Editor’s note: On April 8, 2024, as part of a mass amnesty ahead of the holiday of Eid, conservationist Niloufar Bayani was released, along with three of her colleagues, after spending six years in a notorious Iranian prison. In the preceding months, journalist Lucy Sherriff and The Sunday Long Read team had been working on an account of how she got there and once there, how she survived.

This is her story.

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Imagine your job is to deliver water to some of the last remaining wild individuals of a critically endangered species. The Asiatic cheetah, which lives only in the arid deserts of eastern Iran, hiding among rocky, rugged mountains that stretch 10,000 feet skyward, competes with local livestock for limited water resources. You might be its best hope of survival. 

You’re dressed head to toe in khaki, binoculars swinging from your neck, laden with the kind of gear wildlife conservationists need not just to do their jobs, but to survive in the wilderness. You’ve hauled water from Tehran, hours away, to this gnarled terrain near the Afghanistan border, placing the buckets in areas where game cameras indicate the animals might be present. You crouch behind coarse bracken and hold your breath. Time slows as you hold your position, hoping to blend in seamlessly with the sandy landscape. At last, you spot her: long-legged, agile, fearsome. An acinonyx jubatus venaticus, one of only a handful of Asiatic cheetahs left on the planet, has come to drink.

This is the kind of moment, the kind of magic, that Niloufar Bayani, a Tehran-born, Canadian-educated conservationist, moved home for. She worked for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a Tehran-based conservation organization, whose goal was to bring the cheetahs back from the brink of extinction. 

Bayani had joined the foundation, run by fellow Iranians Morad Tahbaz and Kavous Seyed-Emami, after five years working for the United Nations in Geneva. At 31, she had a promising career ahead of her, but had decided to return home to Iran to save her country’s threatened wildlife.

The future of one of the rarest cats in the world, which once stalked plains stretching from Russia to Pakistan to Yemen, had been left entirely to Iran. The population had drastically declined thanks to shrinking habitats, restricted resources, and poaching. The only likely remaining wild population lives in the eastern-central arid region of Iran, where there are very few humans. It was near impossible to conduct research on the cheetahs.

But the group’s painstaking efforts to save the cheetahs would soon come to a halt. Even though they operated in the open, with the full permission of the Iranian government, their freedom would be stripped away by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a paramilitary group that operates independently from Iran’s regular military and answers only to the country’s supreme leader. Established by Iran’s religious leaders as an extrajudicial tool after the 1979 revolution whose name it bears, the IRGC frequently advances the supreme leader’s agenda inside the country and abroad. 

In November 2017, the IRGC placed Tahbaz, the foundation’s co-founder, under a travel ban, unable to leave the country. And by January 2018, he and eight of his colleagues, including Bayani, would be arrested, and according to family members, thrown in solitary confinement and subjected to torture, with several charged with “sowing corruption on earth,” a charge that can carry the death penalty. After two weeks in prison, Kavous Seyed-Emami would be found dead – with prison authorities claiming he had hung himself inside his cell.

Following years in prison, forced confessions, and a closed-door trial, Tahbaz, an American, British, and Iranian citizen, was released from prison in September 2023 and allowed to fly home to the United States as part of a political prisoner swap and a $6 billion deal with the US government. 

Their arrests were “completely out of the blue,” says a family member of one of those arrested, who did not want to be identified because of safety concerns. “They were doing everything by the book. …We still don’t really know the reason why they were taken.”

For this story, the Sunday Long Read spoke with family, friends, and associates of the imprisoned individuals. Many of them did not want to be identified for security reasons. These interviews, along with international media coverage and the efforts of academic advocacy groups, paint a picture of Niloufar Bayani’s longtime dedication to science, her not-always-quiet defiance, and her efforts to preserve her humanity – and that of others – in dark circumstances.

Six years passed after Bayani was arrested by the IRGC. Apart from a five-day period when she was released on furlough, she spent the entire time behind bars.

