Iranians abroad wrestle with their homeland’s new reality

With the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran now two weeks old, Iranians are coming to terms with the new normal of daily conflict. But the war has not only affected those living in the country currently under attack, as Iranians living overseas also find themselves caught in the middle of a geopolitical storm. While the Trump administration views the war as a net positive for the world, many of the Iranian diaspora say their feelings are more complicated.

‘Attacking each other on social media’

With the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the installation of his son as his successor, media outlets have “rightly focused on trying to understand how the conflict came about, where bombs have fallen and how many have died,” said The Guardian. But what can “easily get lost are the voices of the people directly affected,” including Iranians living abroad, whose views are “far from uniform.”

In the United States, various factions of Iranian emigrants are “attacking each other on social media, bullying shopkeepers and restaurant owners to promote their political agenda,” Kowsar Gowhari, an Iranian-born attorney living in Maryland, said to The Christian Science Monitor. Despite the new Iranian supreme leader coming to power, there are “some who believe this government is done, finished,” but others “don’t want [President Donald Trump] to destroy the place and to put in place a puppet government.”

Iran has always been a “melting pot with diverse views,” Mohamad Machine-Chian, an author and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is a native of Iran, told the Monitor. When the first ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, took over Iran in 1979, Iranians “thought that the Islamic revolution was the way to go. Forty years later, they can see the disaster that has been created.”

The cultural divide has been especially prominent in California, where “half of all Iranian-Americans live,” said The Economist. And many of the “American-born children of Iranians who left after the revolution are now in their 30s and 40s.” Their memories of Iranian politics are “not of the regime, but of America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Many fear that the current situation in Iran could “bring continued conflict rather than liberation.”

Other countries

It is not just the U.S. where Iranians have mixed feelings about the war. Since the conflict began, Iranians abroad feel like they are “living in a parallel universe,” Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini, a council member in Oxford, England, who previously lived in Iran, told The Guardian. This parallel world is one where “life carries on normally — looking after patients, talking to colleagues — while at the same time you open your phone and see the destruction of places that mean so much to you.”

But it isn’t just the emotional toll of the war that could have an impact; Iranians living overseas have been threatened with the seizure of their property and could “face other legal penalties if they express ​support for the United States and Israel,” said Reuters. Those who do “will be met with the confiscation of all their properties,” Iran’s prosecutor general said in a statement.

This hasn’t stopped Iranian emigrants from speaking out. No “Iranian outside, ​in the diaspora, is really and truly worried about themselves and their properties and equity ‌and belongings ⁠when people inside Iran, they go out, barehanded, without anything, they will stand in front of live ammunition, and they actually get killed,” Meyam Aghakhani, an Iranian living in London, told Reuters. “So my war and my fight continues without any hesitation.”