How Turkey became unsafe haven for dissidents
While Ankara requests the most renditions of any country, its own borders remain extremely porous, its security personnel vulnerable to corruption and its territory a playground for foreign intelligence services.
Mohammed Mosaed is an award-winning Iranian journalist. He famously tweeted during the November 2019 protests in Iran, “Knock knock! Hello Free World! I used 42 different proxy to write this! Millions of Iranians do not have internet. Can you hear us?" The tweet required not only significant technical skill but also nerves of steel.
Mosaed was arrested in November 2019 and kept for 16 days at the notorious Evin prison, which is run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
When Mosaed criticized the Iranian government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was arrested and interrogated again in February 2020. He was released but his social media accounts remained suspended. In August, he was charged with colluding with foreign powers against Iran’s national security and spreading propaganda against the state. He was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison and banned from practicing his profession and using mass communication devices for two years.
He managed to get himself smuggled into the eastern Turkish province of Van and the Turkish authorities allowed him to stay in the country after his plight garnered widespread local and international support.