Act I: “If only we had known what was to come”

Bayani grew up in Iran’s capital Tehran with her parents Marmar and Yousef and sister Narges. She developed an adoration of animals from an early age and had a particular affinity for insects. She realized, however, that if she wanted to become a conservationist she would have to pursue her education abroad – there were far more opportunities outside her home country. When Bayani was 18, she left home to study biology at McGill University in Montreal.

At university, Bayani was enthralled by all the new, interesting people from all over the world, coming together in one place. Daniel Hoops, a shy student in the same biology course as Bayani, was one of those people. “We never would have been friends if it weren’t for her personality,” Hoops recalled. “She is just such a warm and wonderful person.” Hoops remembers Bayani as tall, elegant, and graceful, thanks to the years she spent studying ballet. Her tight, dark curls framed her face, and her warm brown eyes sparkled with life.

“She loved Iran. She would go on and on about how it’s not what we hear about in the media,” Hoops recalled. Bayani was willing to argue for hours about how everyone misunderstood her beautiful Iran, with its classical poetry and colorful cuisine. She encouraged Hoops to visit her after graduation.

Bayani and Hoops grew closer during a semester-long program called Canadian Field Studies in Africa. A group of 37 biology students were dispatched to East Africa in January 2008, moving across the region from Kampala to Tanzania, Hoops remembered. There was a fraught moment when the group, none of whom had a visa for the country, arrived at Arusha Airport in Tanzania. Thirty-three Canadians, one Singaporean, and two Europeans were waved through immigration. Bayani was stopped and taken aside for questioning. The group waited at the airport for news of Bayani, who was eventually let through after hours of questioning – about what, Hoops doesn’t know. But Bayani smiled her way through it all, despite her friend’s worry for her.

On the way back from one field excursion, the group’s van was traveling on the winding road that wrapped around the base of the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano, sticky with mud after a particularly heavy bout of rain. The wheels churned in the thick mud and the van ground to a halt, tires spinning.

In the near distance, the volcano spewed ash. Just hours prior, it had begun erupting. The group emptied out of the van, terrified, watching the lava ooze out of the vent. Suddenly, Bayani dropped to the ground, hands and feet squelching in the mud as she moved her body back and forth, hips arched high to the sky. “Oh my god,” Hoops thought, “Nilou’s doing yoga.” Other students joined in, Bayani leading the impromptu yoga class. Yoga progressed to acrobatics, and Bayani was soon turning aerial cartwheels. 

Bayani threw her head back and laughed. Her laugh was infectious, and soon, the whole group was laughing too.

After she graduated from McGill, Bayani spent the next two years studying conservation biology at Columbia University. In 2012, she applied for an internship at the United Nations Environment Program, based out of Geneva, working on ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere.

Bayani was inducted to the job with the usual security training the UN required all of its employees to take – something that would come back to haunt her.

Colleague Karen Sudmeier was instantly impressed with the intern, who always dressed well, and whose laughter could be heard echoing down the office corridors. Bayani landed a full-time job after her internship finished, and threw herself into Genevan life. Every year, Bayani would get a team together for the l’Escalade race, a lengthy run through Geneva in freezing December. “That’s Nilou,” Sudmeier says. “Always making the most of life.”

Bayani traveled to the DRC regularly, accompanied by videographer Armando Guerra, whom Bayani met for the first time boarding a flight bound for DRC’s chaotic airport of Kinshasa. The pair, who had been assigned to film a video for the UNEP, had instant chemistry, cracking jokes just minutes into the packed flight.

The poverty in the DRC shocked Bayani and sparked a conversation about how one’s place of birth defines one’s life. “I have never met anyone who has a worse passport than me!” the Cuban-born Guerra told Bayani. Guerra took a photo of their passports, both as a symbol of how far they had come, and a reminder that, despite all of their progress, they were still restricted by their nationalities.

Guerra looks back on those conversations as bittersweet. “If only we had known what was to come,” he says.  

In the spring of 2017, Sudmeier remembers, the UNEP project’s funding was drying up, and Bayani was tired of the red tape and lack of career opportunities at the UN. “She wanted to move on,” says Sudmeier. “What she really got excited about was the prospect of going home. She wanted to contribute to her country and rediscover her culture.”

