When Israeli bombs fell on Iran during the last two weeks, Mandy Ansari Jensen was bicycle between crying and praying and reviewing her phone every few minutes while waiting to know her father in Iran. After five insomnia nights, she finally confirmed that she was alive.
Jensen, who grew up in the United States after his parents fled from Iran during the 1979 revolution, is one of the many Iranians around the world who say they feel frozen in fear and anguish while waiting for updates of loved ones in the country in the middle of the outbreak of the war between Israel and Iran. The United States entered the conflict by bombing several Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday, and Iran took reprisals on Monday with a symbolic strike in an American military base in Qatar that did not cause casualties.
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Many in the Iranian diaspora come from families who sought to escape the theocratic regime that took over in 1979 after the Iranian revolution. As the conflict between Iran and Israel persists, some Iranians abroad express a renewed hope for regime change, while others care about the consequences of foreign intervention.
“The Iranian people have resisted oppression for decades. They have risked everything to protest, organize, speak,” said Jensen, a content creator who now lives in New York City. “The Iranians want a free Iran, but having our country bombarded by world leaders who know that they do not care about the safety of innocent civilians is not the way we are not pawns. We are people.”
Citing Iran’s “existential threat” potentially producing nuclear weapons, Israel on June 12 launched a massive attack aimed at the country’s nuclear capabilities, military leadership and scientists, which led to go to say goodbye to its own missiles towards Israel. Until Monday, the Iranian Ministry of Health reported that Israeli attacks have killed at least 400 people in Iran and wounded 3,000. Iran’s retaliation attacks have killed at least 24 in Israel.
Israel’s attacks killed some of Iran’s senior officials, which led to mixed celebration and fear reactions among those who oppose the widely unpopular regime of Iran.
For Shirin Naseri, it is a “bittersweet feeling” to see an external government weakening the Islamic Republic in a way that the Iranian people have fought to do from the inside. Naseri grew in Tehran before emigrating to the United Kingdom at age 25 to escape the regime, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We want the regime to disappear, but at the same time, we even cry the slightest damage to innocent people, to our homeland,” said Naseri, who added that the Iranians are involuntarily trapped in a conflict driven by the Iran regime, not their people. “We are like any other people who seek freedom against war in all forms and at all levels … and yet we dare to wait for something good to get out of that.”
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But that feeling of hope is also mixed with some skepticism. In addition to the threat of bombs over civilians, Nikoo Nooryani, an Iranian American -based American in Los Angeles, said that many are also concerned about the potential for the regime “to hide under this national security layer” as justification to take strong measures against political dissidents in Iran.
“Historically, this has been the way in which foreign collusion has been developed. It has always delayed the liberation movements of the Iranian people, instead of helping them,” said Nooryani, who also has a family in Iran. “And I think that is another great point of discussion that is lost when people are gathering for freeing Iran by bombing them. He has never been in favor of people.”
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 -year -old woman arrested by the morality police for allegedly not using her child, caused generalized protests led by women and young people throughout the country. This movement of “women, life, freedom”, as in many past protests, led to brutal government reprisals, according to Human Rights Watch.
Nooryani said that observers have often combined the movement with a call to foreign assistance, which is concerned to open doors for external actors such as Israel and the United States to co -opt Iranian civil disturbances for their own interests. In the center, he said, the approach is “self -determination for the people of Iran.”
“It is really discouraging to see three governments, who strongly oppose their own countries, create this chaos for all of us,” said Nooryani, referring to Israel, Iran and the United States.
The conflict has also raised complicated feelings by the hundreds of thousands of Persian Jews, many whose families fled Iran in the midst of fears of religious persecution after the revolution.
Among them is Millie Efraim, who wrote on social networks that it is difficult to see people online to advocate because “Iran defends” without recognizing the suffering that the regime has caused to their own people.
Efraim, who is American and Jewish Iranian, lives in Israel, where he said he has been among the thousands of people who have had to hide in bomb shelters while Iran continues their attack attacks against Israel.
While he believes that “Israel can only free the Iranian people,” Efraim said he hopes that the war catales sufficient change to “eliminate Khamenei and the Islamic regime forever.”
“I am aware of the ugliness of war. I have friends in Iran to whom I am worried, because there have been collateral damage even with precise attacks, and my greatest fear is a superficial negotiation that keeps Khamenei in power,” Efraim said. “For the sake of Iranians and Jews worldwide, both have been the objectives of the Islamic regime and its representatives, we must take advantage of this moment and make the regime change.”
The human rights lawyer, Gissau NIA, director of the strategic litigation project of the Atlantic Council, said that despite the hopes of the regime change, some of those calls fall into “a little fantasy thought” at this time.
Since the war broke out, he said, many Iranians must prioritize their own survival, since some are rationing food, while others abandoned their homes with nothing more than sleeping blankets, and are not necessarily empowered to take the streets and overthrow the regime.
“And historically, the change of skies regime has not gone well. In particular, any project in which the United States has been involved has not gone well,” said Nia, who is Iranian. “So I think that at least among the Iranians inside Iran, but also in the diaspora, we are now really starting to think about what comes next, if something comes later.”
What worries him abroad, said NIA, are reports surrounding the alleged terrorist sleeping cells in the United States giving rise to the type of racial profiles that proliferated after the terrorist attacks of September 11.
“The reality is that the Iranians within Iran have led the successive protest movements to get rid of their regime,” said Nia. “The Iranian people should not be combined with a regime that is not chosen and that the power has been for the oppression for decades.”
