San Francisco Frontiers - 'I was drowning': Iran Nobel winner exposes pain of separation from children

In the book, "A Woman Never Stops Fighting", Mohammadi, the 2023 laureate who has spent most of the last decade in-and-out of prison for her human rights campaigning, reveals both the defiance and the pain of her struggle.

Mohammadi recalled the scorching summer day in July 2015 when, while jailed in Tehran's Evin prison, she said goodbye to her twins Kiana and Ali, then eight and now 19, for the last time before they left for Paris.

"They arrived dressed in colourful summer clothes, their hair neatly combed, bright smiles on their faces," she said, adding the children were "completely absorbed in their own world" rather than worrying about farewells.

After embracing a last time, "once outside, still holding tightly on to one another, they began to run. They looked back, waving goodbye -- an image I'll never forget.

"My body was flushing with heat. I felt as though I had become a flame, scorching in the hot summer air," she said.

"I felt as though a vast void had opened inside me."

After their plane had taken off for Paris, she recalled feeling that she "knew that for their sake, the kids had to be taken out of Iran."

"It wasn't safe for them -- not with the sabotaged cars, the midnight intruders, and the shadow of the gallows over our home."

"But at the same time, I was a mother, and I was drowning."

"I would likely not see Kiana and Ali again, at least not for a long time. And how could I live without seeing my children?"

- 'Never endure that unbearable moment' -

Mohammadi, 54, was in May released from prison on health grounds after her most recent arrest late last year.

She was incarcerated during the 2022 mass "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests, her 2023 Nobel award, the mass demonstrations earlier this year and the US-Israeli war that erupted on February 28. She was out of prison during Israel's 12-day war in 2025.

When the 2025 war broke out and the sound of bombing echoed around her home in Tehran, Mohammadi said she "feared that I might have to leave this world without ever seeing my children again".

"I had promised myself that I would survive. I had to stay alive so that Kiana and Ali would never have to endure that unbearable moment -- the moment of learning of their mother's death."

But in the book she also shared the joy that burst out in October 2023 when a fellow prisoner, after a phone call, yelled that "Narges has won the Nobel Peace Prize!"

The women prisoners in her ward in Evin immediately started chanting the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" as the sound of "clapping hands echoed through the corridors".

The women danced in the prison yard, singing the Persian version of "Bella Ciao", she said.

Mohammadi recounted how during her stints in prison, especially as the 2022 protests raged in Tehran, her civil disobedience did not let up even to the point of covering the omnipresent security cameras.

"In response to the regime's obsession with control, I gathered several sanitary pads from my friends, opened them, coated the backs with liquid glue, and began sticking them over the surveillance cameras in the corridors and stairwells."

"In the prison yard, the cameras were installed even higher, so we tied two broom handles together with rope, fixed a sanitary pad to the brush end, and used it to raise the pads and cover the camera lenses."

Supporters have said that Mohammadi, who suffers from a heart condition, risks being re-arrested at any time to serve some 18 years on various national security charges and warned any further imprisonment would put her life in danger.

Z.Sanchez--SFF