I am recording this from a hospital bed in a country I will not name.
My left hand is gone. They amputated it 4 days ago because of injuries I suffered in an airstrike that was meant to kill me.
The doctors and nurses here do not know who I really am. They believe I am just another refugee from the Middle East who got caught in some explosion.
They are partly right about the refugee part, but I was not simply caught in an explosion.
I was supposed to die in it. 46 men died in that blast. Senior clerics, military commanders, intelligence chiefs, the most powerful men in the Islamic Republic of Iran, all gone in seconds.
I am the only one who walked out of that building before it came down.
And the reason I survived is something so terrifying and so impossible that I have barely been able to speak about it until now.
But time is running out. The people searching for me are getting closer, and I must tell this story before they find me.
My name is General Hazim Adel. Until March 7th, 2026, I was one of the highest-ranking military commanders in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I served in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for 32 years. I held the rank of major general.
I commanded sensitive military operations across the Middle East in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.
I was a trusted advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Javad Matashimi himself. I sat in rooms where decisions that shaped the future of the entire region were made.
I had power, respect, wealth, and influence. Everything the Islamic Republic could offer a man who served it faithfully, I had it all.
And I believed in it completely. I was not just a soldier following orders. I was a true believer in the Islamic Revolution, devoted to Allah, devoted to the vision of Iran as the leader of the Shia Muslim world.
Every operation I commanded, every order I gave, I did it believing with all my heart that I was serving God.
I was born in Tehran in 1968, 9 years after the Islamic Revolution that turned Iran from a kingdom into an Islamic Republic.
My father was an official in the revolutionary government. He was not high-ranking, but important enough that our family lived comfortably and was deeply connected to the system.
From the time I could understand words, I was taught that Iran had a sacred mission.
We were told that our country was chosen by God to spread true Islam across the earth, to stand against the corruption of the West, and to prepare the world for the return of the Mahdi, the hidden Imam who would one day come back and bring perfect justice and peace.
These were not just ideas to me. They were the air I breathed. Every prayer, every lesson in school, every conversation at our dinner table pointed in the same direction.
Iran was special. Islam was the only truth, and serving the revolution was the highest calling any man could answer with his life.
I joined the Revolutionary Guard at 19 during the final years of the Iran-Iraq War.
I saw real combat. I watched friends die beside me in trenches and on battlefields.
I carried wounded men on my back and buried others with my own hands. The war hardened me.
It took away my fear of death and replaced it with a cold determination to serve the cause no matter what it cost.
After the war ended, I did not slow down. I kept climbing. I moved from frontline combat into strategic operations, learning how to plan missions, gather intelligence, and coordinate forces across borders.
Over the next two decades, I was involved in operations not just inside Iran, but all across the region.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza. Wherever Iran had interests, I was there or my orders were there.
I became known as a man who delivered results and could be trusted with the most dangerous assignments the Republic had to offer.
But I want to be very clear about something. I was not just a military man doing a job.
I was a man of deep faith. I prayed five times a day without fail.
I studied the Quran and the Hadith with great dedication. I sought guidance from religious scholars about the spiritual meaning of my work.
When I ordered operations that resulted in the deaths of our enemies, I truly believed I was carrying out the will of Allah.
When innocent people were caught in the crossfire, I told myself it was an unfortunate but necessary price for defending Islam.
I had blood on my hands, far more than I want to think about now, but I slept peacefully every night because I believed each drop was shed in a righteous cause.
I was fully convinced that when my time came to die, Allah would welcome me into paradise as a faithful servant who gave everything for Islam and the revolution.
By early 2026, I had reached the very top of Iran’s military structure. I was one of perhaps 15 generals who had direct access to the Supreme Leader.
Attended the most classified briefings, helped shape major policy decisions, and directed Iran’s military strategy across the entire region.
Then on February 28th, 2026, everything fell apart. A coordinated wave of airstrikes, launched by Israel with American intelligence support, struck multiple locations across Tehran at the same time.
The main target was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Javad Matashimi. The missiles found him in his compound in northern Tehran.
He was killed instantly along with everyone else inside the building. But the strikes did not stop there.
Within the same hour, missiles hit the Defense Ministry, the IRGC headquarters, and several other secure government facilities.
The scale and precision of the attack was beyond anything we had ever imagined was possible.
The casualties among our leadership were devastating. Along with Supreme Leader Matashimi, we lost Defense Minister Brigadier General Farhad Kasemi, IRGC Commander-in-Chief General Rostam Karimi, Chief of the Joint Armed Forces Staff General Nader Sharoki, and National Security Advisor Abbas Valadi.
