NO HOPE, BUT A DREAM

How Trump Surrendered to the People Who Murder Innocents

He capitulated to the very regime that killed this man’s fiancée when she was just 26.

opinion

Nobody had more cause to cheer the death-by-airstrike killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of Trump’s war with Iran than the fiancé of Neda Agha-Soltan.

Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old aspiring musician and photographer, was at the fringe of a demonstration in Tehran on June 20, 2009. That was the day after Khamenei issued a public call for a crackdown on protesters. The murderous mullah had not intimidated her.

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“She said, ‘I’ll go! Even if a bullet hits my heart,’” her fiancé, filmmaker and photographer Caspian Makan, recalls her saying.

Just after 7 p.m., at the intersection of Kargar and Salehi Streets in Tehran, Agha-Soltan was shot in the chest by a regime sniper. A viral cellphone video recorded her final moments as she bled out on the street, wide-eyed and beyond help, blood pouring from her nose and mouth.

“Probably the most widely witnessed death in human history,” Time magazine later declared.

Makan later told the Daily Beast that he and Agha-Soltan had been planning to have a baby, figuring it would be a boy and deciding they would call him Joupin, a Persian name that connotes a warrior.

Makan was still grieving the loss of his fiancée 17 years later, when the Daily Beast called him and confirmed that reports he had heard were true: the now 86-year-old Khamenei had been killed in Leadership House, less than a mile from where Agha-Soltan died.

“I’m speechless,” he said. “It’s amazing! Finally!”

But Makan cautioned that the evil that had killed Neda and tens of thousands of other protesters over the years still remained. As many as 40,000 had been slaughtered in just two days in January.

“It doesn’t matter who’s their leader, because they have a system,” he said. “If [the U.S.] killed the leader, OK, there’s another one.”

Makan also worried that the regime could end up even stronger.

“Mr. President [Trump] started this war,” Makan said. “If he stops in the middle of this mission…”

On Wednesday, Trump did exactly that, by officially signing an agreement with the regime, whose supreme leader is now Mojtaba Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son.

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“It’s awful,” Makan, now 54, told the Daily Beast from his current home in Canada. “This is very bad for the future. It’s really bad for everyone. Especially for America [and] the reputation of the U.S. I’m speechless.”

For all Trump’s talk of unconditional surrender, what he somehow imagined would be another quick win like Nicaragua threatened to turn into another forever war. He had TACO’ed yet again, cowed this time by rising oil prices as a result of the Iranian regime’s threats to attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

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“I thought the USA doesn’t negotiate with terrorists!” Makan told the Daily Beast. “This ‘deal’ sounds like an apology from the U.S. to the Islamic regime… It’s shameful.”

The fears Makan expressed at the start of the war have been realized.

“Now they are even more powerful,” he said.

He described the regime as an engine that generates evil.

“The fuel is the blood of innocent people looking for freedom,” Makan said.

That included the blood of Neda

“She always was looking for freedom, for real freedom,” he said. “She knew how they are evil.”

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Makan was asked if he had ever dared hope during this war that freedom might finally be coming to Iran.

“To be honest with you, not at all,” he replied.

He then said, “But I have a dream.”

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