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While the Israeli bombs have fallen on Iran in the past two weeks, Mandy Ansari Jensen has bike between crying and praying and checking her phone every few minutes while waiting to hear his father in Iran. After five sleepless nights, she finally confirmed that he was alive.
Jensen, who was raised in the United States after his parents fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution, is one of the many Iranians in the world who say they feel frozen in fear and sorrow while waiting for updates to their loved ones in the country in the middle of the war out Between Israel and Iran. The United States has entered into the conflict by Bombing several Iranian nuclear installations Saturday, and Iran retaliated on Monday with a symbolism US military base In Qatar, that made no victim.
Many in the Iranian diaspora come from families who sought to escape the theocratic regime which took over in 1979 after the Iranian revolution. While the conflict between Iran and Israel persists, some Iranians abroad express a renewal of the hope of change of regime, while others are worried about the consequences of a foreign intervention.
“The Iranian people have resisted oppression for decades. They risked everything to protest, organize, express themselves, “said Jensen, a content creator who now lives in New York. “Iranians want a free Iran, but having our country bombed by world leaders that we know do not care about the security of innocent civilians is not the way either. We are not pawns. We are people. “
Citing the “existential threat” of Iran potentially producing nuclear weapons, Israel on June 12 launched a massive attack Targeting the country’s nuclear capacities, military leaders and scientists, which prompted Iran to dismiss its own missiles towards Israel. Since MondayThe Iranian Ministry of Health reported that Israeli strikes killed at least 400 people in Iran and injured 3,000. Iran’s retaliation strikes killed at least 24 years in Israel.
The attacks of Israel killed some of the senior officials of Iran, leading to mixed reactions of celebration and fear among those who oppose the largely unpopular regime of Iran.
For Shirin Naseri, it is a “soft-other feeling” to see an external government weaken the Islamic Republic in a way that the Iranian people had trouble doing from the inside. Naseri grew up in Tehran before immigrating to the United Kingdom at the age of 25 to escape the regime, led by the supreme chief of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We want the regime to be gone, but at the same time, we even mourn the slightest harm to the innocent people, to our homeland,” said Naseri, who added that the Iranians are reluctantly drawn in a conflict motivated by the Iranian regime, not his people. “We are like any other people in search of freedom against war in all forms and at all levels … and yet we are hoping that something well could get out.”
Read the coverage of NBC News of the Iran-Israel conflict:
But this feeling of hope is also mixed with a certain skepticism. Aside from the threat of bombs on civilians, Nikoo Nooryani, an American Iranian based in Los Angeles, said that many were also concerned about the potential for the “hiding under this national security coat” as a justification to suppress stronger against political dissidents in Iran.
“Historically, this was the way in which foreign collusion took place. This has always delayed the liberation movements of the Iranian people, rather than helping them,” said Nooryani, who also has a family in Iran. “And I think it’s another big point of discussion that is missing when people come together for the release of Iran by bombing them. It has never been in favor of people.”
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini – a 22 -year -old woman arrested by morality police for not having worn her hijab correctly – Generalized protests triggered Led by women and young people across the country. This movement “women, life, freedom”, as in many previous manifestations, has led to brutal reprisals, according to Human Rights Watch.
Nooryani said observers have often confused the movement with an appeal to foreign aid, which it worries opens doors to external actors like Israel and the United States to coopte Iranian civil disturbances for their own interests. At the heart, she said, the objective is “self-determination for the inhabitants of Iran”.
“It is really discouraging to see three governments, which are strongly opposed internally in their own country, create this chaos for all of us,” said Nooryani, referring to IsraelIran and The United States
The conflict also raised complicated feelings for the hundreds of thousands of Persian Jews, many of whom fled Iran in the midst of fears of religious persecution after the revolution.
Among them, Millie Efraim, who wrote on social networks That it is difficult to see people online defend “Iran defending themselves” without recognizing the suffering that the regime has caused their own people.
Efraim, who is an American and Jewish Iranian, lives in Israel, where she said that she was one of the thousands of people who had to hide in bombs shelters while Iran continues his reprisals against Israel.
While she believes that “Israel alone cannot release the Iranian people”, Efraim said that she hoped that war will catalyze enough changes to “withdraw the Khamenei and the Islamic regime for good”.
“I am aware of the ugliness of the war. I have friends in Iran for whom I worry, because there have been collateral damage even with precise strikes, and my greatest fear is a superficial negotiation which keeps Khamenei in power,” said Efraim. “For the good of the Iranians and Jews around the world, who have both been targets of the Islamic regime and its proxies, we must grasp this moment and change the regime.”
The human rights lawyer, Gissou Nia, director of the Atlantic Council’s strategic dispute project, said that despite the hopes of change of diet, some of these calls are falling into “a little fantastic thought” at the moment.
Since the war broke out, she said, many Iranians must prioritize their own survival – like some rations food while others have left their house with nothing other than sleeping covers – and are not necessarily allowed to descend into the streets and overthrow the regime.
“And historically, the change of regime of the sky did not go well. In particular, any project in which the United States was involved did not go well,” said Nia, Iranian-American. “So I think at least among Iranians inside Iran, but also the diaspora, we are now starting to really think about what comes next, if something comes after.”
What is also worried abroad, said Nia, Reports surrounding presumed terrorist sleeping cells in the United States give birth to Racial profiling that proliferated After the terrorist attacks of September 11.
“The reality is that Iranians in Iran have led successive protest movements to get rid of their regime,” said Nia. “The Iranian people should not be confused with a regime that is not elected and that has been exercising power by oppression for decades.”
