Kiana and Ali Rahmani were only 8 years old when they left Iran to reunite with their father, Taqi Rahmani, who had fled the country as the Iranian authorities sought to arrest him.
Their mother, activist Narges Mohammadi, could only imagine the scene from her jail cell as her children would be taken from her for an "unknown" period of time and endure a "separation that would make me a stranger to my children and them unfamiliar to me."
“I haven’t seen my mom in nine years. I have become used to growing up without a mother,” Kiana, now 17, told Roya Maleki of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda as she marked another anniversary of separation from her mother on July 16.
“My father is a good dad; he has been both a father and a mother,” she added.
In a statement posted on her website on July 16, Mohammadi recalled staying awake through the night in her prison cell on July 16, 2015, knowing her children would be on a plane to France soon.
The separation, she said, “felt like vanishing into a misty void of lost connections, tearing a mother and her children apart, leaving us in an indescribable abyss of heartache and longing.”
"A separation that would turn me into an unfamiliar woman to my children, bearing the name ‘mother’ in a ‘misplaced’ manner," she added.
Mohammadi, 52, has been campaigning for human rights in Iran for decades and has been in and out of prison in the last 20 years. She has been convicted five times since March 2021 and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.
She is currently in jail for “spreading propaganda” against the Islamic republic.
Kiana recalls that it was “difficult” going through adolescence as a young girl without her mother, forcing her to turn to her friends and other women for advice.
“I had to learn things that a mother should teach her daughter. I had to ask my friends or their mothers whenever I had a question because I did not have a mother,” she said.
Despite remaining behind bars for so long, Mohammadi has remained at the forefront of Iran's women's rights movement.
Her efforts were honored last October when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her children accepted the award on her behalf in December.
Kiana said the award raised her mother’s spirits but worsened her conditions in prison because it led to further restrictions, such as limited visiting privileges and phone calls.
Despite not seeing their mother for half of their lives, Ali said they had learned from their mother to “defend our brothers and sisters” from the Middle East.
“We come from a place where there is little freedom and war is constant,” he added.
In her statement, Mohammadi bemoaned that not seeing her children for so long would make her a “stranger” to them.
“I hope my children understand that I, like all imprisoned mothers…was a loving mother whose heart still aches with overwhelming sorrow for her children,” she wrote.