(Al-Monitor) In 2009, Iran began a crackdown on its religious community that led to the arrest of Dabrina Bet Tamraz. The government eventually shuttered her family’s Assyrian Pentecostal church.
Today, Evangelical and Protestant Christians in the country are largely restricted in worship, and the pressure to remain silent is only increasing.
In 2014, the Tamraz home in Tehran was raided by Iranian intelligence officers. Her father, Victor, was taken and held in solitary confinement for 65 days. By 2017, he was formally convicted on charges of illegal church activities and threatening national security. A year later, Dabrina’s mother, Shamiran, was also convicted of attending seminaries abroad and teaching spies against Iran.
“We call [the charges] a salad,” Dabrina said. “Interrogators put in as many accusations as they can and then finally out of them you get maybe two, three or maximum four.”