, not even once.

But sometimes at night I would hear him grinding his teeth from his room, and my mother would whisper to me that he had returned to the trenches in his dreams.

I would stay quiet and listen to the heavy silence after the grinding, and I understood with the kind of understanding a child has, but cannot name, that certain wars never truly end.

My mother, Fatime Husseini, was a quiet woman from a village in the countryside.

She married my father when she was 16, which was common at that time in the rural parts of the province.

She was religious in the simple way that simple people are religious.

She didn’t read theology books or debate interpretations of the Quran.

She just prayed five times a day with absolute sincerity, kept her head covered at all times, fasted during Ramadan with such devotion that she wouldn’t even swallow her own saliva during daylight hours, and believed with her whole soul that Allah saw everything she did and would reward her in paradise for her suffering on earth.

And she suffered a lot.

We were poor.

Not the kind of poor where you skip a meal once in a while.

The kind where you learn to count the grains of rice on your plate because there might not be any more tomorrow.

My father’s work was seasonal and unpredictable.

Some months he would come home with enough money to buy meat.

Other months he would come home with dust on his clothes and anger in his eyes.

On those months my mother would make bread with the cheapest flour she could find and serve it with salt and tea and say that Allah was testing our patience.

We five children slept in one room on mattresses that we rolled up during the day to create space.

My parents slept in the other room which also served as a kitchen, living room and everything else.

There was no privacy.

There were no secrets.

Everything happened in front of everyone.

My older brother Mei was the first to join the Bassage, the paramilitary volunteer force that serves as the eyes and ears and fists of the Islamic Republic on the streets of every Iranian city.

He was 17 when he joined and he came home that first day with a green headband with a verse printed on it and a look of pride on his face that I had never seen before.

My father, who hardly ever showed emotion, hugged me and said he had brought honor to the family.

From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to be.

Not because I understood politics or ideology or religion, but because I understood that joining the Bassage meant my father would look at me the way he looked at me with pride instead of indifference.

I joined the Bassage at 15 in 2002.

I was too young to do much of anything useful, but they gave me a uniform and a sense of belonging.

They taught me discipline, obedience, loyalty to the Supreme Leader.

They taught me that Ali Kam was not just a political leader but God’s representative on earth.

They taught me that serving him was the same as serving Allah.

I absorbed it all like a sponge absorbs water.

I was a poor boy from Tabre with no education and no prospects.

The bases gave me an identity.

It told me I mattered.

It told me I was part of something sacred.

How could I refuse? If you’ve made it this far, stay with me.

What comes next is the moment that changed everything.

And I need you to be here with me when I get there.

If this account is reaching you in any way, consider subscribing to the channel and leaving a like.

It helps me continue to bring this testimony to more people.

When I was 18, I was noticed by recruiters from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which is the elite military force that protects the regime, and answers directly to the Supreme Leader.

They saw that I was physically strong, unquestioningly obedient, and willing to do anything they asked of me.

They offered me a spot in a special training program for the Ansar Almahi unit, which is the division of the IRGC responsible for protecting the Supreme Leader and his family.

This was considered one of the greatest honors a young man of my background could receive.

My father cried when I told him.

He said that Allah had finally rewarded our family for years of suffering and faithfulness.

I was standing in the same room where I had seen him come back from work so many times with dust on his hands and silence on his face.

And it was the first time in my life I had seen my father cry.

I didn’t know what to do.

I just stood there.

He pulled me by the shoulder and hugged me.

and the smell of cement and his sweat stuck in my memory like one of those things you can never separate from an important moment.

The training was brutal.

2 years of physical and psychological conditioning designed to turn ordinary men into human shields.

We ran 20 km every morning before sunrise.

We learned hand-to-hand combat, weapons handling, surveillance techniques, anti-assination protocols, evasive driving.

We were taught to sweep a room for threats in under 3 seconds.

We were taught to position our bodies between the protected person and any potential source of danger.

We were taught to react to gunfire, not by ducking or running, but by positioning ourselves directly in the line of fire to absorb the bullet intended for the principal.

I broke my nose twice during that training.

The second time, an instructor stepped on my face during a fighting exercise, and I felt the bones give way with a dry crack.

I didn’t even stop.

I got up, blew the blood out of my nose, and continued.

That’s what they wanted.

That was the point.

But the most important part of the training wasn’t physical.

It was psychological.

They taught us to erase ourselves, to become invisible, to have no opinions, desires, or ambitions separate from the safety and well-being of the protectee.

