374th Night of Remembrance - 3

Iranian Oral History Website
Machine translation edited by Mandana Karimi

2026-10-20

The 374^th  Night of Remembrance program was held on Thursday - November 27, 2025, focusing on reciting the memories of active military personnel during the victory of the Islamic Revolution from the prisons of the Pahlavi regime in the Soura Hall of the Hozeh Honari. The program began with the broadcast of a clip of Martyr Amir Ali Hajizadeh, and then Bahram Ali Taheri, Mohammad Hassan Pourjoum’eh, and Qanbar Rasekh shared their memories. Davud Salehi led the performance of this Night of Remembrance.

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The host continued the program by introducing the third and last narrator and said: He entered the army in 1973 at the age of eighteen or nineteen after going through the difficult stages of selection, testing, and making a commitment; but later he would use all his efforts to overthrow the same regime. The presence of more than four thousand American advisors with their families in the military industries and their “hardship differential” while the Iranian people were living in poverty and hardship, deeply disturbed his spirit and soul; to the point that he turned to revolutionary activities and spent four years and four months of his life as a political prisoner in the torture chambers of the Pahlavi regime. Then he invited Mr. Qanbar Rasekh, the secretary of the Center of the Fajr-e Afarinan[1] of the Armed Forces before the revolution, to share his memories.

The narrator began his speech with the name of God and reciting verses, thanked the organizers of the meeting, and said: I am the secretary of the Fajr-e Afarinan of the army and the armed forces. You may ask who are the Fajr-e Afarinan? We were military men who worked against the Shah, America, Israel and England during the Pahlavi regime and were sentenced to from three months to life imprisonment and even death. We also presented two martyrs before the revolution. When we were released from prison under the leadership of Imam Khomeini (RA), 99 percent of our pals returned to the army and fought against Saddam's Baathist regime during the Holy Defense. That is, we are both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary fighters.

He explained about the formation of resistance cells in the Pahlavi army and said: Many do not know that Lieutenant General Qarani spent six years in prison during the time of the tyrant for trying to establish an Islamic state. We were in two groups in the army: "political activists" and "political fighters and prisoners." Political activists were very important people, including Brigadier General Mustafa Totiai (who is still alive). He was the personal bodyguard of the Shah, his family, and foreign advisors in the royal palace, but at the same time he was considered an influential factor of the Imam Khomeini (RA) in the Shah's palace; So that the Imam was informed of all the comings and goings of the palace. Another figure was the late Colonel Mohammad Mehdi Katibeh (Chief of the Second Army), who provided the country's classified information to the Imam with complete discretion.

Referring to organizational activities in the army, the narrator added: A great figure such as Martyr Major General Seyyed Musa Namjoo was not involved in revolutionary activities in 1978, but since 1961. Documents of these activities are available in a book called "The Nameless Group" (published by the Islamic Revolution Documents Center). Martyr Namjoo would select faithful individuals and introduce them to Brigadier General Rahimi to work on them; the output of this training were great figures such as the late Major General Mohammad Salimi, Major General Yousef Kolahdouz, Major General Abshenasan, Martyr Sayyad Shirazi, and Martyr Babaei. Martyr Kolahduz, who was part of the Shah’s special guard and was allowed to advance to the Shah’s throne, became the founder of the Revolutionary Guard after the revolution, and the disciplinary and structural plans of the Guard, the ideological organization of the army, and even the Basij Mostaz’afin (Mobilization of the Oppressed People) were formed with the role of these revolutionary soldiers.

The narrator continued by referring to the high security atmosphere of the army before the revolution and said: Eight security circles were watching over us: Pillar One of the Pahlavi Army, Counterintelligence, Mossad, CIA, MI6, KGB, and most dangerous of all, the “infiltrators.” Someone would pray behind me and immediately after the prayer would go and report that so-and-so had spoken against the Shah! At that time, economic and cultural poverty was rampant in the country. If someone wanted to set up a small manufacturing workshop in the deserts of Qom, they would not be allowed to work unless they paid bribes to the agents of the regime and the Pahlavi family. Culturally, 70 percent of the people were deliberately kept illiterate and backward; to the point that when the martyr Agha Mustafa Khomeini drank water from a glass, some people ignorantly said that the glass had become impure because he studied philosophy and was a politician! In terms of health, we were so poor and lacking in doctors that they had brought doctors from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh who worked with translators. If the translator translated a sentence incorrectly, the patient would lose his life. However, the army corps, which came from villages and towns and from the heart of schools, were pure and religious people.

