Zolal Habibi: Inside Iran's Resistance — the 1988 Massacre, NCRI, and What Comes Next

Zolal Habibi was three days old at her first demonstration. She was seven when she learned, from a newspaper poem, that her father — a writer and human rights activist — had been executed in the summer of 1988, one of roughly 30,000 political prisoners killed by the Khomeini regime in a matter of weeks. She decided that day not to cry, and kept that promise to herself for ten years. It became, in her words, her first act of resistance.

Today Zolal is 27 years into her work with the Iranian resistance, and one of the more visible voices connecting international audiences to what’s actually happening inside Iran. In this conversation, she walks through her path from a twelve-year-old lobbying members of Congress to an eighteen-year-old who gave up a full scholarship to study medicine after watching the 1999 student uprisings unfold on live television.

We spend real time on the parts of this story that don’t get simplified anywhere else. The NCRI and MEK spent fifteen years, from 1997 to 2012, on the US and EU terrorism lists — placed there, by Zolal’s account and the court record, as a diplomatic gesture during a period of Western engagement with Tehran, and later removed after rulings in UK, European, and US courts found no basis for the designation. We talk through the NCRI’s ten-point plan for a secular, democratic Iran after the regime — gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, a free press, an independent judiciary — and why it’s drawn support from thousands of lawmakers and more than 130 former heads of state.

We also get into the present moment directly: this year’s 40-day war and the ceasefire that followed it, the new wave of executions of political prisoners and protesters that started almost immediately afterward, Iran’s collapsing currency and fuel shortages, and Zolal’s pointed critique of monarchist claimant Reza Pahlavi and the idea that restoring the Shah’s line is any kind of answer. And we close on what’s actually giving her hope — four major uprisings in the last decade alone, and a generation inside Iran she describes as done waiting.

If you want to go deeper or get involved, Zolal pointed listeners to the NCRI (ncr-iran.org), Maryam Rajavi’s platform (mariam-rajavi.com), and the Organization of Iranian American Communities, which has chapters in more than 40 US states and is holding a rally at the UN on September 22–23, during the UN General Assembly, to draw attention to the current wave of executions in Iran.

A brief editorial note: the NCRI/MEK’s history is genuinely contested — it spent years on Western terrorism lists before courts ordered its removal, and it continues to face criticism from some former members and researchers. We didn’t skip past that in this conversation, and you’ll hear it addressed directly.

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