Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert on the bombing of Iran’s Evin prison

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G'day, Matt Bevan here.

This is if you're listening.

We are sticking today with a country that I am fascinated by at the moment, Iran.

And I know that a heap of you are fascinated by it too, because in the last two weeks, views on YouTube have skyrocketed for our episodes about the Ayatollah Khomeini and the former President Ibrahim Raisi.

It's not a mystery who we have to thank for that burst of fascination.

A targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival.

I'm not happy with them.

I'm not happy with Iran either.

We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f they're doing.

But there's something else going on here too, I think.

A lot of people don't know all that much about Iran.

People think it's some kind of a hybrid of Iraq and North Korea.

U.S.

Senator Ted Cruz has recently showed in his interview with Tucker Carlson that even the people urging military action against Iran don't know all that much about it.

Someone who does know a lot about it is Dr.

Kylie Moore Gilbert, who famously spent 804 days incarcerated in Iran, including a large amount of time inside a prison that is almost always referred to as notorious, like a 90s rapper.

In the final days of what Donald Trump is calling Israel and Iran's 12-day war, Israel used fighter jets to bomb that prison.

And you can bet that I'll be asking Kylie about that.

G'day, Kylie.

G'day, Matt.

I want to start by talking about your interest in Iran and Shia Islam.

Your academic research surrounded the Shia Muslim population in Bahrain, the oil and gas-rich island nation across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

What led you to be interested in this part of the world

and Shia Islam?

It wasn't one one particular thing.

I had been studying the Middle East since my undergraduate days.

I actually have a bachelor degree in Middle East studies, which was focused more on language acquisition and history politics, you know, a basic overview of the whole region, really.

And that required me to live in the Middle East for a year and improve my language and conduct research.

So from sort of first year undergrad onwards, I've been studying the Middle East.

And I've always had a great fascination for that part of the world.

I backpacked around the Middle East a bit after high school.

And,

you know,

the Shia Islam thing was not a particular interest.

I think I sort of fell into it because there was a gap in the academic literature that I was able to identify when I was writing my PhD.

But yeah, I mean,

I was never a scholar of Iran specifically.

I was much more focused on those Arab countries, particularly the Gulf states, as you mentioned.

So it became a kind of a natural thing to want to go to Iran.

I mean, having studied Bahrain, having written a lot about Bahrain, which has a majority Shia population, and many of which look to Iran, at least religiously,

if not even culturally or politically, even some of them.

So, when I actually got invited to come to Iran by an Iranian university for a couple of weeks, I thought, oh, this would be, you know, an interesting insight into an interesting part of the world that I don't know enough about.

And I guess that's where it all started.

Well, you mentioned that you backpacked around the Middle East a lot.

Is there much travel between the Arab world and Iran?

Do they travel between

those two worlds all that much?

Do they know much about each other?

They do.

Certainly the ones that are bordering Iran.

The border between Iran and Iraq right now, in some parts, doesn't really even exist.

I mean, the Iranians basically control the Iraqi side of the border.

And,

you know, my captors used to...

tell me every year they would go to Karbala and Najaf, the two holy Shia cities in Iraq, and they would just get on a bus or a coach in Tehran and go all the way to Najaf in Iraq and not even stop at a border once and not even show their passport or bother, you know, with probably not even see an Iraqi, not speak a word of Arabic and conduct the whole thing in Farsi.

So, you know, there's considerable cultural blurring between over-the-borders, as there is, you know, with Kurds, with Turks, with all kinds of other ethnic groups.

in the Middle East.

And there are Persian Gulf states too.

I mean, there's been a very long history, a long trading relationship, ethnic communities of Persians and Arabs on either side of the border too.

They know each other pretty well.

That doesn't necessarily mean they like each other.

And certainly in a political sense, Iran has been quite meddlesome in the affairs of its neighbours.

And on the Afghan side, too, I mean, there's a lot of meddling and involvement in Afghanistan or between Afghanistan and Iran as well.

