When Siroos was arrested and sent to Iran’s most notorious prison, he expected torture and possibly death. What happened next was supernatural — a testimony of God’s presence in the darkest place.

Returning to Danger

In 2010, Siroos returned to Iran to teach and mentor new believers in the underground church. He knew the risks. The Iranian government had been cracking down on Christian activity and house churches were being raided across the country.

But the call to serve was stronger than the fear.

For days, Siroos held secret seminars in multiple cities, training former drug addicts and new converts in the faith. People were hungry for God’s Word. They would arrive at 6 a.m. and stay until 10 p.m., soaking up teaching. Some would stay until 2, 3, or 4 a.m. for prayer, desperate for a touch from God.

Then the warnings came.

A woman in one of the meetings had been approached by the police. Desperate for money, she agreed to spy on them — but she also warned them:

They have told me to wear a microphone. Be careful. They are watching you.

Another warning followed. A man who installed satellite dishes overheard an IRGC agent plotting Siroos’s arrest. He passed the message on.

The team rerouted. They changed locations. They finished their seminars in secret.

But at the end of the trip, the authorities were waiting.

Arrest and Evin Prison

After saying goodbye to his friends, Siroos was grabbed by Iranian authorities. They blindfolded him, disoriented him and took him to Evin Prison — one of the most notorious prisons in the world, known for torture, executions and the imprisonment of political dissidents and Christians.

They made him strip. They ran a full medical examination, all while he was blindfolded. He was led from room to room, instructed to keep his head bowed and follow the feet of the person in front of him. If he raised his head, they shouted at him to lower it again.

Finally, they led him into an isolation cell.

When they removed the blindfold, Siroos saw it: the exact shade of bright green from a vision he’d had days earlier.

Before the arrest, while praying with his team about the warnings, Siroos had seen a vision of a bright green room surrounded by angels ten times taller than the walls, with fiery weapons protecting it. At the time, he thought it was the room where they would hold their next seminar.

But it wasn’t. It was his prison cell.

“Initially, I was in shock and didn’t even fully notice,” Siroos recalls. “Then later, in prayer, I physically saw the angels who were protecting me, and I remembered it all.”

Read how Siroos came to faith by faking a refugee story

Supernatural Encounters in Solitary Confinement

Everything in solitary confinement is designed to break a person. Isolation. Darkness. Disorientation. The goal is to drive prisoners to insanity.

But God had other plans.

The first supernatural encounter Siroos noticed was a miraculous healing.

“I have an allergy on my skin,” he explains. “If I’m low on sleep or under stress, it turns black and starts to itch. In Iran, I had it all over my arms because of little sleep. The first time I looked at my arms in the cell, the marks had completely gone.”

He begins to cry as he remembers. “The first thing I saw that encouraged me was this.”

Over the next 15 days, miracle after miracle unfolded.

Interrogation Without Fear

The next day, they took Siroos for interrogation.

Iranian authorities typically use torture to extract confessions from Christians. They beat prisoners until they admit their faith, then use those confessions to build cases for apostasy — a crime punishable by death.

But when Siroos sat down, he felt no fear.

“I told them I was a pastor of a church in Holland,” he says. “There was a long silence in the room. They were expecting to beat me for a few days to get me to confess that I was a Christian!”

Before his arrest, Siroos and his team had prayed together. They had been reminded of Jesus’s words: “Don’t worry about what you will say. The Holy Spirit will give you the right words.”

“I can honestly say I had no fear,” Siroos reflects. “Also, I am naturally a very forgetful, absentminded person. But I can tell you that in that place, my mind was completely awake, sharp and alive! I knew exactly what they knew already, and to that extent, I would confirm details to them. They actually commended me afterward for being ‘good and truthful.'”

God had given him supernatural clarity and wisdom.

A Miraculous Phone Call

On the third day, they allowed Siroos to make a phone call.

“Now bear in mind, I am a forgetful person,” he says. “I can’t even recite my own phone number! But in that moment, I automatically remembered an Iran phone number for a sister in our community. I had the number clear from the Holy Spirit.”

When he called, his entire family happened to be gathered in that sister’s home at that exact time.

Before calling, Siroos had prayed for five specific things. The first two were that his son would remember the emergency instructions Siroos had given him and that his wife Soheila would not worry.

