Political prisoner Sepideh Qoliyan was released from Mashhad's Vakilabad Prison on Saturday, May 30, after completing her sentence. She had been violently arrested on December 12 while attending the seventh-day memorial ceremony of Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer who died under suspicious circumstances.
After her release, she went straight to Alikordi’s grave with a bouquet of flowers. There, she compared her recent imprisonment and the wider struggle of Iranian society to the myth of Sisyphus, the ancient Greek figure condemned by the gods to push a massive boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time he reached the top.
Since her first arrest in March 2017, which followed Instagram posts about air pollution in Ahvaz and the diversion of Khuzestan’s water resources, Sepideh has lived through a repeated cycle of prison, brief freedom, and re-arrest. Her arrest alongside Ismail Bakhshi and several labor activists during the 2018 Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company workers’ protests turned her into one of the most recognizable faces of Iran’s labor and civil rights movement.
At times, her freedom lasted only a few hours. In March 2023, immediately after walking out of prison, she chanted: "Khamenei the Tyrant, we will drag you into the dirt!" Security agents ambushed and re-arrested her on the road hours later. Yet, as Sepideh once wrote, she has never laid down "the heavy burden of carrying the truth every single piece of it, scattered and fragmented."