But, you know, I think they know each other pretty well for better or worse.

But they are very different.

What struck you about Iran when you travelled there for that academic trip?

I was most struck by the warmth and hospitality of the people.

And this is coming from, you know, someone who has been in the Middle East quite a fair bit.

And the Middle East is known for its hospitable culture, whether that be Arabs or Turks or whoever.

But the Iranians kind of take it to a next level.

And the warmth of their hospitality and the embrace, the love that they have for tourists, particularly foreigners,

you know, it's amazing.

I wasn't prepared for that.

The food is also excellent.

I would say, you know, the best food of anywhere in the Middle East.

When you say the hospitality, can you give me an example of that hospitality?

People just going out of their way, taking hours out of their day to accommodate you, to help you, to assist you for no reason whatsoever that would benefit them.

Just curiosity about hanging out with a foreigner for a few hours, you know, know offering you a ride in their car a lift to this site or that site and chatting with you along the way and then bringing you into their home for lunch and introducing you to their wife or you know just really um

friendly curious people who are actually quite open-minded and not at all xenophobic and just yeah the the warmth from everybody the welcoming kind of like greetings and smiles you would get as a tourist in Iran.

I mean,

it could be a real haven for tourism.

It It could be a real mecca of tourism if that regime wasn't in power.

It's a really brilliant country.

A mecca across the Gulf from Mecca.

So,

what did you see?

What parts of Iran did you see on your trip when you were there?

So, the academic part of my trip was in Tehran and Qom, which is the kind of religious centre of Iran.

And then I also did some side trips to places like Yazd, Isfahan, Shiraz,

Persepolis, the ruins of that ancient Persian city.

So I did see quite a bit, but I was only there for a couple of weeks before my detention.

So I can't really have pretensions of having an exhaustive tour around the country or something like that.

No, and you were picked up as you were trying to put your baggage on the baggage machine.

Can you talk about what that was like and when you knew that something was really wrong?

Yeah, I mean, when I put my baggage on that, you know, on the carousel or whatever it's called when you check in, the guy from Emirates was,

I noticed he took my bags off again and put them to one side after giving me my boarding pass.

And I said, why'd you do that?

And he had kind of a weird excuse, like, oh, you know,

this is fragile.

We'll send it to the fragile section or something.

And I was thinking, but I never told you it's fragile.

What are you talking about?

And that kind of stuck in my mind for a second there as, well, this is a bit odd.

And of course, he must have had a flag in his system when he was checking me in that, you know, this this person's banned from leaving the country or triggered some kind of red flag with the authorities that I'd checked in, but couldn't tell me that.

And then I proceeded in the direction of passport control and I was lining up to have my passport stamped.

And that's when I was approached by men dressed in black, which far later on, actually, I discovered, you know, they were the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

That must have been absolutely terrifying.

You were

arrested and you ended up in the notorious Evin prison.

What were you thinking when you arrived in this terrifying and famously terrifying place?

Well, maybe luckily for me, I didn't actually know that's where I was when I first arrived there.

I'd been kind of blindfolded and bundled into the back of this van and I hadn't seen myself pass through the gates of a prison.

I had the blindfold removed to be taken into this kind of administrative office, which has, as we've just learnt, has been actually bombed recently

Oh, I definitely want to talk about that in a moment.

But this was the judiciary kind of offices of the prison, and I was taken in there to meet this guy called the Baz Pars.

And he was signing off on my admission to the prison and my temporary arrest warrant and all of that stuff.

But I didn't actually realize that was what was happening because it was all happening in Farsi around me, and I didn't speak Farsi.

So I had to do this administrative thing, and then I got blindfolded again and driven to another part of the prison, a section called Dualef,

which was a kind of a prison within a prison, a bit of a black site within Evin that was run exclusively by the Revolutionary Guard and didn't comply with any of the basic rules and regulations of the rest of Evan Prison.