In total, roughly 35 of our most senior officials were killed across multiple sites in Tehran that single day.
The Islamic Republic had never faced a blow like this. Our Supreme Leader was dead.
Our top military commanders were gone. Our chain of command was in pieces. The country was thrown into a state of panic and confusion I had never witnessed before, not even during the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq War.
Rumors spread like fire through the government. Some officials fled Tehran, afraid more strikes were on the way.
Others demanded immediate retaliation against Israel. The entire system was teetering on the edge of total collapse.
In the middle of this chaos, the Assembly of Experts acted. This is the body of senior Islamic scholars whose duty under the Constitution is to select and oversee the Supreme Leader.
With Matashimi dead and no clear successor named, they called an emergency session to choose a new leader before our enemies could press their advantage any further.
The meeting was scheduled for April 16th and 17th in the holy city of Mashhad, home to the sacred shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia Imam, and one of the holiest places in all of Shia Islam.
The Assembly believed that gathering in Mashhad instead of Tehran would offer both spiritual significance and better protection from further attacks.
The session would take place in a reinforced underground chamber beneath a government compound near the city center, designed to withstand conventional strikes.
The leaders were confident that the depth of the chamber and the sacred ground above it would shield them from harm.
I was not a member of the Assembly of Experts. That body was reserved entirely for senior clerics and religious scholars.
But as one of the highest-ranking military commanders who had survived the Tehran strikes, I received a direct invitation to attend the emergency session.
My role was to provide security assessments and military council while the scholars deliberated on choosing our next Supreme Leader.
I accepted without a second thought. I believed it was my duty to guide Iran through this crisis and to make certain that whoever took power understood the military threats we were facing.
On the evening of April 16th, I arrived in Mashhad under heavy armed escort. The city was tense and on edge.
News of the Supreme Leader’s death had swept across the country, and the people were frightened, angry, and deeply uncertain about what would come next.
Soldiers and armed guards were stationed on every corner. The streets surrounding the compound had been completely sealed off to all civilian traffic.
I was taken directly into the compound and led down a long concrete staircase into the underground chamber where the Assembly would hold its session.
The room was large, but still felt crowded because of how many men had gathered inside it.
There were 47 of us in total. Members of the Assembly of Experts, wearing their clerical robes and turbans, sat alongside senior IRGC commanders in full military uniform.
Intelligence officials and key government ministers who had survived the initial strikes filled the remaining seats.
The air was already thick with tension, cigarette smoke, and the sharp smell of bitter tea.
Men were greeting each other with tight embraces. Some were weeping openly for the colleagues they had lost.
Others spoke in urgent whispers about what had to happen next and who should lead.
As I lowered myself into my chair in that underground chamber, surrounded by the most powerful surviving leaders of the Islamic Republic, I had absolutely no idea that within the next several hours I would witness something that would shatter everything I had ever believed and change the entire direction of my life forever.
The session officially began just after midnight on April 17th. The chairman of the Assembly, a senior cleric named Ayatollah Sadegh Rouhani, opened the meeting with a long prayer asking Allah for guidance and wisdom in choosing the next Supreme Leader.
After the prayer, the debate started immediately. Different factions had already formed around different candidates.
One group wanted Tariq Matashimi, the eldest son of the fallen supreme leader, arguing that he understood his father’s vision better than anyone and that continuity of leadership was essential during wartime.
Another group opposed this saying that passing power from father to son was monarchy, not Islamic governance, and that it went against the very principles the revolution was built on.
A third group pushed for Ayatollah Mahmoud Khorasani, a highly respected scholar from Qom with deep religious credentials but very little military experience.
The arguments went back and forth with rising intensity, voices overlapping, men standing up to make their points and refusing to sit back down.
Hours passed and the debate grew more heated. Men who had been friends and allies for decades were now shouting at each other across the room.
Accusations of disloyalty flew in both directions. One commander slammed his fist on the table and said that choosing the wrong now would be handing victory to Israel without them having to fire another missile.
A senior cleric responded that military men had no business telling religious scholars how to choose a supreme leader.
The chairman tried repeatedly to bring order, but the room was beyond his control. Tea cups were refilled and emptied dozens of times.
Cigarette smoke hung so thick in the air it stung our eyes. Everyone was exhausted from days of grief and crisis and the exhaustion was making tempers shorter and words sharper.
I sat listening, occasionally offering my assessment of the military situation when asked, but mostly watching these powerful men struggle to hold together a system that was cracking apart from the inside.