Through friends in Iran, Bayani heard about the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, co-founded by Morad Tahbaz, a London-born iranian businessman who lived in Connecticut and was passionate about conservation, and Kavous Seyed-Emami, an Iranian-Canadian sociology professor who taught at a Tehran university. The pair founded the organization in 2008 after Tahbaz fell in love with the Asiatic cheetahs during trips back to his home country. At the time, there were less than 30 left in the world, and they were all in Iran. Tahbaz partnered with his friend Seyed-Emami to launch the foundation and they began hiring staff to save the country’s cheetahs. The foundation worked closely with the environmental department of the Iranian government, which even assigned the nonprofit projects.

Bayani was offered a job with the foundation in 2017 as a conservation biologist. She was excited about the prospect of returning home, though some of her friends questioned her decision.

“I’ll be safe,” she told Guerra over beers in Geneva. But Guerra was concerned she was being naive about the dangers of working in Iran. Perhaps, Guerra wondered, she had been shielded from the injustices of her country because she had been away for so long.

“Wouldn’t you go back to Cuba, Armando?” she asked him. “No!” he replied. But Bayani was adamant: she wanted to go home to work to save the Asiatic cheetah from extinction. There were few opportunities to fundraise, and organizations from abroad cannot easily transfer money due to sanctions imposed on Iran. “We have been living for so long abroad,” Guerra mused, “that the chance to go back to one’s home country…it is just so tantalizing.”  

Returning home to make a difference in the very place where she first fell in love with animals made perfect sense. Bayani left Geneva for Tehran in May 2017. Weeks later, she was driving the remote mountains of Iran’s central plains, stalking cheetahs, laying camera traps, and hauling water.

“Come visit!” Bayani eagerly WhatsApped Guerra, who began reading travel blogs about Iran. “I could use my Cuban passport,” he joked. “It’ll be less suspicious, considering they’re both axis of evil countries.”

“Is it safe?” Guerra asked. “Yes, it’s safe,” Bayani replied, with a smile emoji.

Bayani and Guerra stayed in touch, but sometimes weeks would go by before she would reply. “Hey, I’m worried about you, where are you?” Guerra wrote to his friend after a particularly long period of time had passed. “Ahhh thank you,” Bayani replied, “Please always worry about me.”

Guerra felt foolish for his concern. “I’m sorry, I’ll shut up now.”

“Bye bye byeeee,” came Bayani’s response.

Act II: “Intolerable anxiety never ceased”

On the morning of January 10, 2018, the IRGC arrested Tahbaz at his home. Although Bayani’s colleague had been under a travel ban since November of the previous year, nobody had thought it too unusual. Iran places individuals under bans for a variety of reasons. But six weeks later, the IRGC came to Tahbaz’s house and took him away, refusing to tell even Tahbaz’s wife, Vida, why. Bayani was concerned, but there was nothing she, or her colleagues, could do.

The foundation staff was still in the dark when, on January 24, an unknown number of soldiers from the IRGC, clad in fir-green uniforms with gold embroidered insignia displaying the black pasdaran logo of the corps—a raised fist clutching an assault rifle—stormed their homes, arresting eight more of the foundation’s staff, including Bayani, over two days.

As Australian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who once shared a cell with Bayani, wrote in her memoir about her imprisonment, “The Uncaged Sky,” Bayani would have found herself blindfolded and bundled into a car, headed into Evin Prison, a notorious detention center in northern Tehran. Bayani would finally have her blindfold removed once alone and locked in a dark cell. The exact details of the raid remain largely shrouded by an aura of secrecy and fear – no one connected to the group will publicly discuss it, and those behind bars are not accessible – but it resembles the regular extrajudicial detention of foreigners that has led to international criticism and sanctions for the IRGC.

Shortly after the group’s arrest, then-President Hassan Rouhani appointed a special investigation to look into the charges, and even publicly declared the group not guilty. But the IRGC insisted the group were spies, and claimed the president’s intelligence ministry was “not qualified to identify acts of espionage.”

