Sarina Esmailzadeh

سارینا اسماعیل‌زاده

2006–2022 · 4 years ago

Born: 2 July 2006
Taken: 23 September 2022
Age: only 16 years old
From: Karaj, Alborz

Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.

Who did I miss? Tell me their name, and who they were.Say what you think, in Persian or English. Other readers can answer you.Discuss

Their life

Sarina was born in Mehrshahr, Karaj, and went to the Farzanegan school for gifted girls. Her father died in 2013, and she lived with her older brother and her mother, who had long been ill.

She ran her own YouTube and Telegram channels, posting videos about her friends and family and about the things she cared about: compulsory hijab, the economy, freedom. She wrote poetry and recited it on Telegram, often with music and photos of her handwriting, and her channel had a large following. After Jina Amini was killed she posted a protest poem, and her last post read: "My homeland smells like exile."

Iranian teenagers today are not the same as they were twenty years ago. They know what is happening in the world, and they ask themselves what they have less than an American teenager, that their worries should be so different.

Her YouTube video of 22 May 2022, as recorded by the Boroumand Center

How the regime took them

On 23 September 2022 Sarina joined a protest in Karaj. Security forces beat her about the head with batons, and she died of her injuries. Her death certificate records multiple blows.

The family was not allowed to see her body before the burial. Amnesty International reports that agents then harassed them into silence, and a provincial judicial chief claimed she had killed herself by falling from a height.