In this section, the host of the program referred to one of the narrator's written memoirs and asked: "I read in your memoirs that there was a statue of the Shah in front of your office door and you would bang on it every morning; how did you dare to do so in that suffocating atmosphere where the father would betray the son to SAVAK?"

In response to this question and how his struggle began, the narrator said: "We had awakened clerics; including Hojjatoleslam Saeed Sharifi, who in his meetings would draw for us the true faces and characteristics of Muawiyah, Yazid, and Amr al-As. When I entered the army, I saw that the Shah was the exact embodiment of Yazid and Muawiyah; I would see his photo in Mecca wearing the ihram robe or claiming to be the girdle of Imam Reza (AS), but he was working with religion against religion." It was here that I spontaneously and "at will" began writing slogans and distributing Imam's proclamations inside and outside the army.

He added: "We were rebuilding tanks and armored vehicles in the M-series factories, which were under the supervision of American, Israeli, and British advisors. In the industrial warehouse where we received tools, a bust of the Shah was placed on the table. With the same knowledge I had gained, I would hit the statue on the head with my hand and say: "All the misfortunes of the Iranian nation are visible under this head and its prime minister!" I did not stop there and in 1974 I wrote the slogans "Death to America" ​​and "Death to the Pahlavi Regime" on the walls of the Pahlavi Army Garrisons. I was eventually arrested and sentenced to five years in prison, but after four years and four months, I was released with the victory of the revolution led by Imam Khomeini (RA).

In the final part of his speech, the narrator recounted the memories of the torture chamber of the “Joint Anti-Sabotage Committee” (the current Ebrat Museum) and said: “There, they used the most cruel and corrupt people to torture the youth and the educated. One of the torture instruments was the “Apollo” chair. They would lock the wrists and legs, place a metal helmet resembling an astronaut’s helmet on the head and chest, apply electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, and whip the prisoner with an electric cable and a hand. The metal helmet would cause the prisoner’s screams to echo in his head, damaging his brain so that the interrogator would not be disturbed! At the same time that America had sent the Apollo spacecraft to the moon to divide the profits, their Apollo device in Tehran was making our youth mourn.

He concluded his speech by pointing out a subtle psychological and religious point in prison and said: There were two groups of religious and non-religious people in prison, each divided into seventy-two sects; the non-religious included communists, Maoists, members of the Tudeh Party, Soviet supporters, existentialists and other groups. Their goal was practically dependence on the Soviet Union or China and Enver Hoxha and as a result, the disintegration of Iran, but the main goal and intention of the Muslim children was to form a unified Islamic nation. When they tortured us with the Apollo machine, we would call out, "O Allah", "O Muhammad", "O Ali", "O Fatima Zahra" and "O Hussein" to endure the pain. But the amazing thing was that when a communist and Marxist prisoner who said “Religion is the opium of the masses” was put in the Apollo machine and the cable was lowered, instead of saying “Ya Lenin!” or “Ya Marx!” he would unconsciously shout: “Ya Hussein!” The communists used the word “Rafiq (Comrade)” when addressing each other; while “Rafiq” is one of the names of God. When they returned to their cells, we would say to them: “Rafiq! What was that word you said under torture”? They would say: “Now something has come out of our mouths”!

We investigated and saw that because these people had grown up in the laps of Iranian mothers and had been present at the funeral processions and Ashura mourning groups since childhood, the names “Ya Hussein” and “Ya Zahra” were deeply embedded in their nature; And in those terrible and terrible moments, it was nature that awakened and came to their aid. In conclusion, I emphasize that if we do not support the Guardianship of the Jurisprudence and our beloved Leader today, the same situation and troubles of the past will be repeated a hundred times worse

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