…Here’s something I know. Iran is full of people like Negar. She’s 32, a movie editor. She hates the regime. She doesn’t want her country to be attacked, a return to the wailing sirens of the Iran-Iraq war of her youth (in which Israel supported Iran.)

Negar contacted me the other day from a town in central Turkey. She lives there in limbo as her application for refugee status is processed by a U.N. agency. Her story returned me to the road from Revolution to Freedom.

It’s just an ordinary Iranian story — of waste.

On July 17, 2009, she was in a protesting crowd when security agents grabbed her, rammed her head into a water channel, broke her hand. Her camera and bag were taken. “I knew they would come for me.”

She managed to get her passport renewed, flew to Istanbul, and decided to seek asylum in Britain. Her parents borrowed money and she paid $10,000 for a fake Italian passport. The people-smuggler said she should travel to Nairobi, and from there to London: That way she’d look like a tourist.

So Negar headed for Africa, spent four days wandering Nairobi — and was arrested at the airport. Deportation to Iran loomed. “No,” said Negar, a convinced atheist, “they might kill me.” She was put on a plane back to Istanbul via Dubai.

In Dubai, the authorities wanted to deport her to Iran. She prevailed again and proceeded to Turkey, where she was detained and held for five weeks. Under the terms of her release she had to move to central Turkey to await the result of her refugee application.

History’s whirlwind got her.

Negar’s heart is in Iran. “It was a great moment, changes came,” she told me. “People are motivated, this stupidity cannot continue. Before we were hidden, now we have found each other. The day I met you was incredible, so much serenity. I realized: Iranians care about their destiny.”

Negar now wants to come to the United States, pending the new Iran she considers inevitable. I asked why. “Because there I can be the way I am.”

Negar does not want her country bombed. “It would be a big, big mistake. All Iranians would unite in anger.”

Her own government stifled Negar’s voice. But the world must listen. It’s her country after all — and the ballot-counting Heydari’s.