A woman described as Iran’s “Nelson Mandela” wins the Nobel peace prize

No sooner was she out of prison than Narges Mohammadi would post videos on social media of the abuse she had suffered inside. She would be arrested and jailed once again. Even as they hauled her back to prison, she would post, laughing at her captors. She would spend her medical leave of other prisoners. And once back in jail she would compile reports of human-rights violations and smuggle them out.She would organise sit-ins against guards who wielded cattle-prods. As blows rained down on her she led her fellow prisoners in chants of anti-fascist anthems and the cry which for a year has : “woman, life, freedom”. The only way her interrogators could silence her was to lock her in solitary, “a sealed tin” as she calls it, at least once for months on end. Even then her example gave hope to the women in Ward 209, the block the Ministry of Intelligence uses for interrogations in the regime’s , Evin, in the Iranian capital, Tehran. She shrugged off her interrogators’ hints to go into exile, even when they offered her instructions for how to flee through Kurdistan. She spurned their pleas to ask for a pardon and so be done with the punishment. And when abuse worsened, she recorded it in minute detail in her book, “White Torture”, along with her torturers’ names.