It was approximately 10:45 in the morning when the room changed. I cannot describe it any other way.
One moment we were in the middle of another fierce exchange between two clerics about whether Tariq Matashimi had sufficient religious qualifications.
The next moment every voice in the room simply stopped. Because anyone chose to stop speaking.
The words just ceased. I watched Ayatollah Rouhani’s mouth continue moving, his lips forming words, his throat visibly straining to produce sound, but nothing came out.
Absolute silence fell on that underground chamber like a heavy blanket dropped over all 47 of us at once.
I tried to speak and felt my jaw move, felt air leaving my lungs, but there was no sound at all.
It was as if someone had pressed a mute button on the entire room. I saw panic flash across faces around me.
Men grabbed at their own throats. Others looked at each other with wide, terrified eyes.
A security officer near the door reached for his sidearm, but his arm froze halfway, locked in place as though an invisible hand had seized it.
Then came the cold. The underground chamber had been warm, almost uncomfortably so, from nearly 50 men packed into a sealed space for hours.
But in an instant the temperature plunged. I felt the warmth drain out of the air as if someone had opened a door to the deepest winter.
My breath came out in a white cloud when I exhaled. I could see the same white mist forming in front of every man around me.
Some of the older clerics began trembling, wrapping their robes tighter around themselves, their faces twisted with confusion and growing fear.
The fluorescent lights overhead flickered once, then twice, then dimmed to almost nothing. We were on the edge of total darkness in that sealed underground room with no explanation and no way to cry out for help.
Then a new light appeared. It started as a small point of brightness in the center of the room, hovering in the air between the circle of chairs where we sat.
It grew steadily, expanding outward, soft and white but intensely pure, unlike any light I had ever seen from any lamp or bulb or flame.
Within that light a shape began to form. At first it was unclear, just a presence, a thickness inside the glow.
But within seconds it sharpened into the unmistakable outline of a man. He was standing in the center of our circle, dressed in robes that were impossibly white, so bright they seemed to produce their own light from within the fabric itself.
His face was calm and full of authority. His eyes moved slowly across the room, resting on each of us for a moment before moving to the next man.
When those eyes reached me, I felt something I had never experienced in my entire life.
I felt completely seen, not just looked at, but known. Every thought I had ever had, every order I had given, every prayer I had prayed, every lie I had told, every drop of blood I had spilled, all of it was visible to this being in a single glance.
I wanted to look away, but I could not. My body would not obey me.
None of our bodies obeyed us. We were all frozen in place, unable to move or speak, only able to watch and listen.
He spoke. His voice was not loud, but it filled every corner of that room and vibrated deep inside my chest.
He spoke in perfect Persian, clear and smooth, with no accent from any region I could identify.
He said, “I am Jesus Christ, the one you call Isa. I am the son of the living God, the word made flesh.
I was crucified and I rose from the dead. I stand before you now as both a witness and a warning.”
The silence that followed those words was heavier than any silence I have ever known.
47 of the most powerful men in Iran sat paralyzed, staring at a figure that could not possibly be there, hearing words that contradicted everything we had been taught since birth.
My mind was screaming at me that this was impossible, that this could not be real, that there had to be some explanation.
But my heart knew, even in that first moment, that I was standing in the presence of something far beyond anything human or anything I had ever encountered in all my years of faith and prayer.
Then he began calling men by name. He turned to Ayatollah Rouhani, the chairman of the assembly, and said, “Sadegh Rouhani, for 38 years you have stood before students and told them I was nothing more than a prophet.
You have taught thousands of young men that my death on the cross never happened, that my resurrection was a Christian invention.
You have built your reputation on denying who I am.” Rouhani’s face went completely white.
His hands gripped the arms of his chair so hard his knuckles looked like they would break through the skin.
Jesus turned to General Behzad Talabi, a senior IRGC commander sitting three chairs to my left.
“Behzad Talabi, you have ordered the deaths of innocent men, women, and children and called it service to God.
The blood of the people you destroyed cries out against you. You do not serve God.
You serve your own hunger for power.” Talabi made a choking sound, the first human noise anyone had been able to produce since the silence fell.
One after another, Jesus addressed men in that room by their full names, speaking directly to their specific sins, their private failures, their secret betrayals, things that no intelligence agency could know, things that only God could see.
After addressing perhaps 15 or 20 men individually, Jesus turned his gaze to all of us together.
His expression shifted. It was still full of authority, but now I could see something else in it, compassion, deep, painful compassion, like a father watching his children walk toward a cliff and refusing to stop.
He said, “You gather in this room to choose a leader who will continue leading this nation in rebellion against the true God.
