One rainy spring evening, a young Iranian mother with a mangled arm, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter met a smuggler near the Iraqi border who gave them a stern ultimatum: Ensure the child’s silence or leave her behind. The mother, Sima Moradbeigi, 26, recalled that she dashed to a pharmacy for a bottle of cough syrup to drug her daughter into a stupor. Under the cover of night, the family followed the smuggler out of Iran along mountain paths, sometimes crouching or crawling through muddy scrubland to avoid border guards stalking their route with flashlights. Hours later, Ms. Moradbeigi and her husband said, they arrived safely at a mosque outside the city of Sulaimaniya in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region. The Islamic Republic — the theocracy that arose after Iran’s 1979 revolution — was never hospitable to women who rebelled against its strict religious codes for dress and behavior.

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Persons: Sima Moradbeigi, Moradbeigi, Juan, —, Mahsa Amini Locations: Iranian, Iran, Sulaimaniya, Iraq’s, Kurdistan Region, Republic