They taught us to suppress every human instinct that could interfere with duty.

fear, hunger, fatigue, pain, emotion.

Everything had to be controlled, contained, and ultimately eliminated.

We were no longer supposed to be men.

We were supposed to be walls, living walls that could think and move and react, but that existed only to keep one person alive.

I graduated from the training program in 2007 at the age of 20.

I was immediately assigned to the outer security perimeter of the Supreme Leader Compound in northern Thran.

My job was to stand at a checkpoint and search every vehicle and every person who entered the compound.

I did this for 3 years without complaint.

I stood in the sun in the summer when the temperature reached 45° C and the asphalt under my feet was soft enough to leave footprints.

I stood in the rain in the winter when the cold numbed my fingers to the point where I could barely hold my weapon.

I stood there in 12-hour shifts and then went back to the barracks and slept and then stood there for another 12 hours and I did it with gratitude because I was serving the Supreme Leader and that meant I was serving God.

At least that’s what I believed.

The compound was in a wooded area in the north of the city, far from the noise and dust of the neighborhoods where I had grown up.

In the winter, when the plain trees lost their leaves, you could see the Albor’s mountains in the background covered in snow with a sky so blue above it seemed like a lie.

Sometimes I would stare at those mountains during my shifts and think about absolutely nothing.

It was one of the few moments of emptiness that the training had taught me to achieve.

In 2010, I was promoted to the internal security squad.

This meant I was inside the compound itself, patrolling the corridors and gardens and meeting rooms where Ali Kam lived and worked.

I saw him almost every day.

He was smaller than I expected.

He walked slowly and spoke softly and had a calmness that made you feel like you were in the presence of someone who had access to a wisdom that ordinary people couldn’t comprehend.

I genuinely revered him.

I truly believed he was God’s chosen representative on earth.

I would have died for him without the slightest hesitation.

In the following years, I rose through the ranks of the internal squad.

I became known for my absolute reliability and my ability to remain invisible while being constantly present.

I never spoke unless spoken to.

I never expressed an opinion.

I never asked questions that weren’t directly related to my duties.

I was the perfect guardian.

And in 2023 that perfection was rewarded with the assignment that would change my life forever.

I was personally assigned to protect Mojaba Kamune.

Moaba was different from his father.

Where Ali Kamune was calm and deliberate, Mojaba was nervous and suspicious.

Where the father projected an aura of spiritual authority, the son projected an aura of paranoid ambition.

Mustaba was 54 years old when I was assigned to him.

A portly man with a thick black beard and dark eyes that were always moving, always scanning, always looking for threats or opportunities.

He trusted almost no one.

He had a small circle of advisers who were more like servants than counselors.

He spoke to them in a tone that was somewhere between command and contempt.

He rarely smiled.

He rarely laughed.

He was a man who lived in a state of permanent anxiety about his future and his position and his security.

Everyone in the inner circle knew that Mojaba was being prepared to succeed his father as supreme leader.

This was Iran’s worstkept secret.

Ali Kam was 86 years old and his health was declining.

The question wasn’t if Mojaba would take over but when.

Handmmojaba was terrified of this responsibility, not because he doubted his ambition, but because he knew how many powerful people in the regime did not want him to succeed his father.

There were rival clerics, rival military commanders, rival political factions, each with their own candidates for the position.

Mojaba knew that any of them could try to eliminate him before the transition of power occurred.

I spent every day for 3 years less than an arms length away from Moshtaba Kamina.

I knew his habits, his fears, his routines, his obsessions.

I knew that he drank exactly three cups of tea every morning, always with two sugar cubes, never with milk.

I knew that he paced his office for exactly 45 minutes after every call with a military commander, muttering to himself in a way that made me wonder if he was praying or strategizing or simply trying to convince himself that he was capable of leading a country of 90 million people.

I knew that he slept poorly, often waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning and calling me to check the hallways outside his room.

Sometimes when he called in the middle of the night, I would open the door and find him sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his legs, staring at a fixed point in space as if he were seeing something that wasn’t there.

I would check the room.

I would check the bathroom.

I would check the hallway.

I would report that everything was clear.

He would nod without looking at me, and I would return to my post.

They were strange moments, but I didn’t ask questions.

It wasn’t my job to ask questions.

I was there to protect, to obey, to disappear when not needed, and to appear in a split second when I was.

On the afternoon of February 28th, 2026, I was with Mojaba in a safe house in the Lavasan district northeast of Thran.