You quote your scriptures which mention my name but do not understand who I am.
You honor me with your lips as a prophet while denying everything I taught and everything I accomplished.
You wait for a savior who is coming, but you have rejected the savior who already came.”
He paused and the weight of his presence pressed down on us so hard I thought my chest would collapse.
“I am calling you to repent. Turn away from your denial of truth. Turn away from the violence you commit in the name of God.
Lay down your pride and accept me as your Lord and savior. Do this and you will be saved.
Refuse and you will face a judgment far worse than any bomb or missile.” For one long, terrible moment, nothing happened.
Every man in that room sat frozen, processing words that dismantled 40 years of belief in a matter of seconds.
Then the supernatural hold on our voices broke. Sound returned to the room and instead of falling to their knees, the leaders of the Islamic Republic chose to fight.
Ayatollah Rouhani was the first. He leaped to his feet, his face no longer white with fear but red with fury, and began reciting from the Quran at the top of his voice.
“Say, he is Allah, the one. Allah, the eternal refuge. He neither begets nor is begotten and there is none comparable to him.”
Other clerics joined him immediately, standing and shouting verses that denied the divinity of Christ.
“And they say, the most merciful has taken a son. You have done an atrocious thing.
The heavens almost rupture therefrom and the earth splits open and the mountains collapse in devastation that they attribute to the most merciful a son.”
The room erupted into a wall of sound as men who moments before could not speak now screamed Quranic verses like weapons aimed at the figure standing among them.
General Talabi pointed a shaking finger at Jesus and shouted above the noise. “You are not Isa.
You are a jinn, a demon sent by Shaitan to deceive us at our weakest moment.
We reject you. There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his final messenger.”
Others joined in with similar declarations, their voices breaking with a mixture of rage and terror.
They were doing the only thing they knew how to do when confronted with something that threatened their entire worldview.
They were clinging to their doctrine with both hands, quoting scripture to drown out a truth that stood physically in front of them.
Jesus did not argue. He did not raise his voice. He did not fight back against their Quranic recitations or their accusations.
He simply stood in the center of that storm of rejection and let them rage, his face carrying that same terrible compassion, like a doctor watching a patient refuse the only medicine that could save his life.
When the shouting reached its peak, Jesus spoke one final time. His voice cut through every other sound in the room as cleanly as a blade through cloth.
Your time is ending. What you have built will crumble. The blood you have spilled will be answered for.
I warned you. I called you. You have given me your answer. And then he was gone.
Not fading slowly, not walking away, not dissolving into light. Simply gone, as if he had never existed.
The cold vanished instantly. The fluorescent lights returned to their normal brightness. The room felt exactly as it had before the encounter, warm and smoky and crowded.
But nothing was the same. Men were shaking uncontrollably. Several had collapsed back into their chairs with their heads in their hands.
Others were still standing, still reciting Quran verses under their breath, their eyes darting around the room searching for any trace of the figure who had stood among them.
One cleric was weeping silently. Another was arguing loudly that it had been an Israeli psychological weapon, some kind of advanced holographic technology designed to break their spirit.
The room was pure chaos, and in the middle of it all, I sat in my chair with my heart slamming against my ribs, sweat pouring down my face, knowing with absolute certainty that what I had just witnessed was real and that I needed to get out of that room immediately before something terrible happened.
I stood up from my chair on legs that barely held me. My mind was racing for any excuse to walk out of that room without raising suspicion.
Then I remembered that I had been assigned to coordinate a secure communication relay with our forces stationed along the western border.
The relay was scheduled for that morning, and I had completely forgotten about it in the madness of the overnight session.
I grabbed onto that excuse like a drowning man grabs a rope. I raised my voice above the arguing and the Quran recitations and announced that I needed to step out to handle an urgent military communication.
I said I would return in 15 minutes. Nobody objected. Nobody even looked at me properly.
They were too consumed with debating among themselves whether what they had just seen was real or a trick, whether it was demonic or technological, whether it meant anything at all.
I walked toward the heavy steel door at the far end of the chamber, forcing myself not to run, keeping my steps measured and calm, even though every nerve in my body was screaming at me to move faster.
The security officer at the door opened it for me, and I stepped into the long concrete corridor that led to the staircase going up to ground level.
The corridor felt endless. My footsteps echoed off the walls, and I could still hear muffled shouting from the meeting room behind me as the door closed.
I climbed the stairs quickly, gripping the metal railing because my hands were trembling so badly I did not trust my own balance.
At the top, another guard opened the outer door, and I stepped into the daylight.