And I had my blindfold removed again when I was put into my cell.

So nobody told me I'm in a prison.

Nobody told me I'm in Evin.

Nobody told me the Revolutionary Guard had arrested me.

I had to figure that out later on down the track.

I obviously knew I was in a prison cell, but I had no idea where I was.

That is...

Honestly, I can't possibly imagine anything worse.

That sounds just utterly, utterly terrifying.

Can you describe what you were able to tell about

the place you were in?

What can you describe the prison for us?

Initially,

I was in a very small unit for women, which was

on the second floor above the men's unit, which was much more extensive.

And there were just a number of small solitary confinement cells and a few slightly larger cells that would house maybe two to three prisoners.

The first cell I was in for a month, which was kind of an extreme solitary cell.

It didn't even have a toilet.

It was just a windowless box, two and a half by two and a half meters squared.

No natural light, no...

fresh air, no furniture, no bedding, absolutely nothing in there, just me sitting on the floor for 23 hours a day with nothing to do.

And that was, you know, it's a form of torture.

It's solitary confinement is torture.

And they do that deliberately to break you.

They want to break you down psychologically because at the same time, you're going to interrogations.

At the beginning, it was every day, and then every, you know, a couple of times a week, once a week, and then maybe once every few weeks.

And they want you to be very emotionally vulnerable and fragile and to just break.

And they want you to tell them everything.

And they want you to sign a false confession, which which makes it easier for them to kind of prosecute you and speed you through the court.

Court, quote unquote, because it's not much of a court, but through the system to tick all the boxes.

So

I was kept in this unit in a variety of different cells for 23 months, so almost two years.

And altogether I was 12 months in solitary and the rest of the time with cellmates.

Can you tell me a bit about those cellmates?

What were they there for and what were they like?

There were all kinds of women there,

mostly Iranian

civilians.

Evin is known as Evan University.

It's got the most educated

kind of social elites or professional class

prison population in the country, really.

It's renowned for that.

Everybody from political dissidents and hardline activists to

academics, scholars, judges, lawyers,

people who have fallen afoul of the regime for some reason.

And that might be for security reasons, like myself, they were suspecting I was a spy, but it might also be for all kinds of other things, like political speech or often score settling.

They want to shake you down and take your assets.

They might not like your politics, but you've got all this property they want.

And so they threw you in there and then blackmail your family to get their hands on the property.

So there was all kinds of different reasons.

But as in every prison, you've got good people and bad people.

And part of the challenge is having to share a really small cell with people you don't like or people whose hygiene standards are horrific or people.

In my case, my first cellmate was actually a spy who had been admitted to being a spy and had been arrested for that and had been put in my cell.

to spy on me because she'd done a deal with my captors to kind of flip to their side, I guess.

And part of her mission was to make life hell for me and get as much information out of me as possible.

So that was a pretty terrible experience.

But I did have others who became really close friends of mine, like sisters, and two of them were environmental conservationists.

And they had this completely bonkers case, like really whack stuff, like conspiracy theory territory, where they had been monitoring endangered cheetah and leopard populations in Iran with camera traps and other specialist equipment.

And this was over, you know, hundreds of kilometers of territory in Iran that wasn't densely populated, you know, of that ecosystem.

And the IOGC.

Not a lot of cheaters and leopards in towns.

There's not a lot of cheaters and leopards in it.

I don't even know Iran had cheaters and leopards.

No, I didn't know that either, actually.

There's just 100 or 200 or so left.

They were critically endangered.

And these guys were the only NGO trying to save them.

And they rounded them up, threw them in prison, and accused them of using cheaters and leopards to spy on secret Revolutionary Guard missile facilities.

So total crazy nonsense, you know, that they were using the cheaters to spy on their behalf or something, you know.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Oh, I didn't.

I thought you meant like they were using the sort of the trap cameras as sort of spy cameras, but okay, so they're using the cheaters.

They're using the cheaters.

Trained cheaters, okay.