It was one of several safe houses maintained by the IRGC for senior leaders in case of emergencies.

Mojaba had been moved there 3 days earlier on orders from the intelligence directorate which had detected unusual military movements by the United States and Israel in the region.

The atmosphere was tense.

Everyone knew something was coming.

The question was what and when.

The safe house itself was a two-story building set against a wooded hillside with bars on the windows and cameras at every external angle.

There were 12 of us in total, including my security team, two intelligence officers, a medical aid, and communications personnel.

Mojaba had been restless all day, pacing the hallways, sometimes stopping in the middle of the corridor and staring at the wall without saying anything.

The medical aid asked me quietly if I had noticed anything different about him lately.

I said, “No, I was lying.

I had noticed, but it wasn’t my job to talk about it.

” The answer came around 11:30 at night.

The first explosions came from afar, like thunder from a storm that was still distant.

But they came in rapid succession, one after another, and each one was closer and louder than the last.

The windows of the safe house vibrated.

The floor trembled beneath our feet.

The lights flickered and then went out completely as the power grid failed.

The emergency generators kicked in within seconds, bathing the corridors in a faint red glow from the backup lighting.

Muayaba was in his private quarters when the bombing began.

I was outside the door as always.

He came out wearing a white undershirt and pajama pants, his hair disheveled, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and adrenaline.

He looked at me and said one word, “Father.

” I had no answer.

Communications were already chaotic.

The phone lines were out.

The cell networks were overloaded or blocked.

The IRGC’s secure radio network was working, but flooded with panicked transmissions from commanders across the city trying to report what was happening.

I could hear fragments through my earpiece, explosions in multiple districts, military installations hit.

The Kam compound in northern Thran hit by multiple missiles.

Within 20 minutes, a senior IRGC officer arrived at the safe house and confirmed what we all feared.

The compound had been destroyed.

Ali Kam, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was dead, killed in a joint American Israeli military strike that had targeted the regime’s leadership.

Along with him, dozens of senior advisers, security personnel, and household staff had been killed.

The officer spoke in a low, steady voice, like someone who had rehearsed what he was going to say in the car on the way over.

He stood in the hallway under the red emergency light with his cap in his hand and delivered the dry words one by one.

Mojaba did not cry.

He did not scream.

He did not break down.

He stood perfectly still in the hallway of the safe house with his hands at his sides and his face completely blank.

It was as if someone had turned off every emotion inside him with a switch.

He looked at the officer who had delivered the news and said nothing for what felt like a full minute.

Then he turned and went back into his quarters and closed the door.

I remained at my post outside.

Through the door I could hear him, not crying, not speaking, breathing, a rapid, shallow breath that grew louder and more irregular as the minutes passed.

Then silence.

Then the breathing again.

Then silence.

This went on for almost an hour.

During that time, the explosions outside continued.

The ground vibrated every few minutes.

Once a closer impact made the pictures on the hallway walls rattle, I stood my ground.

It was what I did.

It was what I was.

Around 1:00 in the morning, the order came to evacuate to a deeper bunker.

Intelligence indicated that the attacks were continuing and that secondary targets were being hit throughout Thran.

The safe house in Lavasan, though not a primary target, could not be considered secure.

We moved Moshdaba and his small retinue into armored vehicles and drove through the dark streets toward a bunker complex in the Albor’s mountains north of the city.

The drive was terrifying.

The sky over Thran was orange, not a natural dawn orange.

An orange that came from fires burning across the city.

Explosions flashed on the horizon every few seconds.

The sound of anti-aircraft fire filled the air with a constant popping noise that sounded like a thousand typewriters working at once.

Smoke drifted across the road, reducing visibility to almost zero in some stretches.

Twice our convoy had to stop and turn back because the road ahead was blocked by rubble from a destroyed building.

Mojaba sat in the back of the armored vehicle, his eyes open, but not seeming to see anything.

I was outside in the escort.

Through the armored glass, I could see his silhouette in the back seat, motionless, as if he had been hollowed out from the inside.

We reached the bunker around 2:30 in the morning.

It was a facility I had visited before during security assessments, built deep into the mountainside, reinforced with meters of concrete and steel designed to survive a direct nuclear impact.

We were safe there, or at least that’s what we thought.

The internal corridors smelled of wet cement and machine oil.

The yellow work lights hanging from the ceiling made everything look worn and old even though the facility was relatively new.

Other groups were arriving.

Officers I recognized from other squads.

Communications personnel carrying equipment.