The IRGC is a separate entity from Iran’s regular armed forces, operating as one of the most powerful paramilitary organizations in the Middle East and a locus of power that has control over much of Iran’s politics. 

Iran’s regime has a history of arresting scientists, academics, and artists, “to the extent that the Evin prison is jokingly called the ‘Evin University,’” says Ali Arab, a statistics professor at Washington DC’s Georgetown University and Amnesty International board member who campaigns to raise awareness of human rights violations against academics. Crackdowns on academics are becoming more frequent around the globe. “Since the early 2000s, there has been an increasing and systematic trend in arresting scholars that travel to Iran for different reasons but almost always with the same charge of spying and collaboration with a hostile state,” he says. “Most of these cases are tangled with Iran’s hostage diplomacy.” 

There are many ways the arrests of Bayani and her colleagues could be interpreted, including the regime’s paranoia over NGOs with international links. 

Just a couple of months before Bayani and her colleagues’ arrests, the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation wrote a letter to Panthera, an international big cat charity whose co-founder Thomas Kaplan had made a surprise public appearance in September 2017 at the annual conference of United Against Nuclear Iran, held in New York. Kaplan described Iran as a “reticulated python” devouring the other countries in the Middle East. He also publicly discussed his role as one of United Against Nuclear Iran’s major funders, which came as concerning news to the foundation’s staff. In their letter, the foundation’s staff told Panthera that Kaplan’s public comments had caused them “alarm and consternation.” “We are very sorry to see personal politics have a negative impact on conservation, but these are unusual times,” the letter continued.

Panthera had donated cameras–cash donations aren’t possible, due to sanctions–to Tahbaz’s foundation, and the cameras were a major piece of evidence for the prosecution, a source who did not wish to be named told The Sunday Long Read. The IRGC argued that the cameras had visibility of the country’s nuclear weapons that were being developed, although one expert told The World in 2019 that low-resolution camera traps, like the ones used to track the cheetahs, likely couldn’t see much beyond the targeted animals.

Arab believes the main factor may have been the element of detaining the conservationists for diplomatic leverage. One former Evin prisoner told The Sunday Long Read that the regime’s agents believed Bayani was a dual citizen of Iran and Canada, only to find out later that was not the case – Bayani only held permanent residency in Canada.

Bayani, recalling her treatment in letters to then-Judiciary Chief Sadegh Larijani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that were later translated and published by the Center for Human Rights Iran, was subjected to months of solitary confinement and psychological and physical torture. She was questioned for “9-12 hours day and night” during that period, she wrote, estimating she faced a total of 1,200 hours of interrogation.

“I was interrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning, or sit-and-standing,” Bayani wrote in the letters, also published by BBC Persia. “Threatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father… threatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices…[and] heard hours of detailed descriptions about the suffering and pain caused by torture.”

Bayani became increasingly terrified that if she didn’t write whatever her interrogator wanted, he would violently sexually assault her. “Because of his inexplicable sudden appearances and disgusting behavior in various places like dark passages and in the detention yard, I didn’t feel safe anywhere,” she wrote. “Intolerable anxiety never ceased.”

She was forced to mimic the sounds of wild animals by agents who threatened to inject her with hallucinogenic drugs. Sepideh Kashani’s husband Houman Jokar was beaten and paraded in front of Kashani covered in blood. Interrogators reportedly traveled to New York to film Morad Tahbaz’s daughter Tara at a cafe, so they could show her father they had the ability to kill his daughter if he did not agree to sign scripted “confessions.”

“I was interrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning, or sit-and-standing…threatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father… threatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices…[and] heard hours of detailed descriptions about the suffering and pain caused by torture.”

Niloufar bayani in letters to then-Judiciary Chief Sadegh Larijani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

The paramilitary’s goal was to force each individual to sign a confession saying they were guilty of espionage, a crime punishable by the death penalty. All nine staff members, including Bayani, resisted until one freezing February 2018 morning, a few weeks after their arrest.

The guard assigned to Bayani for the day showed his prisoner a photograph. It was Seyed-Emami, lying on a steel table.