Yep, they put collars on some of the cheaters, so they that they were spying equipment and they were also, they had cameras planted around.

So, it was total crazy.

And I mean, how are they to know there's IIGC missile facilities under the ground somewhere um so anyway this these are the kinds of cases quite interesting cases but people like that i was imprisoned alongside and most of them were innocent

well i i want to talk about spying because obviously you were not a spy uh

but we've recently in the last little while seen that there are very large numbers of spies, obviously, in Iran.

There is clearly a significant Mossad presence in Iran.

That's what has allowed them to carry off the early stages of this military operation that we've now seen potentially lead to a ceasefire.

We'll see how that goes in the next few days.

So, in a way, they are kind of justified in their paranoia, but do you think that they really thought you were a spy,

or was it about trying to do what they had done to your cellmate and turn you into a spy?

It could be a little bit of both.

You know,

the IRGC is not a monolith.

And the people who arrested me, I think they were one faction.

There was actually two different factions fighting over me.

One faction, which I became aware of quite early on in the piece.

One faction did what you said.

They actually wanted to recruit me.

They saw me as somebody they could leverage and recruit to their side and potentially, I guess, spy for them overseas or, you know, feed information back to them from overseas.

The other faction thought I was a spy and wanted to shake me down for as much info as possible and subject me to horrific treatment so that I would

tell them everything I knew and whatever, and then obviously convict me of that as well.

And the second faction won out in the end, and that's what happened to me.

In the end, I got thrown into prison and that's what happened.

But that other faction did come back maybe a year and a half later after I'd been convicted, after everything had dust had settled elsewhere and approached me again and asked me, hey, now you've been convicted, we can free you from this prison.

We can make a deal with you if you come and work for us.

So it was a little bit of both.

But after my conviction, and I was put through this ridiculous sham trial with a notorious judge in a kangaroo court situation, and I got a 10-year prison sentence.

After I was convicted, they kind of just downloaded that propaganda into their brains and sort of all then started to treat me like I was a bona fide spy, even though the ones who had interrogated me and the ones who'd engaged with me prior to that knew I wasn't a spy.

And

you know, I don't think they took that allegation seriously at all.

But the organization more broadly, once that conviction had happened, decided I am a spy and they treated me as such.

Aaron Powell,

it's not a very sophisticated way of operating.

Were you sort of

throughout that process just kind of going, how are you guys able to run a country?

How are you able to retain power when you are, you know, you have different factions doing different things and

you're believing your own propaganda?

They can't have been particularly impressive to you.

Some of them were just completely incompetent and I would say idiots, like completely uneducated, uninformed.

And it's not surprising because they get those positions on the basis of ideological affiliation and religious affiliation and

most importantly who they know and who they're connected to,

not skills or training or expertise.

And we're talking about the intelligence organization of Iran, you know, of the Revolutionary Guard.

So

they've got two competing intelligence organizations as well, which fight with each other and is a bit confusing too.

But, you know, it's like ASIO or something, but recruiting.

I think, I don't know, I imagine it's hard to become an ASIO officer.

But in Iran, if your uncle's an ASIO officer, he'll just bring you into the fold and you could be a complete dumbass and not know anything about espionage or counter-espionage.

But you know, you pray five times a day and you love the Supreme Leader and you've got a poster of him on the wall of your bedroom.

So you get the job.

And that's kind of how it works.

And this is what happens when you promote incompetent people and reward religious zealotry instead of expertise.

And I think this is why they've been so poor at identifying actual spies and actual informers in their midst, because these people are far more sophisticated.

And, you know,

there's a real corruption there, too, where they need KPIs.

They need to arrest X number of spies in X number of days.

And so they end up rounding up innocent people or score settling with people they don't like for whatever reason, and then claiming that they're spies and then ticking the boxes, saying, Look, I've arrested all of these infiltrators when most of them are probably innocent.