Two clerics I didn’t remember seeing before.

Everyone moving fast with that kind of controlled urgency that trained men develop when the situation demands that fear be executed rather than felt.

Moshtaba was taken directly to a reinforced command room, a separate chamber within the main bunker with extra concrete walls and its own communications network.

I took up my position at the entrance to this chamber.

It was approximately 3:00 in the morning.

At 3:15 in the morning, a massive explosion shook the entire bunker.

The lights went out.

Dust fell from the ceiling.

The emergency lighting activated, filling the corridors with that same faint red glow.

An Israeli bunker busting bomb had hit the mountain directly above us.

The bunker held.

The structure survived, but the force of the impact was enormous.

Concrete cracked in at least three places that I could see from the hallway.

Metal beams groaned with a sound that made you think of a large ship capsizing at sea.

And Moshtaba, who was sitting in the reinforced command room, was thrown from his chair by the shockwave.

I ran in through the door.

He was on the floor.

There was blood on his face from a cut on his forehead where he had hit the edge of the table.

His left arm was at an odd angle.

He was conscious but dazed, looking around the room with eyes that seemed unable to focus.

I lifted him up and put him in a chair.

A military paramedic rushed in and began to treat the cut on his head.

His arm was broken.

The paramedic straightened it as best he could and wrapped it in a makeshift splint.

The blood from the cut on his forehead ran down the side of his face and dripped onto the collar of his white shirt, which was already covered in gray dust.

And then it happened.

It was approximately 3:30 in the morning.

Moshaba was sitting in the chair where I had placed him, his head bandaged, his arm in a splint, his face covered in dust and dried blood.

The paramedic had given him painkillers and was preparing to check for internal injuries.

I was directly behind his chair with my hand on my weapon, scanning the room for any structural damage that could pose an additional threat.

The room was quiet except for the sound of distant explosions filtering through the meters of rock and concrete above us.

There were six people in the room.

Moshtaba, me, the paramedic, two IRGC intelligence officers, and an aid who was trying to reestablish communication with military commanders across the country.

No one was speaking.

The sound of someone typing on a keyboard.

The sound of someone breathing a little faster than they should.

The low hum of the damaged ventilation system.

And then, without any warning, Moshaba stiffened.

His entire body tensed as if an electric current had passed through him.

His eyes, which had been half closed from the painkillers, suddenly opened wide, wider than I had ever seen them in 3 years of standing next to this man every day.

His pupils dilated until the dark brown irises were almost invisible.

His mouth opened, but no sound came out at first.

Then he screamed.

It wasn’t the scream of a man in physical pain.

I had heard that kind of scream before on the battlefield, and in other situations I prefer not to detail now.

This was different.

It was the scream of a man who was seeing something so terrifying that his mind couldn’t process it.

A scream that came from somewhere deeper than the throat or the lungs.

It came from the center of his being.

He pointed his intact right arm toward the corner of the room.

The corner where there was nothing, just concrete walls meeting at a 90° angle, an electrical cable running along the ceiling, a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall.

Nothing else, no person, no object, no threat.

I looked.

I saw nothing.

The intelligence officers looked.

They saw nothing.

The paramedic looked.

He saw nothing.

But Mojaba was seeing something.

And whatever it was had turned the heir to the Supreme Leader of Iran into a man who looked like a terrified child.

And what he said next, in a voice that trembled so much that the words came out broken one by one, was the last thing anyone in that room expected to hear in that bunker, buried in the mountains on that night when everything was collapsing.

“He is here,” Mushtava said in Farsy.

the man in white.

He is here and I know what he wants from me.

I stepped forward on instinct, positioning myself between him and the empty corner, my hand on my sidearm.

The training took over.

If Moshtaba perceived a threat, it was my job to neutralize it, but there was nothing there.

I kept looking at that corner and saw concrete and cables and the red fire extinguisher on the wall and nothing else.

There is no one there, sir, I said.

The room is secure.

He grabbed my arm with his good hand.

His grip was so strong that his nails dug into my skin through my sleeve.

He pulled me close to his face and spoke directly.

And the smell of blood and dust and fear on his breath stuck in my memory like certain things you’d rather not have experienced.

You can’t see him because he doesn’t want you to see him, he said.

But I see him.

I’ve been seeing him for months.

He comes to me at night.

He stands at the foot of the bed and looks at me.

And now he’s here in this room.

And he’s telling me that my time is running out.

The room was completely silent.

No one moved.