He committed suicide, Bayani remembered interrogators barking at her, as she described her experience in her letter to Khamenei. “That’s going to be your fate and the fate of all of your colleagues and family members unless you write whatever we want.”

The 63-year-old academic had been found dead in his Evin Prison cell sometime around February 9, two weeks after he had been taken in for interrogation. Officials claimed the academic and father of two had committed suicide, but a preliminary autopsy report that omitted his cause of death showed “bruises on different parts of the body and evidence of an injection on his skin,” according to his family’s lawyer. Four days after the conservationist’s death, a short film was aired on state-funded television accusing him of espionage. The guards stuck with their story of suicide, and the news trickled through to the outside world, causing a media storm. 

His family and friends were adamant: Seyed-Emami would never have committed suicide. 

Their lawyer demanded to know whether Seyed-Emami had died by suffocation, stroke, or drug poisoning, but the authorities refused to release further information and pushed the family to bury him without a full autopsy. Had he not died, the arrest of the conservationists “wouldn’t have snowballed into such a thing,” a source close to the prisoners, who did not wish to be named due to safety concerns, observed. There was almost no media coverage of the group’s arrest at the beginning; Iran imprisoning academics was becoming commonplace. “If Kavous hadn’t died in custody, their arrests wouldn’t have become such huge global news. And I think once that happened, the [guards] had to double down on their cases against these environmentalists.”

Shortly after Seyed-Emami’s death, Bayani signed the false confession. The guards were triumphant–their prisoner’s trial could begin. However as Bayani outlined in her letter to the judiciary chief, the inhumane treatment would continue for months. 

On October 24, the group’s eight members were told of their alleged crimes. Four, including Bayani and Tahbaz, would be tried for fasad fil-arz  or “sowing corruption on earth.” The others faced lesser charges: espionage and cooperating with a foreign enemy state. The IRGC’s evidence was based on a claim the conservationists were “seeking proximity to military sites with the cover of the environmental projects and obtaining military information from them.” The charge of sowing corruption could carry the maximum sentence—the death penalty.

Hard-line judge Abolqasem Salavati, then-chief judge of Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court, was assigned the trial. Those opposing the regime in Iran nicknamed Salavati the “Judge of Death,” which reflected his reputation for using trumped-up charges to sentence defendants to disproportionately long sentences or even the gallows.

Bayani was devastated, though she rarely broke down in tears, Moore-Gilbert wrote in her memoir, recalling Bayani’s instinctive rage at injustice. Sometimes, when Bayani really lost control, she would pull the telephone receiver, used for occasional, brief calls to the guards, out of the wall and smash it, sending shards of plastic flying across the room. She would shriek and wail and scream. When the guards intervened, they became the target of her anger.

After hearing the news that Salvati would be overseeing her trial, Bayani wept in her cell. The forced confession would be used as evidence against her, even though she had retracted it immediately after signing. 

Following Bayani’s confession, she and Kashani, who were being held in the same block, were granted a little more freedom. Less time in the tiny box, a shared cell with other inmates, brief trips, known as hava khori, to the small, caged courtyard. 

That is when Bayani would meet Moore-Gilbert, who had been arrested after attending a conference in Tehran. Moore-Gilbert recalled Bayani hatching a plan to communicate with her, during a time when her frantic screams and desperate weeping echoed through the dingy cells.

During her next hava khori, Bayani, using a sharp twig, carved “LOVE” in English onto the stubbly surface of a cactus, one of the only living things that grew in the dismal courtyard space. She hoped Moore-Gilbert would see it during her next outing and know she wasn’t alone.

Bayani and Moore-Gilbert swapped messages of hope and encouragement by hiding notes in the cactus pot and scrawling messages on the walls of the courtyard. Bayani hid walnuts, dates, raisins and almonds for Moore-Gilbert, until at last, the two had an opportunity to converse.

“Hallelujah!! Hallelujaaaaah!” the Australian-accented voice rang out early one morning, waking Bayani, who immediately recognized it as Moore-Gilbert’s. “Hallelujah, hallelujah,” she sang back.