One of the things that Israel did after Donald Trump sort of seemingly sort of

unilaterally maybe called a ceasefire,

declared that actually the war's over now.

I've bombed who I went to bomb and now we're all done.

Israel bombed the front doors of the Evan prison.

Why did they do that, do you think?

I think it was a symbolic bombing.

It was sending a message to the regime saying, look, this is the most notorious house of detention.

Everybody's heard of it.

This is where all the dissidents and people opposing your regime are being held.

We're going to open the gates.

So that was a strong message.

Also, it was a message to the opposition in Iran and the many, many, many thousands of people who were against this regime saying, you know, this is a paper tiger.

Look, we can blast open even the most secure facility in your country.

You know, rise up and take this opportunity.

I think that's what they were hoping for.

I don't think that that's actually what happened at all.

And in fact, a number of innocent people died in those bombings.

And that has kind of, and obviously the prisoners inside were utterly terrified.

I mean, I've heard reports now of stampedes happening in some of the prison wards with people getting injured because others are running on top of them when, you know, trying to get out and, you know, breaking glass and bits of masonry falling from the walls, injuring people and just sheer and utter terror.

As well as, you know, some of the people who were killed were family members who'd arrived at the prison to post bail for their loved ones, for example.

So there were people who were caught up in this who

should not have been targeted.

There were also a number of extremely evil people who died, including the head of Evan Prison, the head prosecutor,

who by some reports it seems died accidentally, like it wasn't known that he was going to be in that building when it got bombed, and it just happened.

he happened to be there and that's probably good news.

But yeah, I think that the reaction within Iran to that bombing was much more muted and much more of a mixed affair than what the Israelis might have been anticipating.

Aaron Powell, Benjamin Netanyahu is doing things like, you know, issuing statements to Iran and, you know, to Iranian citizens calling on them to rise up against the regime and that kind of thing.

You know, this is...

something that senior U.S.

figures also talk about, you know, oh, we just need to inspire the Iranian population to overthrow their captors and that kind thing.

Do you think that that is

ever going to work?

An external force trying to trigger an internal revolution in Iran?

Or are they totally misunderstanding the way that Iranian society functions?

There's no way that statements on X or truth social

pronouncements by other

world powers about rising up is going to trigger anything in Iran.

I mean, the Iranians I know have been saying, hey, where were you guys three years ago when we were actually rising up?

Nobody helped us then.

You can't just decide the timing of this.

The expectation that they would rise up under fire was also mad.

I mean, people were evacuating Tehran.

They were terrified for their lives, for their property.

They're not going to stage an uprising at that moment.

Now is an interesting time for Iran, though.

It's quite a critical time.

The regime's clearly very rattled by that rhetoric of regime change and by this humiliating blow that they've been dealt.

You know, they are a paper tiger in many ways.

The only power they have left is is power against their own civilian population.

And they still have a formidable security apparatus which they are using to great effect right now.

I mean they've arrested more than 800 people just in the last few days.

Multiple well-known dissidents have been rounded up and disappeared.

Several people have been executed already.

There's grave fears for a number of well-known people who have death sentences which have been kind of in limbo for years now, some of whom have been convicted of spying for Israel on highly dodgy trials.

There's one guy Ahmed Reza Jalali who's a Swedish citizen, Swedish dual national of Iran.

He's been on death row for about eight or nine years I think at this point and he's disappeared.

And when they disappear you out of the prison that can often be an indication that you're going to end up in an execution facility.

So there are a lot of grave fears for people like him.

They're going on a spree now, rounding everyone up and trying to put paid to any attempt to stage an uprising or have that

civilian discontent with the regime, which has been there for a very long time, you know, erupt into something more.

And also they're very paranoid.

I mean, clearly, as you were saying, Matt,

Israeli intelligence has penetrated the highest possible ranks of the regime.

And there's no way that somebody within the regime wouldn't have been feeding that information.

It's people within their own ranks.

How on earth would the Israelis be able to assassinate so many high-value targets without someone on the inside having flipped and decided to work for them?

