A framed photograph of Soran Mansournia’s younger brother, Borhan, sits on a bookshelf in his office in the Dutch city of Groningen. The picture was taken in Iran’s Kurdistan province in August 2019; Borhan is seen smiling and surrounded by trees. Three months later, the 28-year-old was shot dead while standing next to Mansournia at an anti-government protest in the city of Kermanshah.
“He was a very close friend of mine—he wasn’t just a brother,” Mansournia said of Borhan. “We knew every detail of each other’s lives.”
Iranian security forces are alleged to have killed at least 323 people in a nationwide crackdown over five days in November 2019, according to an investigation by Amnesty International and the Hertie School. The protests began after the government announced significant fuel price increases, but they quickly turned into a broader expression of discontent with the regime.
After Borhan’s death, Mansournia says he was interrogated 24 times by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite military organization that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader. In 2021, Mansournia left Iran for a job as a lecturer at the University of Groningen. He continued his activism for human rights in Iran from abroad, regularly posting on social media and speaking at rallies.
But Mansournia, who is now 36, has also faced a relentless wave of threats, harassment, and intimidation by people he believes are linked to the Iranian regime. After the start of the Iran war in February, it got worse, he said.
As conflict among Iran, Israel, and the United States escalated in the last year, so did Iranian transnational repression in Europe. In March, a man of Iranian descent who was a vocal regime critic was shot and seriously injured in the Dutch city of Schoonhoven. Dutch Justice and Security Minister David van Weel said he could not rule out the possibility that Iran was behind the attack.
Iranian dissidents in Europe say they are growing more fearful—and they don’t think their host governments are taking threats from Tehran seriously.
In 2022, after giving a speech at a rally in The Hague during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, Mansournia said he caught someone trailing him as he walked around the city with his partner. Three weeks later, Iran’s intelligence service showed his partner’s parents in Iran a video of them, he said.
Mansournia has been under Dutch police surveillance for his protection since the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year, although “they’re not doing enough,” he said. In the last 10 months, the police have checked the security of his office twice and his home once, he said, and installed an application on his phone to track him. They told him they could take him to a safe house in the Netherlands—but only if he reduced his activism, he said. “I said, ‘If I do that, I don’t need your protection, and actually the regime wants this,’” he recalled telling authorities.
On April 9, Mansournia received a call from a French number, he said. A man speaking Farsi told him: “Watch yourself because we are watching you. We will come to you soon,” according to Mansournia. He said, “It was terrifying. I’ve received many threats from the regime before, but it was the first time that they called me directly.” He believes that the caller was an Iranian agent.
Mansournia said he has also received scam emails inviting him to fake conferences as well as phishing emails sent to his colleagues falsely accusing him of online harassment. A couple of days after the April phone call, the Iranian government posted Mansournia’s contact details online and wrote that he had “betrayed the country.”
All these threats have made him more careful in his daily life. He uses different routes to and from work and is planning to move in with a friend for a few months. “I really don’t know why [the Dutch government and the European Union] don’t take the regime’s long arms seriously,” Mansournia said.
A Iranian woman holds a placard with the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” during a demonstration at The Hague on Nov. 19, 2022. Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