“Kylie!” Bayani called out, speaking quickly before any guards arrived. “Come back here tonight after they dim the lights!”

“No problem,” Moore-Gilbert replied, knocking on the prison wall. 

Later that night, in a scene Moore-Gilbert recounted in her memoir, Bayani whispered to Moore-Gilbert through the small vent in their cell wall that connected to her fellow inmate’s. It was the only blind spot in her cell; cameras surveilled every part of the room, apart from the area where the filthy cistern sat. Here there was a small, dusty opening, and Bayani crouched by the toilet to speak with Moore-Gilbert.

“Kylie, this is Niloufar,” Bayani said. “Listen, you are in a detention center called ‘Du Alef,’ 2A, inside a prison called Evin. 2A is run by the Revolutionary Guards, whom we call Sepah. Sepah will try to get you to confess to whatever bullshit they are accusing you of. Don’t do it. It’s a trap. Believe me, I know.”

“I don’t know how you’re still here, Niloufar,” said Moore-Gilbert, who remembered she was beginning to cry in panic. “I couldn’t hold on for nine months!”

“Kylie, you won’t be here long,” Bayani replied. “My case is…complicated. But you’re a foreigner, you don’t even speak Farsi. Once they get the information they want out of you, they’ll send you home.”

As usual, Moore-Gilbert recalled in her book, Bayani was looking out for others. Moore-Gilbert refused to sign a false confession. “In the end, interrogators gave up trying to extract one,” Moore-Gilbert later wrote. “For this, I was indebted to Niloufar.”

Moore-Gilbert was eventually released in 2020 after spending 804 days in Iranian detention and returned to Australia. 

Bayani, alongside her other colleagues, meanwhile, was headed to court, to be represented by lawyers appointed by Abolqasem Salavati. There would be no fair trial.

There are no specific figures relating to scientists, but a recent study by Scholars at Risk documented 409 attacks on scholars, students, and their institutions in 66 countries. Tahbaz and Seyed-Emami served as “valuable bargaining chips for the regime,” says Arab, the Amnesty International board member, thanks to their dual nationalities. Moore-Gilbert, though not Iranian, was released as part of a prisoner exchange, for a trio of Iranians imprisoned in a terror plot in Thailand.

In January 2019, a year after their arrest, Bayani and her colleagues finally stood trial. They were read part of the 300-page indictment, which based most of the charges around Bayani’s false confession. At one point, a judiciary official of Evin offered to downgrade Bayani’s charges in exchange for a guilty plea. She refused. 

Each time she spoke out during the closed-door trial in court, she risked a harsher sentence. But she continued to interrupt the reading of the indictment, objecting that her forced confessions had become the base of the IRGC’s case against the group. “If you were being threatened with a needle of hallucinogenic drugs (hovering) above your arm, you would also confess to whatever they wanted you to confess!” she reportedly told the court.

Her protests didn’t matter. On November 23, 2019, authorities sentenced Bayani to 10 years imprisonment on charges of “contacts with the US enemy state” and “gaining illegitimate income” from her previous employer, the United Nations, according to Scholars at Risk. The IRGC had found Bayani’s security training from her UNEP induction on her computer, Sudmeier said,  and used it as evidence that she was an Israeli spy, claiming the software was developed by Israeli secret intelligence. Bayani was also asked to pay the Iranian government all of the funds she received from the UN during her five-year career there. “We think she was given especially harsh treatment because she was working for the UN,” Sudmeier said. By this point, Bayani had been in prison for 20 months, none of which would count towards her sentence.

Tahbaz also received a 10-year sentence, Taher Ghadirian and Houman Jokar got eight years, and Amirhossein Khaleghi Hamidi, Sam Rajabi, and Sepideh Kashani received six. Abdolreza Kouhpayeh received four. Bayani and Sepideh Kashani appealed the ruling, but the appeals court confirmed the verdict on February 18, 2020.

Speaking last year, Arab predicted that pressure from international science communities, as well as Iranians living abroad could increase the chances of Bayani being freed early. “There is a trend in Iran that they release prisoners before completing their full prison sentence based on [a] pardon from the Supreme Leader as a fatherly gesture,” he explains.

