Issa Saharkhiz
| Isa Saharkhiz عیسی سحرخیز |
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|---|---|
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| Born |
January 30, 1954 Abadan, Iran |
| Alma mater | Tehran University |
Isa Saharkhiz (Persian: عیسی سحرخیز ‘Isâ Saharkhyz; born 1953), is an Iranian journalist, political figure, and former head of the press department at the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Education during former President Khatami's administration. He is also a member of the central council of the Association for the Defense of Press Freedom in Iran. He was arrested in July 2009 during the post-presidential-election crackdown and is currently serving a three-year sentence on charges of "insulting Iran's supreme leader" and "spreading propaganda against the regime." According to his son Saharkhiz completed this three years prison in June 2012 and he is not released yet. Isa Saharkhiz was released on October 3, 2013 two months before the end of his sentence.
Saharkhiz was born in 1953 in Abadan, in the province of Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran. In 1959 his family moved to Karaj, close to the capital, Tehran. Saharkhiz went to secondary school and passed the national entrance examination for admission to Iranian universities in Karaj and then studied economics at the University of Tehran where he graduated in 1979. For three years, he was active in the movements that had begun after the Revolution to increase the rate of literacy, and to reconstruct the rural areas (Jihad of Construction). From 1982 to 1992 he worked in Iran for Iran's official news agency, the IRNA, as a reporter and economics expert, but also reported on the Iran-Iraq War "directly from the front line" for the last two years of the war. In 1992, the relatively liberal head of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammad Khatami, resigned. The ministry was in charge of IRNA and Saharkhiz had gotten to know Khatami. After Khatami resigned, Saharkhiz moved to the United States for five years to run IRNA's office in New York.
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