Mira Nassiri was 15 years old when she began writing under a name that was not her own. To express her true thoughts freely, she needed to adopt a pseudonym and a surrogate character. That character, Iranian blogger Sarah Shams, existed only online. There was no record of her in school, nor any official trace of a person by that name, but the blog posts were real, and so were the ideas that Nassiri was trying to put across.
The Iranian system, she wrote, could not be fixed through reform. Elections were more or less a farce, with only those permitted by the Supreme Leader allowed to take part, and the space for dissent was narrowing.
“I was 15 when I started blogging with a fake name, Sarah Shams,” she told The Jerusalem Post last week while visiting Israel. “Sarah was my aunt’s name, and Shams was an Arab lady who sang on television when I was starting my blog. I saw her name, and I said ‘Shams.’”
Nassiri grew up in Isfahan, in a country where political discussion was carefully monitored, and the internet, at that point, still offered some space. It was not open, but it was open enough.
Over time, the blog became more direct
At first, the blog was cautious, but over time, it became more direct. Nassiri wrote about politics, about power, and about what she saw as a widening gap between what people were told and what they were actually living inside the Islamic Republic, and from the beginning, she said, she rejected the idea that Iran’s political system could be changed through elections.
“I did not vote,” Nassrii said of the 2009 presidential election. “I was against the election. I was against the whole establishment of the Islamic regime from the beginning. I’ve never voted, and I always advertised against it.”
Her message, even as a teenager, was on point in a repressive political system where only those permitted by the regime’s supreme leader could stand for election.
“I tried to let people know that no matter how many elections you contribute to, the Islamic regime system is not going to change,” she said. “And the new president will be the new puppet of the Islamic regime.”
At the time, blogging itself was rare in Iran. Among them, she said, only a handful were writing openly about politics.
“In the beginning, when I was 15, among them there were only three political bloggers,” she recalled. “One was me.”
For a while, the fake name protected her. She would change the blog's address when it was filtered, moving from one version of “Sarah Shams” to another so readers could keep finding it. But the blog began to attract attention from people within the system.
“I received messages from people who were claiming that they are working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), but they are not with them,” she said. “They were forced to work with the IRGC because they were sent to military service.”
One of them, she said, sent her confidential letters from a military base in southeastern Iran. The letters contained orders relating to the torture of Baloch people suspected of links to Jundallah.
“It shocked me because this person trusted me with his life,” she said. “I was 16. I didn’t know that they would torture people like this. I knew that they were torturing the political people. But going after someone who is not related to any political activity and ordering the soldiers to torture them like that… of course it shocked me.”
She published the material, and then the warnings began to come, stating that the authorities were doing their utmost to find out who “Sarah Shams” was.
Nassiri joins student protests
By 2009, Nassiri was still a high school student, but she was already joining university students in protests in Isfahan, which erupted after the reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some 4,000 people were reportedly arrested over months of protests.
It was at one of these protests that Nassiri was first arrested.
“They took my phone away from me,” she recalled. “They sprayed gas pepper on my face. And I couldn’t breathe anymore. People helped me. I couldn’t see. I could just hear the crowd.”
That night, she said, BBC Persian reported that the protest in Isfahan had begun after a girl was struck by security forces.
“Me and my mom were watching it,” she said. “And my dad was like, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible. I hope nothing happens to this girl.’ And me and my mom, we knew that it started with me.”
In September 2009, Nassiri entered university in Tehran to study political science. There, she continued to lead protests. During one demonstration, a police car was set on fire after protesters were attacked. Nassiri said her picture was taken by someone she believes was a regime infiltrator and later published in a police magazine.
“They published it in the Police Weekly magazine, with the faces of many others,” she said. “And they called them mohareb. ('enmity against God' - a charge often used by the regime to execute political prisoner.)”
A girl living in the same student residence recognized Nassiri and reported her. It was the principal, she recalled, who warned her to leave immediately, as the authorities closed in from all sides.
While she was running, a friend gave her a phone. Somehow, she said, the authorities found the number.
“They called that phone,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You’re coming to the Islamic Revolutionary Court tomorrow, 7 a.m., or we’re going to come and get you.’”
She ran again and for a month and a half, was on the move, with even her family unaware of her whereabouts. Eventually, a contact warned her to get out of Iran or face either execution or a long jail sentence.
Friends arranged her transfer to Kurdistan. She stayed there for 10 days before crossing the border into Turkey.
THE CITY of Van in eastern Turkey rises to over 5,000 feet above sea level and is around 100km from the Iranian border. For Nassiri, it offered her the best bet to get out of Iran and into the free world. Her escape, as she recalled, was arranged through smugglers near Salmas, close to the Turkish border.
Like something out of fiction, Nassiri, still just a teenager, was led through the border on horseback by Kurdish smugglers, alongside Afghan migrants and another Iranian. Some of the migrants, she said, were kept in a stable with sheep for three nights.
“We all crossed this frozen river that they had to break the ice first,” she said. “My feet were freezing. I couldn’t feel my toes anymore. The Afghans didn’t have proper clothing, it was horrible.”
The crossing became even more dangerous on the mountain when, during a snowstorm, Nassiri’s horse reared up, and she fell.
“He went up… and I fell on the Iranian side of the mountain,” she said. “I couldn’t breathe. I thought, ‘I’m dead’.”
She said her chest and back were injured, and she struggled to walk. On the Turkish side of the border, there were further close calls, but eventually, Nassiri reached Van, the refugee system, and later Canada.
Nassiri’s work as an independent investigative journalist
Canada offered safety, but Nassiri said it also revealed a different face of the Islamic Republic’s reach, when she began to discover “that many of the people who are related to the Islamic regime are actually residing in Canada.”