Arab believes that holding on to Bayani and her colleagues no longer serves a purpose for the regime. “In my opinion, there’s a strong chance that Bayani and other conservationists may be freed in the next pardoning occasion.”

The UN repeatedly called for Bayani’s release. “We have only one earth and those that seek to protect the planet should not be prosecuted for doing so,” UNEP head Inger Anderson tweeted in 2022.

The families of Bayani and her colleagues have been limited in their ability to publicly campaign for their release. Many were too concerned about their safety to speak openly to The Sunday Long Read or worried that doing so could backfire for their loved ones who are still in prison. Organizations like Scholars at Risk had continued to raise public awareness about the prisoners’ plights and urged the public to put pressure on Iranian authorities to release Bayani – or at least grant her access to legal counsel and medical care.

Any terms or conditions on Bayani’s pardon were not immediately available. And if she sought to leave the country, seeking asylum is also complex for Iranians; there are thousands in Turkey and other countries waiting for their cases to be processed. In Bayani’s case, academic organizations may be able to help, especially those within the Iranian diaspora such as the International Community of Iranian Academics in collaboration with organizations like Scholars At Risk, who have raised awareness of Bayani’s plight.

Years later, Guerra still texted his friend. “Hey, I know you cannot read this,” he wrote to Bayani in a recent message. “But I miss our silly conversations. Back then I was very angry. Very very angry that you are in jail. I should have told you not to go back home. But you made everything sound so possible and safe. I’m very angry, but I will not stop talking about you. Not until you are released.”

Act III: “Freedom is a state of mind!”

Despite her captivity, or in defiance of it perhaps, Bayani’s spirit seemingly remained unbroken, Moore-Gilbert said. She staged numerous hunger strikes, resulting in multiple visits to the hospital, to demand better conditions for her fellow inmates. “Freedom is an attitude, freedom is a state of mind!” she reminded Moore-Gilbert during one dark moment. Her ability to find joy in the bleakest of times persisted. During hava khori, she occasionally broke into dance-a-thons with all comers, Moore-Gilbert recalled, energetically leaping into African dance, which she studied during her student days abroad, gracefully executing pirouettes thanks to the ballet classes she took as a child, or gleefully whirling around her narrow cell singing at the top of her lungs.

As her prison sentence wore on, she contemplated her calling as an environmentalist. Here she was, stuck behind bars with some of Iran’s brightest minds; yet, Bayani had the sense they understood little about the impact and causes of climate change in Iran, even though some of them were in prison for protesting about water shortages and pollution.

She decided to conduct a survey of her fellow inmates about their awareness of climate change. In March 2022, she asked the women a series of questions and studiously gathered the results. The project took almost a year, turning into an essay touching on her life in Evin, climate change in Iran, potential reforms, and a warning to the country’s leaders. Simultaneously, Bayani developed a nine-week climate change syllabus for her fellow inmates, featuring other prisoners as guest speakers.

The group became so engaged in the course’s content they wrote an open letter calling on the Iranian government to take climate action. “We, the female political prisoners and prisoners of belief in Evin, social, environmental, and political activists in diverse fields, mothers and grandmothers of future generations, express our deep concern about the future of our children and our country,” the letter, signed by 20 inmates, read. 

After weeks of painstaking work on the manuscript, Bayani passed it on to her former colleagues at UNEP, to edit and publish in 2023. That year, Bayani was temporarily released for Nowrouz, the two-week Persian New Year festival, and was able to work on the project until she was summoned back to prison.

By April 2024, Niloufar Bayani, Morad Tahbaz, Houman Jokar, Sam Rajabi, Abdolreza Kouhpayeh, Amirhossein Khaleghi Hamidi, Taher Ghadirian and Sepideh Kashani had all been released from prison.

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This story was made possible by the support of Sunday Long Read subscribers and publishing partner Ruth Ann Harnisch. Header illustration by Tara Anand for The Sunday Long Read. Edited by Kiley Bense and Peter Bailey-Wells. Designed by Anagha Srikanth.