One rainy spring evening, a young Iranian mother with a mangled arm, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter met a smuggler near the Iraqi border who gave them a stern ultimatum: Ensure the child’s silence or leave her behind.

The mother, Sima Moradbeigi, 26, recalled that she dashed to a pharmacy for a bottle of cough syrup to drug her daughter into a stupor.

Under the cover of night, the family followed the smuggler out of Iran along mountain paths, sometimes crouching or crawling through muddy scrubland to avoid border guards stalking their route with flashlights. Hours later, Ms. Moradbeigi and her husband said, they arrived safely at a mosque outside the city of Sulaimaniya in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region.

Their daughter, Juan, barely stirred.

The Islamic Republic — the theocracy that arose after Iran’s 1979 revolution — was never hospitable to women who rebelled against its strict religious codes for dress and behavior. But their perils were amplified by a revolt that began last September, set off by the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, while she was in the custody of the country’s morality police.

Women played a central role in the months of antigovernment protests that followed, demanding nothing less than the abolition of the entire system of authoritarian clerical rule. The government eventually stamped out most of the protests, leaving hundreds dead, according to rights groups.

Some mothers concluded that it would be better to risk their lives fleeing Iran to spare their daughters a lifetime under the authoritarian regime. These are the stories of three women who made that difficult choice.

Transformed by Rage

Days after the protests began, Ms. Moradbeigi said she walked out her front door gripping a head scarf, which she planned to burn on the streets of her hometown, Bukan. Before that moment, she had not considered herself political.

She had found happiness with her husband, Sina Jalali, who owned a fabric shop, and their daughter. But she was enraged by the death of Ms. Amini, who had lived in Saqhez, not far from Ms. Moradbeigi’s hometown in Iran’s northwestern Kurdish region. Like Ms. Amini, she was part of Iran’s Kurdish minority, which has faced discrimination and repression.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/world/middleeast/iran-women-girls-leave.html