So they're really paranoid about infiltrators.

There's going to be a huge drag now, and a hell of a lot of innocent people are going to get caught up in it.

So, in terms of the timing for an uprising, I do think it'll happen at some point, just like it did in 2022.

It'll happen again.

Iran is an interesting place in terms of authoritarian regimes in that Russia is very much

there is no real plan for what happens if Vladimir Putin dies.

There is no succession plan in Russia.

It is a cult of personality around one person to a significant extent.

He dictates policy directly.

He gets to decide.

He's the ultimate arbiter.

That is also the case in North Korea, increasingly, frighteningly, the case in China.

The Supreme Leader in Iran,

do you think that, you know, Donald Trump's talking about, you know, we know where you are and, you know, do what we say, otherwise we'll assassinate you.

Would actually assassinating the Supreme Leader in Iran change anything, or would, you know, just someone very similar to him immediately just take his place?

I think it would be impactful to get rid of Khamenei, or if he just dropped dead one day because he's 86 and not in great health.

So he's not going to be around much longer.

He made that same calculation that Putin made, which was prevent any potential rival from emerging, but at the same time, don't anoint a successor because that successor could become your rival.

And I can understand the logic of that, but when you're 86 years old, paralyzed on one side of your body and considered to have been suffering from cancer for a number of years, perhaps that's not the best strategy if you you want to ensure regime stability after you're gone.

And there are reports that he has hurried to instruct an internal body that he has stacked with his friends and loyalists, many of whom are also religious clerics of a very advanced age.

He's instructed them to start considering the succession issue, and he's given a list of three potential names to that assembly.

I don't know whether that will be publicly announced, but he's kind of realised that this was

a grave

time where he could have potentially been assassinated or something could have happened to him and he didn't have a successor in place.

And that's an issue for him now.

That being said, there is no obvious successor, and there is nobody there because he's stifled so much, so many other potential rivals.

There's nobody there that emerges as the logical successor that would have that legitimacy and would be accepted by the base

without rival factions jostling or whatever it might be.

And there are a few contenders, his son Mushtaba among them, but even segments of the IRGC and the broader base of support, which is about 10 to 20% of the population of Iran that actually support this regime, he's controversial within those groups too.

And the idea of some kind of dynastical rule is anathema to the Islamic Republic.

I mean, they came into being in the revolution in order to get rid of a dynastical family,

you know, the Shah, the Pahlavis.

And so instating the son of the Supreme Leader as the next supreme leader is highly problematic from their ideological perspective, too.

So, yeah, it's really interesting to see where things will go from here.

And even if someone is nominated formally as the successor,

it remains to be seen whether that person will have the legitimacy that Khamenahi has, you know, won for himself over the past three odd decades.

And that could be a moment of weakness for the regime as well.

Well, and the anointed successor may not survive to the point at which they succeed.

Remember, we were talking about Raisi as a potential successor, and then he died because he was in a bad helicopter.

And, you know, you've got the Israelis just randomly wiping out middle levels of upper management.

And so, yeah, it's a fraught time for them.

You mentioned that you think an uprising will come.

Can you talk about what brought the last one about and why it didn't lead to an overthrow of the regime.

So uprisings have been happening in Iran on an increasing basis, at an increasing frequency.

We saw the very major one in 2009, then 2019, then 2022.

I think it shows that the Iranian population broadly is fed up with the corruption and the fanatical ideology of this regime and it entering into their personal lives and entering into every aspect of their life in a way that they reject, as well as the falling living standards and the horrific economic mismanagement.

You know, some of that's due to sanctions, but a lot of it's due to corruption.

And, you know, corruption seems to be cited as the number one grievance with the regime over and above human rights abuses and other issues.

2022 uprising had a real women's rights flavour to it.

And that's always been a grievance too, but it really came to the fore.

It was triggered by the killing of Mahsajina Amini, a young woman who'd been arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly and died in custody.

