Escaping Iran — A Personal and Global Perspective on Human Displacement

Daryush Nourbaha
Human Parts
Published in
4 min readJan 24, 2025

By Daryush Nourbaha

1991 — Daryush offering a peace sign on a ruined tank in the Iran-Iraq border. His mother, Maria, far right.

The experience of illegally crossing a country border, being jailed, and deported can impart a trauma that lasts a lifetime. I was reminded of this when I returned to Turkey after 22 years with my wife and two toddlers last summer. We traveled from our home in California to Istanbul to reunite with my Iranian family. This visit would mark the first meeting between my daughters and my long-separated relatives, so it was something we were all looking forward to. At the Istanbul airport’s customs, my wife and children swiftly secured their visas, but my process hit a snag, triggering echoes of past anxieties dealing with Turkish officials.

The flashback to my teenage escape from Iran resurfaced. It was post-9/11, and I was carrying both my American passport and my Iranian citizenship document. My mixed heritage, a result of my naturalized Italo-American mother and my Iranian father, had shaped a childhood divided between Iran and the US. Yet, the events of 9/11 made my choice clear. Fearing that the nations to which I belonged would go to war, I knew I had to get home to my mother in New York.

But it would be illegal for me to leave. All Iranian male adolescents are forbidden from leaving the country at the age of seventeen until they complete a mandatory two-year term of military service. The uncertainties surrounding the September Eleven attacks, the possibility of Iran being implicated, and war becoming an imminent danger seemed like a distinct possibility. I couldn’t place myself in a position to be forced into military service for Iran to fight against my own country, the US. The choices that propel people to leave their homes and cross political borders are never straightforward.

There are seven countries that border Iran, including Iraq and Turkey. As an American trying to flee Iran, I felt my best option for repatriation would be Turkey. So, when I met Rasool, an older Iranian-Kurd who smuggled wood and alcohol through Iraq, I told him that I did not think crossing into Saddam’s Iraq illegally was a good option for me. I proposed crossing directly into Turkey though it was something he had never done before.

On average, today’s refugees experience ten to twenty-six years of displacement. My journey from Tehran to JFK only took two weeks, but it still left me with a lifetime of memories to digest.

As we were climbing a tall hill, we saw headlights pierce the valley as a pickup truck made its way through the rough terrain. Rasool quietly told me to hurry. I looked up — we wouldn’t make it past the hill in time, but I saw a boulder I could hide behind and darted up the steep gradient as fast as I could. When children and young people experience trauma of imminent death as refugees, it often comes in the form of missiles, explosions, and violence. They are constantly looking for danger and remain in a hyper-vigilant mood. The hypervigilance can be triggered laterin life by something as trivial as the noise from a lawn mower, a knock on the door, or, in my case, the sight of a pair of headlights in a pitch-black night.

Amidst the challenges, Rasool went as far as the bus station in Van with me. We said our goodbyes, and I eventually reached the US embassy in Ankara. At the sight of the embassy, I, who had been sleeping out in the open on rocks with the sound of bullets in the background, suddenly felt privileged. I pulled out my Navy-blue passport and was welcomed in by a Marine at the gate. I knew this was a feeling no refugee would ever experience. However, what seemed like a sanctuary led to three nights in a detention cell and a lifetime ban from re-entering Turkey, something I would only learn two decades later.

This past August, after we’d been waiting for answers for hours, one of the officers put it plainly, “You have a lifetime ban.” I was not permitted to enter the country. We had to leave, and there were no flights at this time of night. Thankfully, the international transit zone had a hotel where we could stay for the night. The next morning, we flew out, and my daughters still have not met any of their Iranian relatives.

I remembered the moment, decades before, when a Turkish Kurd had said something to Rasool one night as we crossed the border by starlight. Rasool translated for me: “Three days ago, four Afghans were killed right here.”

It’s hard to overstate the impact displacement has on people’s lives. Even as a middle-class US citizen, the trauma of those short two weeks has been heavy to unpack over the past twenty years, the wounds only fresher now in the wake of this most recent episode. I can only imagine the pain being endured by people in countries where war is being waged.

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Human Parts
Human Parts
Daryush Nourbaha
Daryush Nourbaha

Written by Daryush Nourbaha

With a background in sustainability, public health and aerospace, I weave personal experience with geopolitical analysis to explore global issues.

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