Melbourne woman Nikoo Jalilvand Fard is worried her mother could be killed by the Islamic Republic at any moment.
She says her 50-year-old mother Farhnaz Nikkhoo has been locked up in Iran's notorious Evin prison for three years, wrongly accused of being a spy for Israel.
"I came here [to Australia in] March of 2022, I never thought I would be here, and my mum and my family would be in that situation," she tells ABC News.
"My heart really breaks to see all of this, the people being killed [by Iran's regime]."
On Saturday night when the US-Israel strikes on Iran broke out, she had a rare chance to speak to her mother amid an almost total phone and internet blackout.
ABC News has been given the voice note where her mother appears to signal goodbye, without directly saying so. She tells her daughter:
"The telephones might be disconnected.
"Anything could happen.
"You be calm, be relaxed. I went to the shower just now. I prayed for you a lot under the shower. I prayed for you. I leave you in the hand of God to protect you, and all of us.
"You just be calm and relaxed. Nothing will happen.
"Our blood is not darker than the blood of the youth they killed."
Ms Jalilvand Fard could sense her mother was saying goodbye.
"She was thinking if anything happens to me, I'm just leaving you to God," she said.
"It was very hard to hear all that conversation and not be able to even hug her.
"That broke my heart."
Asked if she fears the regime is going to execute her mother, Ms Jalilvand Fard says the death penalty is "one of the biggest fears that we had".
"I feel very powerless that my loved one needs me very much and I'm not going to be able to be there with her or even know how it's going to end," she said.
She said her mum used to work for an Iranian telco and was arrested three years ago when she was flying to Australia to visit her.
"They have accused her [of] working with Israel," she said.
"She was a telecommunication manager. We know how much IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) usually keeps … information private so it's very funny to hear [them say] my mum is … charged with sending the data to Israel."
Two years ago, her mother wrote her a letter from Evin prison in which she detailed the torture she faced.
Her mother wrote she had been kept in solitary confinement for five months and was denied enough food and proper medical attention.
"She would get a piece of bread to [eat] for two days," she said.
"There would be physical torture.
"There would be psychological torture, like for example [the interrogator] saying to her, 'Your daughter is in the other cell, can you hear that she's crying and she's here. If you want to keep her safe, you should sign this and you should agree to what I'm saying.'"
In the letter she wrote how she often wasn't allowed to go to the toilet and held it in, which resulted in heavy bleeding.
She wrote: "My body hurts, I keep bleeding, I keep having pain, but there is no attention."
Ms Jalilvand Fard hopes the US-Israel strikes will weaken the regime and exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi will return "to move towards a secular democracy, a free Iran".
"Lots of people have been killed in the past 47 years, and even if every single of us would go and stand in front of the bullets, we needed somebody else to come and help us," she said.
She says if Iran becomes a democratic country, she will return.
"There will be a day that I can go back without having that fear of passing through the gates," she said.