And

that was the trigger point.

And so it was very much a woman-led movement with women's rights at the forefront and the issue of the mandatory hijab very much at the forefront too.

And that came to represent the broader kind of control of this regime over the lives of ordinary people, even down to dictating what they can wear and what they can't wear.

And it's not just a piece of cloth you wear on your head.

I mean, you have to, women have to wear a manto or a chador, you know, something that covers to the knees and nothing above the knees basically.

But men also can't wear shorts or short sleeves or, you know,

women makeup and nail polish are frowned upon and there's all kinds of other kind of rules, tattoos and, you know, it's not just a hijab, it's basically dictating how people should live their lives in a very minute way and they chafe against that, of course.

And so yeah, this uprising happened and it was the biggest one Iran has seen since the revolution.

And unfortunately there was a lot of rhetorical support internationally for the Iranian people, but not much material support.

And I think the Biden administration really, you know, made a significant error in its management of relations with Iran over that.

Very quickly, they went back.

They were keen to do this nuclear deal, but kind of with carrots, not sticks.

They wanted to sit down and be friends with the Iranians.

And, you know, unfortunately, that regime doesn't respect such overtures.

They respect strength and they are very wily and canny negotiators.

And they basically just kicked the can down the road for four years and talked to the Biden administration, but nothing ever came of it.

And Biden was so keen to get back into those talks with the Iranians that as soon as the uprising started to peter out because of huge repression and brutal tactics on the streets used against protesters.

He quickly got back into the negotiations with this regime.

And the whole time he'd been turning a blind eye to enforcing oil sanctions and Iran's oil exports, particularly to China, went up dramatically during the Biden administration.

So he didn't sort of try and strangle the regime financially.

And they kept going on business as usual.

And nobody actually really did much to support the Iranian people.

many of whom were calling for much greater and stricter sanctions enforcement and for that financial strangulation of their their regime knowing that they might pay the price as well, that the economic situation would become even worse inside Iran.

So, there's a lot of bitterness that that support again and again isn't forthcoming.

And so, when Trump and Netanyahu

started saying, hey, rise up, and people rolled their eyes, like, sorry, like, it's not that the conditions right now are bad for us, and where were you guys three years ago?

But I do think that the simmering discontent with this regime would have only grown since this 12-day war that's just come to a conclusion.

And the regime looks so weak and so humiliated in the eyes of its own people that it's almost inevitable that at some point it's going to erupt again.

And I don't know whether this is a good thing or not.

This is just a thought bubble.

But

the people inside Iran who are agitating for this regime to go

could be bolstered and supported much more than they are right now.

And that also could include internet and

technological support.

The regime routinely turns off the internet and restricts the ability for activists to organize, particularly during an uprising.

Even during this war they turned off the internet for several days.

So a lot of activists inside Iran are saying that's one thing that external powers can actually do is stuff like Starlink

or cyber attacks on the regime when they're trying to disable the internet.

Other methods that can be used to keep the internet online, even if the regime is trying to take it offline, that can actually be super useful in the the event of an uprising, for example.

So there are some things that can be done, but I guess the broad message is try and support the Iranian people.

Don't just abandon them to this regime, which is, you know, like a wounded animal.

It's going to lash out and attack those right in front of it, which are its own people.

And they're really the only people that the regime can take this out on right now.

Yeah.

Kylie, this has been a fascinating conversation.

I've really enjoyed it.

Thanks so much for talking to us.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Kylie's book about her time in Iran's Avin Prison is called The Uncaged Sky, My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

This episode was produced by Cinema Nipard.

For this week's Thursday episode of If You're Listening, we are staying in Iran.

Avin Prison wasn't the most notorious of the sites bombed during Israeli and US strikes on Iran in recent weeks.

that award would have to go to the Fordo nuclear site, deep under the Iranian mountains.

So, did the US stop Iran from making a nuclear bomb?

That's in this week's episode.

I'll catch you then.