And as I stood there with my arm trapped in his grip and the empty corner in my peripheral vision, I began to feel something I can’t explain precisely even now after all these nights since then.

something that made me understand that what was happening in that bunker buried in the mountain went far beyond what any of us were trained to handle.

The two intelligence officers exchanged a look.

It was the kind of look that men trained not to show anything exchange when they are processing something their internal systems have no category for.

Colonel Rashidi, whom I knew by name and reputation as a man of brutal pragmatism who had no patience for anything he considered weakness, placed his palm on his knee and stood up slowly.

The paramedic stepped forward and suggested in a low voice that the injuries and medication might be causing hallucinations.

Mushdaba suddenly let go of my arm.

He looked at the paramedic with a clarity on his face that didn’t match anything that had happened in the last few minutes.

And with a surprising strength for a man with a broken arm, he pushed him with his good hand in a way that made the paramedic take two steps back and bump into the table behind him.

It’s not a hallucination, Mojava said.

His voice still trembled, but there was something different in it now.

A kind of weariness, like someone who has carried a weight for too long and has finally decided to put it down.

I’ve been seeing this man for 6 months.

Every night, the same figure, the same light, the same words.

This isn’t the medication.

This isn’t the shock of the bombing.

This started in September of last year when I was sleeping in Thran, months before any of these bombs.

He stopped speaking.

He looked back at the corner of the room.

An expression passed over his face that I had never seen in 3 years.

It wasn’t fear exactly.

It was something closer to resignation, as if he were looking at something inevitable that he had tried to ignore for too long.

The communications aid, a young lieutenant who never raised his voice, had stopped typing completely, and was staring at Mojaba with an open face, unable to disguise it.

Colonel Rashidi walked to the corner.

He planted his feet on the concrete floor and stood exactly where Motaba was looking.

He turned to face the room and swept everyone with his gaze, stopping at Moshtaba last.

“There is nothing here,” he said.

“No threat, no presence.

You are injured and under sedation, and your city is being bombed, and your father has just been assassinated.

Any human mind would be failing under this pressure.

” He spoke with the same voice with which he must have given execution orders in his career, dry without inflection, built to close conversations.

But then something happened.

He was standing in that corner with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at Mojaba with the expression of someone who is closing a subject when I saw the change pass over his face.

Subtle, a blink longer than normal, a slight twitch of the muscles around his eyes.

His hands which were crossed slowly came down and rested at his sides.

He took a step back.

Not a big one, not a dramatic one, but completely involuntary.

The kind of step a body takes before the mind decides it was going to take it.

I felt it before I understood what I was feeling.

The bunker had been cold since we arrived.

The ventilation was damaged by the bomb’s shock wave, and the air that circulated was the still air from the depths of the mountain.

that kind of damp cold that has no specific temperature, but that clings to the skin.

And then, in that corner, where the colonel had positioned himself, and from which he had retreated, there was a warmth, not the heat of an appliance or a flame, a warmth that seemed to come from within the air itself.

It spread over the skin of my face first, then my arms, slowly, like when you enter a warmer room after a long time in the cold.

I stood motionless.

My hand was still on my weapon, but I was no longer thinking about physical threats.

I was trying to understand what my body was registering because my mind didn’t have the vocabulary to keep up.

It wasn’t just the warmth.

There was something else, a presence.

And I know this sounds like the language a preacher would use, and that’s not what I mean.

It’s not a figure of speech.

It’s the most precise description I have of what I felt in that room at that moment.

A presence that was not physical like the presence of another person, but that was real.

In the same way that the concrete of the walls was real, in the same way that the blood on my sleeve where Moshaba’s nails had marked was real.

Something that made the cement walls of the bunker seem like paper.

Something that made my gun in its holster seem like a child’s toy.

Something that made every rank and every position and every hierarchy of the Islamic Republic seem like children playing makebelieve.

I had spent 15 years being trained to identify threats, to feel when a situation had changed, to react before I understood, and something in that corner had changed the situation in a way that 15 years of training had given me no tools to respond to.

I looked at the others.

The paramedic had stopped completely.

He stood with his arms slightly away from his body, like someone who has just heard a strange noise and is waiting to find out where it came from.

The communications lieutenant had his mouth slightly open.

The second intelligence officer, a major I barely knew but who had a reputation for being analytical even in the worst situations, was looking at his own hands as if checking that they were still his.

And Colonel Rashidi, who was now two steps away from where he had been, had the face of a man who has just seen something that contradicts everything he believes, but that he doesn’t know how to deny.