The sun hit my face, and I stopped for a moment, breathing hard, filling my lungs with the warm April air of Mashhad.
The sky was clear and blue. Birds were singing somewhere nearby. Life outside that underground chamber was continuing as if nothing had happened.
People on the streets beyond the security perimeter were going about their normal day, completely unaware that 47 men beneath the ground had just been visited by Jesus Christ himself and had shouted him down with verses from the Quran.
I began walking toward the communications building on the far side of the compound, about 60 m from the main meeting hall.
I had taken maybe 30 steps when I heard it. A sound that every military officer in the world recognizes instantly and that turns the blood in your veins to ice.
A high-pitched screaming whistle cutting through the sky, growing louder with terrifying speed. Incoming missiles.
I did not even have time to think. My training took over, and I threw myself forward onto the ground, covering my head with my arms.
The first impact hit the meeting hall directly. The explosion was so powerful it lifted my body off the ground and threw me sideways like I weighed nothing.
I hit something hard, a concrete barrier or a wall. I do not know which, and felt a crushing pain in my left hand and forearm that was beyond anything I had ever experienced.
More explosions followed, three or four in rapid succession, each one shaking the earth beneath me.
Debris rained down everywhere. Chunks of concrete, twisted metal, shattered glass, and clouds of choking dust filled the air around me.
Then there was silence. Not the supernatural silence from inside the chamber, but the terrible natural silence that follows massive destruction, broken only by the crackling of fires and the slow groaning of structures still collapsing.
I lay on the ground for what felt like a very long time, unable to move, unable to think clearly.
My ears were ringing so loudly it felt like my skull was vibrating. Dust was so thick in the air I could barely breathe.
When I finally managed to lift my head and look around, the world had changed completely.
The building I had walked out of minutes ago was gone. Where the meeting hall had stood, there was now a mountain of broken concrete and twisted steel beams with smoke and flames rising from deep within the rubble.
The underground chamber, the reinforced room that was supposed to protect Iran’s leaders from any attack, had been crushed and buried under tons of wreckage.
I turned my head and looked at my left hand. What I saw made me scream.
My hand was destroyed, torn apart by shrapnel or crushed by debris. I could not tell which.
Blood was pouring from wounds I could not even count. Bones were visible through the torn flesh.
My fingers were bent at angles that no human hand should ever bend. People began arriving.
Security personnel, soldiers, staff from other buildings in the compound, all running toward the destruction.
Someone found me lying on the ground and started shouting for a medic. I was drifting in and out of consciousness by then.
The pain in my hand sending waves of blackness across my vision. I remember being lifted onto a stretcher, remember the bumping motion of being carried to a vehicle, remember voices above me speaking in rapid urgent Farsi about blood loss and shock.
Then I woke up in a military hospital. I did not know how much time had passed.
A doctor was standing beside my bed, his face grave. He told me I had been unconscious for nearly 18 hours.
He told me my left hand had been too severely damaged to save and that they had been forced to amputate it just above the wrist to prevent infection from spreading up my arm.
Then he told me the rest. All 46 men who had remained in the underground chamber were confirmed dead.
The missiles had been bunker buster weapons designed to penetrate deep underground before detonating. Nobody inside had survived.
I was the sole survivor of the Mashhad assembly meeting. For the first two days in that hospital, I could not stop shaking.
Doctors thought it was trauma from the blast and the amputation, and partly it was.
But the deeper cause of my shaking was what I had seen before the missiles came.
I could not close my eyes without seeing that figure in white standing in the center of our circle.
I could not sleep without hearing his voice saying my time is ending and what you have built will crumble.
46 men had rejected him, had screamed Quranic verses at him, had called him a demon, and within minutes they were all dead.
I had walked out of that room not because of any military phone call, but because seeing Jesus had shaken me so deeply I could not bear to stay.
And that decision, driven entirely by what I witnessed, had saved my life while costing me my hand.
I lay in that hospital bed staring at the bandaged stump where my left hand used to be and asked myself the question I could no longer avoid.
Was everything I believed for 58 years wrong? When I was strong enough to sit up and think clearly, the interrogations began.
Officers from the intelligence division arrived at my hospital bed with notebooks and recording devices.
They questioned me for hours across multiple days. They wanted to know every detail. When exactly did I leave the chamber?
Why did I leave? Who told me to leave? Did I receive any warning about the strike?
Did I have contact with any foreign intelligence service? The same questions came at me over and over in different forms, trying to catch me in a contradiction.
I could see in their eyes what they suspected. They thought I had been warned.
