Asieh Rakhshani never saw Iran. She was born in exile in Pakistan, lived a few years at Camp Ashraf with her parents, then was sent to California at age 10.
After graduating from high school, she chose to leave her comfortable Northern California lifestyle to rejoin the Mojahedin-e Khalq at Camp Ashraf.
There her life ended April 8 as she was taking videos of Iraqi soldiers advancing in the camp.
“My sister was one of the seven women killed,” said Hamid Yazdanpanah, a lawyer whose parents raised Rakhshani as their own from the age of 10 to 18.
Rakhshani was filming the pre-dawn attack when she was shot to death, said Yazdanpanah’s mother, Ensieh Yazdanpanah. “She wanted to live in a free Iran. She was sending lots of messages of hope to youth in Iran.… She was full of life and joy.”
Ensieh Yazdanpanah has joined dozens of other Iranian-Americans in protests in Washington, D.C., seeking medical care and assurances that the people still in Camp Ashraf will not be attacked. “I lost my daughter, but I hope to prevent other attacks,” she told the Sacramento Bee.
Asieh Rakhshani was born in Karachi, Pakistan, where her parents had fled in the early 1980s when the revolutionary regime and the Mojahedin-e Khalq parted ways.
The family moved to Camp Ashraf after it was set up in 1986, but when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991 “all children [were evacuated] from the camp and her parents sent her to live with us in Sacramento,” said Hamid Yazdanpanah.
Asieh Rakhshani graduated from south Sacramento’s Union House Elementary School. The family moved to Suisun City in 1993 and later to Richmond and Albany, both on San Francisco Bay. Rakhshani graduated from high school in Albany.
She rejoined her parents at Camp Ashraf in 1999 to fight for a free Iran, “because she felt it was her responsibility to continue her family’s struggle,” Hamid Yazdanpanah told the Bee.
At 4 a.m. on April 9, the Yazdanpanahs got a phone call at their home in El Sobrante, near the Bay, from Rakhshani’s mother, Afsaneh Asadhi, in Iraq.
“She said, ‘We don’t know why they attacked the camp.… Suddenly they started to shoot. Rakhshani got shot in her stomach and her leg,’ “ recalled Ensieh Yazdanpanah. “I said, ‘Why couldn’t you save her,’ and Asadhi said, ‘She lost lots of blood, and there wasn’t any medical help. More than 200 people were wounded very seriously.’”
Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, told the Sacramento Bee, “It is absolutely a tragedy in the making unless the international community splits these people up among several countries and has the UN monitor those who want to take the risk of coming back to Iran.
“Regardless of what you think of this organization, these are people who are not armed and [are] at the mercy of their error-prone leadership on the one hand and a very angry Iraqi regime on the other.”