He was a man who had spent his entire life building certainties and one of them had just cracked in the middle without him knowing how it had happened.

Mojaba looked at all of us.

His eyes moved from face to face with a deliberate slowness.

And then he said, “Now you feel it.

Now you know I am not insane.

He is real and he wants all of us.

” The room fell completely quiet.

Not the kind of silence that exists when no one has anything to say.

The kind of silence that exists when everyone has too much to say and no words are adequate for what has just happened.

It took a while.

I don’t know how to measure it.

It could have been 30 seconds.

It could have been 3 minutes.

And then the warmth went away gradually as it had come.

And the cold air of the bunker returned to being just the cold air of the bunker.

And the walls returned to being just walls.

And the people in the room began to move again like people waking up from a strange moment.

and not sure how long they had been still.

Rashidi was the first to regain his composure, but it wasn’t the same composure, the firmness had returned to his face, but there was a new line around his mouth, a tightness that hadn’t been there before, that said something inside him had settled in a different way.

He said that Mojaba needed to rest, that the doctor would examine him, and that a decision would be made about his next moves.

He said all this looking slightly to the side of the corner, not at Mojaba.

Then he turned and left the room without looking at any of us.

The other officer followed without a word.

The lieutenant lingered for a moment, gathered his communications equipment with slow movements, and also left.

The paramedic went back to work without speaking, checked Mojaba’s pulse, adjusted the splint on his arm, took out a flashlight to check his pupils.

He worked quickly and with his head down, and I knew he was doing it not because he had regained his professional focus, but because he needed something concrete to do with his hands.

I returned to my position.

Outside the door, the bunker hallway was a hallway like any other of its kind, narrow, low ceiling, the red emergency light dripping a dead color on everything.

But I found myself standing there with a different awareness of the space around me.

Like when you’re in a familiar room and you move a piece of furniture and the space suddenly seems to be a different size than you remembered.

Everything was the same.

The cement, the metal floor, the distant noise of the explosions that still filtered through the mountain.

And at the same time, nothing was exactly the same as it had been before I entered that room.

I stood in the hallway and didn’t think about anything for a while.

Not because I had disciplined my mind to emptiness, which is what the training had taught me, but because there was too much to think about and no known place to start.

Around 4:30, the officers gathered in a separate room at the end of the hallway.

I was not called.

I was not expected.

My role was to stand at Mojaba’s door and ensure that no threat reached him, not to participate in strategic meetings.

But military bunkers were not built for acoustic privacy.

And the hallway conducted sound in a way that allowed you to hear the voices clearly enough to understand what was being said, especially when someone forgot they were in a confined space and raised their voice.

Rashidi spoke first.

He said that Mojaba was exhibiting symptoms of acute trauma combined with situational psychosis.

He said that the loss of his father, the injuries, the bombing, and the medication could together produce severe dissociative episodes, and that what happened in the command room needed to be treated as a medical symptom, not as an operational event.

There was a pause.

Then the second officer spoke, and what he said made my blood run cold in a different way than any physical threat had ever done.

He said that if the information about what Mushtaba had declared in that room got out of the bunker, it would be the end, not the end of Moshtaba, the end of the regime.

He said that a man who claims to receive visits from Jesus Christ cannot be the next supreme leader of the Islamic Republic.

He said there were two alternatives.

Either Mohtaba recovered completely and this episode was buried forever as a medical consequence of his injuries or Moshtaba did not recover and in that case arrangements would have to be made.

He did not specify what he meant by arrangements he didn’t have to.

The word hung in the air of the hallway like certain words that everyone knows have more weight than the sound they make.

Then the most senior officer in the room spoke.

He said that this stayed within the bunker, that anyone who knew what had happened in that command room was now a matter of national security.

He said that measures would be taken to ensure containment.

Another silence.

Then the sound of chairs being pushed back and footsteps rearranging.

I moved away from the spot in the hallway where I was listening before the door opened.

I returned to my post at the entrance to Muchaba’s room and stood there with the posture that 15 years had engraved on my body, back straight, eyes towards the hallway, hand at the correct angle.

Inside something was happening that had no name yet, but that I recognized in the same way you recognize in the smell of the air, that a big rain is coming before you see any clouds.

I had become a problem, not because I had done anything wrong, but because I had been in the right room at the wrong time and had heard and felt things that the regime needed to have never happened.

The paramedic was a problem.

The lieutenant was a problem.

I was a problem.