They thought my survival was too convenient to be coincidence. One officer leaned close to my face and asked directly, “Did anything unusual happen inside that meeting before you left?
Anything at all?” My heart nearly stopped. I knew what the truth would cost me.
Telling them that Jesus Christ had appeared in our meeting and that I had fled because of it would either get me locked in a psychiatric facility or executed for blasphemy.
I looked that officer in the eye and told him no. Nothing unusual. Just the debate about the new supreme leader.
I left for a scheduled communication, and the missiles struck while I was outside. He stared at me for a long time, and I could feel that he did not believe me.
But he had no evidence to prove otherwise, so eventually they left me alone. After I was released from the hospital with my arm still healing and my spirit completely broken open, I returned to Tehran a different man wearing the same uniform.
On the outside, I continued performing my duties, attending prayers, speaking the language of the revolution.
But inside, a war was raging. I began secretly researching the claims Jesus had made in that chamber.
Using encrypted connections and hidden browsers, I read the Christian scriptures for the first time in my life.
I read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I read about Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, claiming to be the son of God, being crucified on a Roman cross, and rising from the grave 3 days later.
Everything I read matched what I had witnessed in Mashhad. The authority in his voice, the compassion on his face, the knowledge of men’s secret sins, the offer of salvation, the warning of judgment.
The Jesus of the Bible was the same Jesus who had stood in our underground chamber and called us to repent.
The more I read, the more I realized that Islam and Christianity could not both be true.
The Quran said Jesus was never crucified. The Bible said he was. The Quran said he was only a prophet.
Jesus himself said he was the son of God. One of them was lying, and after what I had seen with my own eyes, I knew which one was telling the truth.
About 3 weeks after I returned to Tehran, my wife Nasreen came to me one night after we had gone to bed.
She locked the bedroom door, sat beside me, and began crying quietly. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me something that sent chills down my entire body.
Since the day of the Mashhad attack, she had been having dreams. The same dream, repeating almost every night.
In the dream, a man dressed in glowing white robes would appear and speak to her.
He would say, “Your husband was pulled from the fire for a reason. The truth he is searching for lives in me.
Do not let him turn back.” She had been terrified to tell me, terrified of what it meant, terrified that she was losing her mind or being deceived by evil spirits.
But hearing me talk in my sleep, hearing me whisper the name of Jesus in the darkness without realizing it, had finally pushed her to speak.
I held her with my one remaining hand and told her everything. I told her what happened in that underground room.
I told her about Jesus appearing, about his words, about the leaders rejecting him, about the missiles coming minutes later.
I told her about my secret research into Christianity, and that I was becoming more and more convinced that Jesus was who he claimed to be.
She did not pull away. She did not call me a blasphemer. She wept and said she already knew because the man in her dreams had the same face I was describing.
Over the following weeks, Nasreen and I studied together in secret every night behind locked doors.
We read the Bible on a hidden device. We watched testimonies of other Muslims who had encountered Jesus and given their lives to him.
We prayed together, not the formal Islamic prayers we had performed our entire lives, but desperate honest prayers asking God to show us the truth no matter what it cost.
And about 2 months after the Mashhad attack, sitting together on the floor of our bedroom with tears streaming down both our faces, we surrendered our lives to Jesus Christ.
We told him we believed he was the son of God, that he died on the cross for our sins and rose again, and that we wanted to follow him for the rest of our lives.
The peace that filled that room in that moment was something I cannot put into human words.
It was like a weight I had carried for 58 years without knowing it was suddenly lifted off my shoulders.
For the first time in my entire life, I was not afraid of God. I was loved by him.
But even as that peace settled into my heart, I knew the danger around us was growing.
And just weeks later, I learned through a trusted source inside the IRGC that the new supreme leader, Tariq Matashami, who had taken power in the chaos after Mashhad, had quietly issued an order to have me eliminated.
They could not prove I was a traitor, but my impossible survival and my inability to explain it to their satisfaction had made me a threat they were no longer willing to tolerate.
I was a dead man walking, and the clock had started ticking. The night I learned about the kill order, I sat with Nasreen in our bedroom, and we both understood without saying it out loud that our life in Iran was finished.
Everything we had built over decades, our home, our careers, our friendships, our standing in society, all of it was gone the moment that order was signed.
We had two choices. Stay and wait for them to come for us, which meant certain death dressed up as an accident or a heart attack or a car crash, or run and try to survive long enough to tell the world what happened in that underground chamber in Mashhad.
We chose to run. But running from the Islamic Republic when you are a major general in the Revolutionary Guard is not like running from an ordinary country.