“The first thing that happened when I called was the phone was passed to a family member who told me not to be concerned,” Siroos says. “She had heard from my son and he had actioned all the arrangements. She ran through my prayer list as if with supernatural insight and reassured me on every point. ‘Don’t worry, it’s taken care of, it’s in hand…’ It fully put my mind at ease.”

The Light in the Cell

When Siroos returned to his cell, the sun broke through the clouds. His cell was at the back of the prison with a tiny window. The sunshine came directly across the room onto the opposite wall.

I saw this light. The light was in my room and I was in the light. I started praying. God was there with me. He was speaking to me and revealing things to me.

Over the next two weeks, God met Siroos in that cell in ways he had never experienced before.

“The most beautiful moments of my life were there with me and my Father,” Siroos says. “There was nothing in my body that could distract me. One empty room; one disgusting toilet; a carpet infused with germs and dirt. And yet, God was there.”

Out of boredom and a desire to keep his mind focused, Siroos washed the carpet with his slider, scrubbing it until it turned from brown to white. He cleaned the toilet until it sparkled. And all the while, he prayed.

“Fifteen years prior, I had read a book on things to do in solitary confinement so you don’t lose your mind,” he says. “Only God could bring the details of that book back to my mind. From physical to mental to emotional to spiritual, God met all my needs, and I thrived in that place.”

Visions and Intercession

God showed Siroos things in prayer that he could not have known.

He saw the families of 4,000 young people (average age 20) who had been executed in his own prison block in the early days of the Islamic Revolution. He prayed for them.

He saw the lost souls of people incarcerated around him, filling the sky with darkness.

“I was seeing in the supernatural domain into the other cells,” Siroos says.

God also showed him the future: “I saw the prison I was incarcerated in become a beautiful park, and people will come and see what the Lord has done.”

Sharing the Gospel Behind Bars

Meanwhile, the interrogations continued. Siroos’s mother’s name is a pure Islamic name and so is his father’s. Wherever they took him, the guards would comment on his parents’ names and his faith, trying to understand how he was not a Muslim.

I was able to share my story in places and with people that I would otherwise not have had access to had I not been captured.

On the way to the courthouse for a bail hearing, the guard in the car asked him again: “You, with this Islamic name and Islamic parents — how is it that you are a Christian?”

Siroos shared his whole life story. “I was a drunk…”

His friend Vahik, who had also been arrested, followed with his testimony: “I was a drug addict…”

The guard sitting with them was a drug addict. His eyes were dark, his whole demeanor affected.

“Suddenly, as we shared our stories, his attention was grabbed,” Siroos recalls. “He kept banging his head on the side of the car, saying, ‘You have found the way!’ I hope one day I will see him again!”

A Merciful Judge

The court they went to was presided over by one of the most ruthless judges in Iran — famous for being one of the five most bloodthirsty, savage judges in the country.

But that day, he was on vacation. Someone else was in his place.

“This judge was decent and the bail he set was much more affordable,” Siroos says. “$8,000 — compared to the $80,000 bail set for one of our friends who had been arrested at the same time.”

God’s hand was at work.

The Promise of Freedom

The last time they interviewed Siroos, they told him they were done with him.

“We don’t know when you will be freed, though,” they said. “It may be two days or two months.”

The thought of two more months in solitary was unbearable.

“I prayed,” Siroos says. “‘God, if there is someone else here that You need to hear something from me, then please introduce me to them. Otherwise, please free me sooner rather than later.'”

Meanwhile, Soheila had gone to pray in Holland and been told, “Your husband will be freed soon.”

Two days later, they freed him.

God Parts the Sea

Just before his release, the authorities called Siroos’s contact at 1 p.m. and told them to pay the bail. The contact was physically too far away to get the official papers signed, stamped and delivered to multiple locations across city traffic in time.

“What was required of them was humanly impossible,” Siroos says.

But as they walked out of the house, someone was waiting in a car for them.

“I have been sent to you,” the driver said. “Wherever you want to go, I will take you.”

As they drove, the lights changed and the traffic disappeared. Everywhere they went, the papers were immediately processed and returned — all in record time.

“Even at the last place, they arrived late, but the person was in a great mood: ‘No problem at all; the official is still here; we can do it for you…'”

When they arrived to deliver the final papers to the prison official, he was there waiting after hours, ready to receive them.

