Ahmad Samadi calls from the car, he has just come from the Berlin Immigration Office and is relieved. The Iranian has been trying to renew his passport for four months, but the Iranian embassy in Berlin is opposed. No wonder Ahmad Samadi is a member of a terrorist group. The 49-year-old journalist has been working for Iran International since 2020, the London-based broadcaster that reports on the protests in the Islamic Republic of Iran and that the regime declared a “terrorist organization” last November. The immigration authorities have now assured Samadi of German citizenship. In six weeks he will be German. Samadi laughs on the phone, he sounds confident.
The past few months must have been very stressful. British police parked seven armored vehicles in front of his station in London in response to “explicit threats” against the station’s employees. Samadi also receives threats almost daily via Instagram or the Clubhouse audio network.
When he is in front of the camera, the family man speaks the announcer: “This is Ahmad Samadi for Iran International from Berlin.” An anonymous user wrote to him in Farsi: “Here is Ahmad Samadi for Iran International from Evin prison.” This is the country’s most notorious prison. Another user became explicit, referring to the Iranian soft drink brand Zam Zam Cola, from which he would like to shove a glass bottle up his butt – a well-known torture method in Iranian prisons – or kill him directly with it.
The protection of the constitution sees the dangers
Since the beginning of the protests in Iran in autumn, since thousands have also shown solidarity in Germany, Tehran’s long arm has been felt strongly here. Whether Iranian or German-Iranian – even in Germany, opponents of the mullah regime are identified, spied on and threatened.
In a recent interview with the German Press Agency, the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, warned critics of the regime living here against traveling to the Islamic Republic. They would also have to reckon with relatives in Iran suffering repression. “Something like this has already happened, and right now in the current situation, in which massive protests are taking place in Iran, we are seeing the same thing in Germany,” warned Haldenwang.
How real the threat can be could be seen in Berlin at the end of October. At night, three strangers attacked a caravan in front of the Iranian embassy where opponents of the regime had set up a protest camp. They were injured, their banners and flags torn down. The perpetrators escaped. Or a few weeks later in front of the Green Party headquarters: activists camped there to persuade Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to take a harder line against Tehran.
According to the activists, four people burst in one night with a broken bottle and a knife and tried to break down a sign accusing the mullahs’ government of murder and terror. They were attacked twice more in a similar way. In two of the three cases, the state security of the State Criminal Police Office is investigating.
Activists have set up camp in a caravan in front of the Iranian embassy in Berlin. During an attack, opponents of the regime were injured there.
(Photo: rolf kremming/IMAGO)
The Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution has so far been cautious about clearly attributing these attacks to the regime and its henchmen. But the activities of the Iranian intelligence services in Germany are being closely monitored. According to German security authorities, the Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) and the Quds Brigades also have their people in Germany. You keep a very close eye on the Iranian diaspora. Especially now.
The mullahs’ regime has been spying on its opponents abroad since the Islamic revolution of 1979. In 1992, the MOIS even had four politicians in exile murdered in the Berlin restaurant “Mykonos”. In 2018, investigators in Bavaria arrested Assadollah A., who was accredited as a diplomat in Vienna. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning an attack on exiles as a MOIS agent.
German-Iranian Maryam Giyahchi says the threat has been with her since she was a child. She fled Iran with her parents, who rejected the Islamic regime, in 1981 when she was still a baby – after the whole family had been imprisoned. Over a cola in a Munich café, she tells how she once answered the phone as a primary school child and only heard a man’s voice saying: “We’ll kill you.” There were always calls like this.
Giyahchi is now 42, sits for the SPD in the district parliament, and is involved in the city association of Munich women’s associations. For a long time, however, she did not deal with Iran issues, the fear was too deep. With the outbreak of the “feminist revolution,” as she calls the current protests, she no longer wanted to stand still. Giyahchi organized a demonstration for women’s and human rights in Iran for the “Women’s March” alliance in December.
No matter where in the world, “the mullah regime is always nearby.”
Suddenly, says Giyahchi, she received messages on Instagram, from total strangers, in Farsi and in a threatening tone. And e-mails with insults, slander. Giyahchi found a lawyer to see if it was worth reporting. “These are mechanisms of terror,” says Maryam Giyahchi. “You can be anywhere in the world you want. You still have the feeling that the mullah regime is always nearby.”
Ahmad Samadi, who lives in Berlin, also knows this feeling. “You will die. Be careful. The Islamic Republic of Iran is as close to you and your family as your blood vessels on your neck,” says a message that the SZ was able to see. At some point it became too much for him. So he went to the police and filed a complaint. The conversation lasted four hours, he says on the phone. The public prosecutor’s office in Berlin initiated investigations against unknown persons and found out through a request to Facebook that the Instagram account is authorized for a verified Iranian phone number.
However, the owner could not be identified because “it can be assumed that the Iranian authorities would not react cooperatively to any request for legal assistance in the local proceedings,” says the letter that the SZ has received. The Iranian embassy in Berlin did not answer SZ questions about the threats against opponents of the regime in Germany and a possible involvement of Tehran.
Danger is part of it, says Ahmad Samadi from the Iran International broadcaster, who reports critically about the regime in Tehran.
(Photo: private)
The police released Ahmad Samadi with a few safety tips: He shouldn’t take the same route home every day or avoid certain countries. Some users wanted to lure him to the Gulf, Iraq or Turkey. All countries that he now has to avoid because dissidents could be kidnapped from there to Iran, his broadcaster warns.
Ahmad Samadi doesn’t sound really worried on the phone, he knows the occupational risk of working on the “other side”. Samadi has lived in Germany since 2014, when he was still working for the Iranian state broadcaster Irib. In 2017 they fired him because they thought he was too critical. “They accused me of registering myself as a refugee in Germany. I think they wanted to get rid of me because I didn’t deliver what I was supposed to.”
For two years now he has been working the way he always wanted to work. “In Iran you have to weigh every word carefully. Now I can finally write what I see and hear. I can write down reality, this freedom feels incredibly great,” says Samadi. And the danger is part of it.