They monitor everything. Phone calls, emails, bank transactions, vehicle movements, even the patterns of which streets you drive down on your way to work.
One wrong step and they would know we were planning to flee before we even reached the city limits of Tehran.
Through my secret study of Christianity over the previous weeks, I had made careful contact with members of Iran’s underground church.
This network of secret believers operates across the country, hidden in plain sight, worshipping Jesus behind locked doors in ordinary apartments and houses.
These people risk their lives every single day simply for believing in Christ. When I reached out to them and explained my situation without revealing every detail of who I was, they connected me with people who specialize in helping persecuted believers escape from Iran.
These were not professional smugglers motivated by money. They were Christians motivated by faith, men and women who had dedicated their lives to helping brothers and sisters in Christ reach safety.
They had routes, contacts, safe houses, and methods that had been developed and refined over years of operating under the nose of one of the most oppressive security states on earth.
They told me the journey would be brutal, especially with my arm still healing from the amputation.
They told me there were no guarantees. But they also told me that God had brought many people through the same path before, and that he would be faithful.
We had to move fast. My source inside the IRGC told me the elimination order would likely be carried out within 2 to 3 weeks.
The regime preferred to wait a short time after issuing such orders so that the target would not connect any unusual activity to what was coming.
That gave us a narrow window. I quietly withdrew cash from three separate accounts over several days, small enough amounts that they would not trigger automatic alerts, but large enough to fund our escape.
Nasreen packed two small bags with only essential items, clothes, medicines, our hidden device containing the Bible, and a few photographs of our children and grandchildren.
Everything else, the house we had lived in for 20 years, the furniture, the possessions, the medals and commendations from my military career, we left behind without looking back.
The hardest part was not leaving our belongings. The hardest part was leaving our children.
We have three children, two sons and a daughter, all adults now with families of their own living in Tehran.
We could not tell them we were leaving. We could not explain where we were going or why.
Any knowledge they had about our escape would put them in immediate danger. The IRGC would interrogate them, and if they knew anything, they would be tortured until they revealed it.
The only way to protect our children was to disappear without a word and let them believe whatever the regime told them.
Nasreen and I told them we were going to visit her elderly aunt in Isfahan for a few days.
We hugged them and kissed our grandchildren and walked out their doors knowing we might never see their faces again in this life.
Nasreen broke down completely in the car afterward. She cried so hard she could not breathe.
I held her with my one hand and cried with her. This old general who had commanded thousands of men and never shed a tear on the battlefield, weeping like a child because he was leaving behind the people he loved most in the world to save their lives by vanishing from them.
The underground church picked us up that same night from a quiet street on the outskirts of Tehran.
We were transferred between three different vehicles over the next 12 hours. Each one taking us further from the capital and closer to the northwestern border.
We traveled on back roads and dirt tracks, avoiding every checkpoint and major highway. At one point, we hid in the back of a cargo truck beneath heavy blankets while soldiers conducted a random inspection of vehicles on a rural road.
I lay there in the darkness, my amputated arm throbbing with pain, my heart pounding so loudly I was convinced the soldiers would hear it.
But they waved the truck through without checking the cargo area. God blinded their eyes just as he had opened mine.
We crossed into Turkey on foot through a mountainous border region in the middle of the night.
The terrain was harsh and steep, and my body was in no condition for that kind of physical punishment.
My arm wound reopened during the climb and started bleeding through the bandages. Nasreen, who had never walked more than a few kilometers at a time in her life, pushed forward through the darkness without a single complaint.
Our guides, two young Kurdish Christian men who knew every rock and path on that mountain, carried our bags and practically carried me during the steepest sections.
When we finally crossed the border and set foot on Turkish soil, I collapsed on the ground and thanked Jesus out loud for the first time in my life without fear of who might hear me.
From Turkey, we were moved through a series of safe houses operated by Christian organizations that help persecuted believers from the Middle East.
I cannot name these organizations or the people who helped us because doing so would endanger their operations and the lives of everyone who works with them.
I will only say that these people showed us more genuine love and compassion in a few weeks than I experienced in 32 years of service to the Islamic Republic.
They fed us, clothed us, treated my wounds, held Nasreen when she cried, prayed with us, and never once asked for anything in return.
Eventually, we were moved to another country, one I cannot name for our safety, where we applied for asylum as religious refugees fleeing persecution.
The process has been slow and uncertain, filled with paperwork and interviews, and long periods of waiting.
But we have been allowed to stay while our case is reviewed, and organization has provided us with a small apartment where we live quietly and try to heal from everything we have been through.