“This never happens,” Siroos says. “God parted the sea for me.”

Safe Return

On the plane, Siroos was scared. He had heard about people disappearing off planes — their families thinking they had been released, only to be taken at the last moment, never to be seen again.

But he arrived in Holland safely.

“After I disembarked, I saw from a distance my baggage was the only one on an empty belt,” he says. “God had even arranged that for me. He had arranged the ‘soonest’ for me, exactly according to my prayer and my wife’s prayer.”

As Siroos and Soheila compared notes afterwards, they found nearly 40 specific prayer points they had both prayed during that time — both in agreement, without knowledge of what the other was praying.

“God answered every one,” Siroos says.

Memories with the Father

The two weeks Siroos was incarcerated left him with memories to last a lifetime — memories with his Father in heaven.

“I would sleep at His feet at night,” he says. “He would light my room. Soheila had read that the prison cells were dark there. She had prayed for light, and from the four corners of the room, God supernaturally lit my room — day and night! It was so bright I could hardly sleep! I had to put a towel over my face.”

He laughs. “Next time, I joked with her to make sure to ask for darkness at night. I remember I once even rang the bell to ask for the light to be turned off and the guard could not see what I was seeing … he wanted to know what light I was talking about!”

As another form of torture, the guards would use old loudspeakers to wake prisoners at dawn with awful sounds.

“One night I prayed that I would not wake to those sounds,” Siroos says. “The next morning when I woke up, I had this strong feeling that I had slept at the feet of my Father and He had shielded me. I woke to the sound of His voice telling me to wake. He took His hands from my ears. I had totally slept through the dawn wakeup call.”

Peace in the Face of Death

Despite the fact that Siroos didn’t know if he would ever come out alive, God showed him beautiful things and kept his heart at peace.

The case against him was strong: threat to national security, hosting illegal meetings, apostasy. The punishment for apostasy is execution. “He wrote it right into my file, right in front of me,” Siroos says.

But in this situation, God is the Father who sits with you and has you lean on Him right there in your prison cell so you can sleep deeply at night in His loving embrace. I am forever grateful for the powerful way He shielded and loved me right through that experience.

The Call Continues

Today, Siroos leads a team of Bible translators working to ensure every people group in Iran has access to the Word of God in their own language. He is responsible for training and for the processes and tools they use.

“I marvel at how God has used every experience in my life to prepare me for this awesome task,” he says. “I am humbled to play a role in providing for the people of Iran the very Word that totally transformed and saved my life.”

Read why Bible translation matters so much for Iran

Pray for the Persecuted Church in Iran

Siroos’s story is not unique. Across Iran, believers in the underground church face surveillance, harassment, interrogation, arrest and imprisonment because of their faith. Many continue to follow Christ and share the gospel despite significant personal risk.

But God has not abandoned them.

Here’s how you can pray:

For persecuted believers: Pray for God’s protection, strength and peace for those facing pressure, discrimination, threats, or persecution because of their faith.

For believers in prison: Pray for God’s supernatural presence, comfort and encouragement for those imprisoned for following Christ.

For underground church leaders and evangelists: Pray for wisdom, courage, discernment and opportunities to share the hope of Christ, even in difficult circumstances.

For families affected by persecution: Pray for provision, comfort, unity and faith for those whose loved ones face arrest, imprisonment and ongoing pressure.

For Iranian authorities: Pray that God would soften hearts, open eyes and bring life-changing encounters with His love and truth.

For the spread of God’s Word: Pray that every people group in Iran would have access to Scripture in their own language and the opportunity to encounter Jesus Christ for themselves.

More prayer points for Iran and a free downloadable prayer guide

God Is on the Throne

If there’s one thing Siroos’s story makes clear, it’s this: God never leaves His beloved.

Not in the green cell of Evin Prison. Not in the interrogation room. Not in the moments of fear or uncertainty.

He is there. With angels. With light. With peace. With miracles.

And He is with the persecuted church in Iran today.

The most beautiful moments of my life were in that prison cell with my Father, He met me there in ways I had never experienced before. And I know He is meeting believers in Iran the same way today.

God is on the throne. And He will never leave His children — no matter how dark the place.