And the only solution that a system like that knew how to offer for that kind of problem was a solution I did not want to receive at the end of a bunker hallway on a night when the country was on fire.

I was relieved at 6:00 in the morning by another member of the security squad, a man named Karimi, whom I had known for years and with whom I had shared long shifts in difficult conditions without any problems.

Karemi was the type who didn’t ask more than he needed to and didn’t answer more than was asked.

He gave me a nod when he took over the post.

I went down to the bunker’s accommodation area, which was a set of metal bunk beds in an adapted hallway, and lay down without taking off my boots.

The hallway ceiling was less than a meter and a half above the top bunk.

There was dampness in the corners.

The sound of the explosions outside had diminished but not stopped.

I closed my eyes.

I did not sleep.

That night around 11, I heard Mushtaba again.

I had returned to my post at 8.

After a few hours in the barracks where I hadn’t been able to truly rest, and was standing in the hallway when the sound came through the door.

It wasn’t the scream from before.

It was a low voice, almost a whisper, but the bunker carried the sound, and I could understand the words with effort.

He was talking to someone, not in the tone of someone reciting prayers, which I knew well.

Not in the tone of someone raving, or delirious, which I also knew.

It was the tone of someone having a conversation, asking, waiting, responding to something I couldn’t hear.

Why me? Was one of the phrases that came through whole.

And then my father killed your followers.

My government imprisoned your believers.

My family has fought against you for decades.

Why do you keep coming to me? There was a pause after that longer than the others.

And then Mushtaba’s voice returned.

And there was a different quality to it.

Broken not in the way a voice breaks from pain or anger.

Broken in the way it breaks when something that has been hard for a long time finally finds a point of weakness.

I believe in you, he said.

I always have.

Since the first night you came, I knew you were real.

I knew that everything they taught me about you was a lie.

He stopped and then But I am a prisoner of what we have built.

If I follow you, they will kill me.

If I confess what I have seen, they will say I have gone mad and destroy me.

I am the last kamina.

If I fall, everything falls.

And then after a long silence that made me unintentionally hold my breath outside, five words that entered me like things that change something without asking for permission.

I know I can’t.

I stood still in the hallway for a while after that.

I wasn’t aware of thinking.

It was more like something settling slowly, like sediment in a glass of water you stop shaking.

For 15 years, I had served a system that told me it represented the will of God.

I had protected men who were presented to me as the guardians of sacred truth.

I had silenced every doubt with the discipline that the training had planted so deep that I no longer knew where the training ended.

And I began.

And now I was outside a door listening to the man who was supposed to be the next Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran say that he knew Jesus was real and was choosing to refuse him.

not because he didn’t believe, because he didn’t have the courage to lose power.

And inside me, a question that I had never in my life allowed myself to formulate began to take shape with a clarity that could not be ignored.

If the man I was there to protect knew he was on the wrong side and stayed there anyway, what exactly was I protecting? What was I serving in the name of what would I have died without hesitation? Over the next two days, the bunker operated in a state of controlled chaos.

Commanders came and went.

Meetings took place behind closed doors that were sometimes left slightly a jar.

There was a silent and urgent reorganization of the power structure happening in those rooms and corridors because Iran had woken up without a supreme leader for the first time in almost four decades.

And the question of who took over what and in what order was a question that could kill.

Mojaba stayed in the reinforced command room for almost the entire time.

He received visits from senior clerics and military commanders who entered with closed faces and left with even more closed faces.

Once passing by the door, I heard his voice firmer than in previous days, discussing something about the assembly of experts and who had the authority to do what in legal and constitutional terms.

The political Moshtaba was still functioning, but the Moshtaba I had heard conversing with someone invisible in the early morning was also still there.

Tai could see it in his eyes every time Karimi or I entered for a routine check.

There was something in Mojaba’s eyes that hadn’t been there 3 days before, like a window that had been open to a space you didn’t expect to exist inside.

On the second day, I picked up a damaged phone that had been left on a counter in the communications sector.

It had an intermittent slow connection, cutting out every minute.

I charged it and went to a corner of the barracks when the hallway was calmer.

I didn’t know what I was looking for when I started typing.

Typing in Farsy with fingers that weren’t entirely steady, trying to find some context for what I had seen and heard.

I found stories slowly, one by one, stories of Muslims who described the same thing.

A man dressed in white.

A face that shone, wounds in his hands, words in Arabic or far or Turkish or Udo depending on where the person was from.

The figure who appeared in dreams, the figure who invited.