It was in this country that my arm became severely infected from the journey, and I was rushed to the hospital where I am recording this testimony right now.
The doctors say the infection is under control, but I need several more days of treatment before I can be released.
I know the regime is looking for me. Through contacts I still trust, I have learned that the IRGC launched an investigation into my disappearance, and that Tariq Matashami himself has ordered intelligence networks operating abroad to locate me.
They know I escaped. They know I am alive. And I believe they suspect that something happened in that chamber in Mashhad that I have not told them about.
They are right to suspect that. What I witnessed in that room, what all 47 of us witnessed, is the single most dangerous piece of information the Islamic Republic has ever tried to bury.
Jesus Christ appeared to the most senior surviving leaders of Iran, called them by name, exposed their sins, offered them salvation, and warned them of judgment.
They rejected him, and minutes later they were all dead. If the Iranian people knew this, if Muslims around the world knew this, it would shake the foundations of the regime more than any military strike ever could.
That is why they want me dead. Not because I am a traitor or a spy, but because I am a witness to the truth they cannot allow to be spoken.
To my fellow Iranians listening to this testimony, I want you to hear me as a man who loved our country with everything in him.
I gave 32 years of my life, my career, my health, and now my left hand to serving Iran.
I am not a Western agent. I was not brainwashed or paid to say these things.
I saw Jesus Christ with my own eyes in a sealed underground chamber surrounded by the most powerful men in our nation.
He is real. He is not just a prophet mentioned respectfully in the Quran. He is the son of God who died on a cross and rose from the dead, and he is offering you the same salvation he offered those leaders in Mashhad.
You do not have to earn your way to paradise through prayers and fasting and rituals, and wondering every night if you have done enough.
Jesus already did enough. He paid the price for your sins with his own blood.
All you have to do is believe in him and accept what he has done for you.
I know this will cost you. It cost me everything I had. But I promise you, standing on the other side of that decision with one hand and nothing to my name, Jesus is worth more than everything I lost.
To Christians around the world, I am begging you to pray for Iran. Pray for the millions of Iranians who are trapped under a regime that claims to speak for God, but opposes everything God stands for.
Pray for the underground church, for the thousands of secret believers who gather in hidden rooms and whisper the name of Jesus because saying it out loud could get them killed.
Pray for more encounters, more dreams, more visions, more moments where Jesus breaks through the walls that religion and government have built to keep people from finding him.
Pray for my children and grandchildren in Tehran who do not know where their parents are.
Pray that God would protect them, and that one day he would reveal himself to them the way he revealed himself to Nasreen and me.
And pray for us. Pray that this testimony reaches the people it needs to reach.
Pray that God would keep us hidden from those who want to silence us. Pray that our asylum case would be approved, and that we would find a place where we can live and worship freely for whatever time we have left.
To Tariq Matashami and the men who now lead the Islamic Republic, I know this recording will reach you eventually.
I know you will try to discredit it, call it propaganda, call it psychological warfare, call me a madman or a traitor.
But you know the truth. You have heard the whispers about what happened in Mashhad.
You know that something occurred in that chamber that your officials cannot explain and your scientists cannot reproduce.
Jesus appeared to your predecessors and gave them a chance to repent. They refused, and they are dead.
He is giving you the same chance right now through this testimony. Do not repeat their mistake.
Do not let pride and power and ideology drag you to the same end. Step down.
Repent. Seek Jesus while there is still time. Because his warning was clear, your time is ending, and what you have built will crumble.
I watched those words come true once already. I do not want to watch them come true again, but I know they will if you refuse him the way those 46 men did.
My name is General Hazim Adel. I served the Islamic Republic of Iran for 32 years.
I was in the room in Mashhad when Jesus Christ appeared to Iran’s leadership and called them to turn from their rebellion against God.
46 men rejected his call and died minutes later when missiles destroyed that chamber. I survived because his appearance shook me so deeply that I walked out of that room moments before the strike.
It cost me my hand. It cost me my home, my career, my country, and my family, but it saved my soul.
I am recording this from a hospital bed with one hand and nothing left to my name except the truth.
And the truth is this, Jesus Christ is the son of God. He is alive.
He appeared in Mashhad. He offered salvation, and it was rejected. Do not make the same mistake those men made.
Turn to Jesus while you still have breath in your lungs and time on your clock.
He is waiting for you with the same compassion I saw on his face in that underground room, arms open, offering you everything and asking only that you believe.
My testimony is finished. May God have mercy on all who hear it. And may Jesus Christ reveal himself to every heart that is willing to see him.
Amen.
