During this act of protest, the flag of the Islamic Republic has been lowered and replaced with a banner bearing an image of Neda AghaSoltan, the woman who was shot to death in Tehran’s street protests after the disputed June presidential elections. The protesters at the Embassy were chanting Persian and Dutch slogans against the Islamic Republic. The Embassy security did not react to the protesters at first but after 15 minutes endeavored to remove them from the premises.

NIGDE, Turkey — Light snow was falling when the two young men set out on horseback for the border to flee Iran. By the time they were deep in the mountains, it had become a blinding blizzard, the temperature had dropped below freezing, and they were barely alive.

Hesam Misaghi and Sepehr Atefi were joining what has become an exodus of dissidents fleeing Iran’s political turmoil. For them that meant a harrowing journey through the country’s rugged northwest in the dead of winter, with the help of Kurdish smugglers.

At a river crossing, the ice broke beneath them and their horses stumbled in, soaking the two with freezing water.

“There was no feeling in my legs and hands,” recalled Misaghi, a tall, wiry 21-year-old. “I felt drunk. I didn’t know where I was. I was laughing from pain.”

Atefi, 20, spotted a van from a distance, grabbed Misaghi’s arm and dragged him toward it through the snow. “There was no life left in me to move forward, but we had to reach the highway,” he said.

The men, both Iranian human rights reporters, reached the van, begged a ride and made it to safety in Turkey.

At least 4,200 Iranians have fled their homeland since disputed presidential elections in June, according to a list compiled by activist Aida Saadat, who herself slipped across the border into Turkey in December. These refugees have scattered to the United States, Europe and Gulf nations like the United Arab Emirates.

Most of all, they have come to Turkey – around 1,150 of them, according to the U.N. refugee agency – taking advantage of the porous border and Turkey’s policy of not requiring a visa. Most of the new arrivals fled for political reasons, including those who took part in opposition protests after the vote. They bring the number of Iranians in Turkey to 4,440, as of February – including “undesirables” in the eyes of the clerical regime, such as homosexuals or members of the Bahai religion.

The danger these Iranians face back home is clear. A month after Atefi and Misaghi’s January escape, police raided their homes in the central Iranian city of Isfahan. Among the charges against them: “moharebeh,” or “waging war against God,” a crime punishable by death.

Police arrested their friend and colleague, Navid Khanjani, who was supposed to have fled with them but changed his mind at the last minute. With Khanjani’s arrest, eight people in the independent Committee of Human Rights Reporters have been jailed, and three remain in prison and could face execution.

In Turkey, the refugees are safer, but they live in limbo. Almost all brought little money and cannot work because of Turkish restrictions, so they cram into small, coal-heated apartments with minimal furniture.

Many Iranian refugees hope the UNHCR will arrange resettlement for them in the United States or Europe – a wait that could take years, as the refugee agency is also dealing with thousands of Iraqis who have fled here from their own wartorn homeland in recent years.

Go to Washington Post.

…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.

Go to NY Times.

Tehran’s skyline still filling with Allah O Akbars at night…..

Free Iran:  Maybe not today.  Maybe not tomorrow.  But the Iranian people’s victory is inevitable.  They will do away with this failed, miserable regime.  They will gain their freedom, and respect for their human rights.  The following are some posters and music videos – songs of hope, resistance and victory.  Long live the brave people of Iran.

.

See More.

In Tabriz, at Sahand Stadium, soccer fans rise up shouting “We are Babak’s soldiers, we are not afraid of dying!”

Students at Babol university protesting and singing Yare Dabestani.

On March 3rd students came out to protest at Elm Va Sanat University in Tehran.

Two weeks before a cherished Iranian holiday that’s celebrated by setting off fireworks and lighting bonfires, Tehran’s chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dowlatabadi delivered an ominous warning to those seeking to turn the celebration into a protest event.

“Police and judges will firmly confront those who intend to go on rampage by exploiting the Chaharshanbeh Souri occasion to create insecurity in the city,” state radio quoted him as saying Sunday. “Nobody is opposed to people’s celebration and recreation. But those who may damage people and public properties in a bid to vent their frustration will be legally dealt with.”

With roots in Iran’s pre-Islamic past, Chaharshanbeh Souri, or Red Wednesday — celebrated on the last Tuesday night before the March 20 end of the Persian calendar year — is an unruly, chaotic and downright dangerous night of edgy pyrotechnics and mayhem.

And that’s during a calm year.

The celebration had already taken on a distinctly political character, especially since the nation’s fundamentalist Muslim clergy have tried unsuccessfully to wipe out such pre-Islamic rituals. But in the wake of the unrest that followed Iran’s disputed presidential elections, opposition supporters have called for protests during the nocturnal celebration.

Jafari-Dowlatabadi warned that the prosecutor’s offices will be burning the midnight oil monitoring the situation during that night, March 16. He called on parents to keep their children from turning the celebration into one of “suffering and mourning.”

“People themselves will never allow anyone to disturb the climate,” he said, hinting that plainclothes pro-government Basiji militiamen will be out in full force.  The prosecutor also likened any opposition to the government as a threat to “national security” that would be dealt with harshly. “Whatever has happened in the past eight months since the election are all blatant cases of threats against national security,” he said. Go to LA Times.

Iran’s security forces will stop opposition supporters using the Iranian new year in March to stage more anti-government protests, a leading judicial official said.

Tehran prosecutor-general Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi was speaking after opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi said on his website on February 28 that the legitimacy of clerical rule was waning due to its “repressive measures”.

“Even though some go on trying to agitate the atmosphere in society with statements… they’ve been given the answer by the people,” Dolatabadi said in comments on state news agency IRNA.

“We will not witness street demonstrations and we will not allow anyone to come to the streets to disrupt public security without proper permits.”

Hardliners have accused reformist opposition leaders of inciting unrest and called them enemies of God, a crime punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic law.

“Even though threats against the revolution will not come to an end, we will not succumb and certainly one day in the not so distant future despair will take them and they will surrender,” Dolatabadi said.

“The file on the election has been closed and law enforcement agencies have been asked to preserve security,” he said, referring to often rowdy large street celebrations involving fires and fireworks on the last Tuesday of the Iranian year, March 16.

The Iranian new year begins on March 21. Go to Radio Free Europe.