The stories came from different places from people with different backgrounds.

Some highly educated and others with no education at all.

Some converted for decades and others who didn’t understand what had happened to them.

But there was a thread connecting them all.

The same thread, the same description, the same weight of reality that the words carried when people tried to describe what it had been like to see this man.

This was not a coordinated fabrication.

No coordination was possible between a 60-year-old lady in Mashad and a university student in Cairo and an underground pastor in Thran.

They were separate voices describing the same thing because they had seen the same thing.

I cleared the browsing history, put the phone back where it was, and returned to my post.

But something had moved inside me that could no longer be moved back.

The system that had been installed in me since I was 15, the structure of belief and obedience and identity that had given me purpose and direction for more than half my life had a crack in it.

Not a dramatic fracture, a fine crack like the ones that appear in concrete after a big impact.

When you look and realize that the wall is still standing, but that it is no longer the same wall.

I thought of my father hugging me with pride.

I thought of myself standing at a checkpoint in the summer of 2009 with the temperature nearing 50° C and feeling that I was serving something sacred.

I thought of the years spent making myself invisible, erasing everything about myself that wasn’t the human shield, and how I had done it with a dedication that at some point stopped being disciplined and became the only way I knew how to exist.

And I thought of Moshtaba’s voice through the door, saying, “I know I can’t.

” and the quiet certainty with which he had said it, which was not the certainty of someone deciding something, but the sad certainty of someone who already knows they will not be able to change what they choose.

On the afternoon of March 5th, Rashidi called me aside in the hallway.

He said there was a reorganization in the protection squads and that I would be transferred the next day to a different escort mission at a location he did not specify.

He told me to be ready at 5:00 in the morning.

He said this looking slightly to the side, not at my face, in the same way he had been looking to the side of the corner in that room three nights before.

I answered, “Yes, sir.

” with the voice that training had built for answers like this, dry and immediate without inflection.

But as he walked back to the main corridor, something about the way he had said escort mission and unspecified location and at 5:00 in the morning clicked into a shape that my body recognized before my mind finished processing.

And the recognition was physical, a tightness in the center of my chest, the kind you feel when you realize you are closer to an edge than you thought.

There was not going to be any escort mission, and I needed to get out of that bunker before 5:00 in the morning the next day reached me.

I stayed on duty until midnight.

Karimi took over the shift without asking anything, as always, with the nod of someone who has performed this ritual so many times that it no longer means anything other than itself.

I went to the barracks, but I didn’t lie down.

I sat on the edge of the lower bunk with my boots on the floor and did what training had taught me to do when I needed to make a decision under high pressure.

I mapped out what I knew.

The bunker had four exits.

Two were the main accesses in the east corridor with permanent checkpoints.

A third was in the supply area with restricted access but no fixed post because the exit led to a loading ramp that ended in a steel door that needed a mechanical key.

The fourth was an emergency exit in the north sector marked with a red sign that I’d memorized during the security assessment when I first arrived.

This exit was monitored by camera but had no physical post during the night because the bunker’s security protocol had been developed to withstand external threats, not to contain internal ones.

No one had foreseen the need to hold someone who was already inside.

I had in my service backpack the routine items I carried on any operational deployment.

a flashlight, a basic first aid kit, a field knife, IRGC identification documents that gave me enough access level to move through the bunker without being questioned by lower ranking guards.

Iranian money, not much, and a small amount of US dollars that I had kept for months out of a precautionary habit that I myself couldn’t explain where it came from.

No communication equipment, no traceable phone.

I took the radio off my belt and left it on the bunk under the folded pillow in a way that from a distance it looked like something was there.

It was a trick I knew and knew worked for about 20 minutes before someone looked closely.

20 minutes was enough time.

I left the barracks at 2:43 in the morning.

I memorized the time because the brain does that on its own.

In situations like this, it anchors on concrete numbers when everything else is dissolving.

The corridor was in red emergency lighting.

There was a guard at the junction between the accommodation corridor and the main corridor.

A young soldier I recognized by sight, but whose name I didn’t know, sitting in a chair with his spine not completely straight.

That posture of someone who has been fighting sleep for hours.

I walked towards him with the stride of someone who has a destination and authority and no reason to be questioned.

I said I had received a call from the communications sector to check a piece of equipment in the north sector.

I showed my identification without him asking because showing it without being asked creates a different dynamic than showing it when questioned.

He let me pass without getting up from his chair.

The north sector of the bunker was where the backup generators and auxiliary ventilation systems were located.

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