In cities like Vancouver, she saw members of the Iranian diaspora living stable, often comfortable lives, with businesses, properties, and access to systems far removed from conditions inside Iran.
She began looking into institutions and networks she believed were connected to Tehran, and protesting outside the Iranian embassy in Ottawa.
“From the first week, I started going, driving up to Ottawa every Thursday and having a protest in front of the embassy, requesting the Canadian government to shut down the spy house of the Islamic regime.”
At one protest, she said, an embassy official threatened them.
“One of the people who was working at the embassy came out threatening us, threatening us that they were going to go after our families,” she said.
Nassiri’s work as an independent investigative journalist later focused on relatives of senior Iranian officials in Canada, including members of the Larijani family.
She said Fazel Larijani, brother of Ali Larijani, formerly head of the Iranian National Security Council and close advisor to former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, had been in Canada as part of the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic presence and later left, while some family members remained.
“When I realized that they are still in Canada, I started doing more research to find out the chain,” she said. “Who else?”
Another Larijani pursued was Bagher Larijani, brother of Ali, who was ordered to leave Canada in 2024 but remains there.
“Legally speaking, he was ordered to leave,” she said. “He could not apply for permanent residency, and he was ordered to leave. But in reality, he doesn’t leave. He’s still there. And nobody has a problem with that.”
For Nassiri, the issue is the system that allows such networks to settle in the West.
“By providing a safe haven for the families and for the people, you actually let them run away and not be afraid of what they do within Iran,” she explained, seeing it as an enforcement failure.
“We have passed laws that the IRGC affiliates must get deported or not let into the country,” Nassiri told the Post. “But even after they passed that law, not even one single person was deported from Canada.”
When laws are bypassed or ignored completely, and enforcement is inconsistent, it weakens the whole point, just as sanctions that exist on paper but are bypassed in practice.
Among other cases Nassiri has investigated are the Tarameshloos, a family whom she alleges are connected to financial networks tied to senior figures in the Islamic Republic.
The family denies those claims, calling them false and defamatory. Nassiri is one of several defendants in a defamation case brought by the Tarameshloos to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with a hearing scheduled for May 11.
Nassiri alleges that Ali Tarameshloo is known in Iran as the “piggy bank” of Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, Iran’s judiciary chief, who recently declared that “no mercy” should be shown to protesters in Iran.
“This is something that I really want to be out there for people to know,” she said. “How dangerous these people are. And they are living in Canada.”
She said the case is about stolen wealth leaving Iran and finding protection abroad.
“They bring this money outside, they invest it, they make more money out of it,” she said. “And that money belongs to Eje’i and his allies. They also reserve a safe haven for the children of those affiliates and their families,” she said. “While people are suffering and they’re struggling to survive inside Iran, these people get to send their children to Canada.
“This is the national assets money,” Nassiri stated. “This is the money of those people who cannot even survive anymore. We have so many hungry children, dying or committing suicide.”
In February 2025, Nassiri said she was confronted in a department store in West Vancouver by individuals she identifies as members of the Tarameshloo family, with the encounter recorded on her phone and later submitted as part of court filings.
The family disputes her account and denies the underlying allegations and that confrontation is now part of the wider legal dispute.
The Tarameshloo family has filed a defamation lawsuit against Nassiri and others, arguing that the claims made about them are false and have caused serious harm. The case, before the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver, includes Nassiri and several co-defendants, among them UK-based broadcaster Volant Media, which operates Iran International TV.
At the center of the case are Nassiri’s claims that members of the Tarameshloo family are tied to financial networks connected to senior figures in Iran, and that some of their wealth traces back to the Islamic Republic’s system.
Canadian defamation law, however, does not deal with those claims directly at this stage. Instead, the court must first decide whether what was said crosses the line into reputational harm, and whether it is protected as truth or as reporting in the public interest.
The case is now moving toward another hearing on May 11, where judges will hear further arguments about how the lawsuit itself should proceed.
Nassiri said the family has spent heavily on the case, and described the lawsuit as an attempt to silence criticism.
“This is how they’re using that wealth, to silence voices,” she told the Post. “They silenced us inside Iran and outside of Iran using their pockets.”
NASSIRI was in Israel last week as part of a collaborative effort with the Middle East Forum, a US-based research and policy institute led by Gregg Roman, which focuses on American security and economic interests in the Middle East and supports Iranian opposition efforts. Nassiri credits the group with being an important partner in her work, supporting both her research and efforts to expose the Iranian networks abroad.
Alex Selsky, Director for Israel Affairs at the Middle East Forum, said the West too often grants refuge to regime-connected families and the money he says was taken from the Iranian people, rather than targeting the leadership networks themselves.
The organization said it supports her journalistic work and facilitated meetings in Israel, including with MK Oded Forer, who chairs the Knesset’s Iran Freedom Caucus, an initiative aimed at building Israeli support for the Iranian people’s struggle against the regime.
For Nassiri, her visits to Israel brought an emotional response from Iranians watching from afar.
“I’m receiving a lot of messages from people,” she said. Hundreds of messages from people saying, "Please tell them not to stop. Don’t take away the hope from us.”
She also said many Iranians see Israel not as an enemy, but as a country confronting the regime that has oppressed them, and thanked Israelis for what she described as solidarity with the Iranian people.
For Nassiri, her journey has taken her from a teenage blogger hiding under a pseudonym in Isfahan to thousands of miles away on Canada’s Pacific coast - but the target has always been the same. To investigate and publicize the crimes of those connected to the Islamic Republic regime.
As she told the Post defiantly, “I’m not going to stop.”
