An Iranian-American’s Letter on War, Grief, and the Future of Iran
Today’s article is a bit different from what I normally write, so please be patient with me.
In the past 48 hours, I have felt a range of emotions. Happy that the Supreme Leader who murdered thousands of Iranians who opposed his government is dead. Mortified at the fact that my ancestral homeland is getting carpet bombed. Upset at my own diaspora for immediately reverting to dancing and celebrating America’s attack, without weighing out the greater implications of what this will look like in the coming weeks.
I always found myself to be a black sheep within the Iranian diaspora. I grew up in California, and I was poor for most of my life after elementary school. Many of the Iranian kids I grew up with were rich and had abundant familial support. I only had my immediate family close to me. I was born and raised in America, but I lived in Iran in middle school and went to school there.
I grew up with a leftist father, who taught me about the plight of the Palestinian people from the moment I learned how to take in information that he told me. I grew up watching the war on terror unfold with him, and that’s what actually inspired me to become a journalist. The household I grew up in was very different than the average Iranian diaspora experience, as many of the diaspora tend to have a lot of money and usually adhere to conservative political ideology.
As I watched my diaspora take to the streets and celebrate the death of the brutal dictator Khamenei, I couldn’t help but mourn the future of what my country holds. I have studied the war on terror and America’s actions specifically in the Middle East for most of my life. I know how this play will unfold and end. None of the scenarios is good either.
I scroll through my hundreds of DMs, and see a plethora of Iranian people cussing me out and asking me how dare I oppose America’s invasion of Iran. How dare I tell Iranians to feel, how dare I question the greater implications that this war has for my people. I’ve come to realize that my own diaspora has had to deal with a lot of government and religious trauma. Unfortunately, instead of going to therapy, they just decide to go off on people like me 24/7.
In a sea of hate DMs, there are dozens of Iranians thanking me for my advocacy and telling me how lonely they have felt throughout the ongoing current events and how I am a beacon of light for them.
To be honest, I can’t blame my fellow Iranians for the way they are reacting. I think to the average American, we look deranged for dancing in the streets and celebrating the carpet bombing of our own country, but then I look back to the 12-year-old version of me who lived under the IRGC dictatorship, and I remember how she tried to end her own life after just a year of experiencing it. The subjugation, constant fear of arrest, forced religion, and everything in between left my Western brain confused and depressed. I was lucky enough to have a father who recognized how serious my mental health issues had become, brought me back to America, and immediately put me into therapy.
He saw what I didn’t at the time, a young girl who just endured living in a religious dictatorship that changed my brain chemistry to the point where I didn’t want to live anymore.
That was only after just one year of living in that dictatorship.
But now I am watching historical sites, schools, hospitals, and civilian areas being bombed, and my diaspora continues dancing in the street as a response, and I can’t help but feel bitter at the lack of nuance they seem to hold.
The Iranian government is not like Syria or Venezuela. Taking out the Supreme Leader does nothing; they will just replace him with another hardliner and keep it moving. The IRGC is a religious theocracy, not a government-run organization, circumventing one specific dictator. To take out the IRGC means you’d have to take out every single government official and hardliner. Not to mention that Iran is extremely mountainous, making it extremely geographically tough to just bomb.
It’s almost like thinking the Mexican cartel will be over with by taking out their leader. It’s just simply not how it works.
I dream of a free Iran, I dream of being able to go back and kiss the ground that my ancestors walked on for thousands of years. Sometimes I wish I were born in the early 1900’s, so that I could’ve lived in Iran during its glory days and passed away before any of this even happened.
My people and culture are among the oldest civilizations to walk this planet, a civilization full of vibrant love and resilience. If I could, I would move back to Iran in a heartbeat. My people had the potential to become a global superpower just from their sheer brilliance and education, a potential that America robbed us of.
I am grieving in layers.
Grieving the thousands who were murdered under a dictator who crushed dissent and stole childhoods. Grieving the little girl I once was, who couldn’t survive even a year under that system without breaking. Grieving the civilians who are now trapped between a brutal regime and a foreign power that has never once brought peace to the region it claims to “liberate.”
Two things are true at once:
Khamenei was a tyrant.
And foreign bombs will not save us.
What breaks my heart most is not disagreement; it’s the absence of nuance. It’s watching my own people, who have endured so much trauma, respond to destruction with celebration. I understand the rage. I understand the decades of humiliation and repression. I understand wanting something, anything, to finally collapse the system that suffocated us.
But I also understand history.
I have studied what American intervention in the Middle East looks like. I have watched how power vacuums are filled. I know that regimes do not dissolve because one man dies. The IRGC is not a single head to be cut off; it is an entrenched ideological machine. And ordinary people always pay the price when empires play chess with our homelands.
I dream of a free Iran. Not an occupied Iran. Not a bombed Iran. Not a proxy battleground.
A free Iran — liberated by its own people, on its own terms.
I want to one day walk the streets my ancestors walked and feel pride instead of grief. I want Iranian children to grow up without fear of morality police or missiles overhead. I want us to reclaim the brilliance, education, art, poetry, and resilience that defined our civilization long before this regime, and long before foreign interference.
Loving your country does not mean celebrating its destruction.
And opposing a dictator does not mean inviting an empire.
I am not naïve. I am not disloyal. I am not anti-Iran.
I am pro-Iranian people.
And we deserve a future that isn’t written by hardliners or by Washington.
I am soooooo sorry!! You come from a gorgeous country with wonderful rugs and ancient empires and traditions. The American people do NOT want this war any more than you do! It's heartbreaking.
I am sorry about you, but, if you are Muslim write like one, I am not a very good muslim but I accept everything and try to be a good human being based on Islam, which gives the best morals as practised by the Prophet and his Ahlulbayt and a few sahaba. Unfortunately what's happening now happened then also. The idol worshippers plus the Christians and Jews who were even then up to the evil plans went after the family of the Prophet of Islam after he passed away, even though he left specific instructions behind. The reason being those new Muslims most of whom who converted as a plan to be a part of rituals but not from the heart, just waited for the Prophet to die, then they took over and played havoc with the family of the Prophet and Islam, they took advantage of most of the ignorant people through coercion and pieced together a huge empire where eventually kings ruled under the guise of calling themselves caliphs. They also murdered the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad in every century, the peak being of brutality in Karbala Iraq, that took place through a so called caliph Yazid appointed by his father muawiya whose grandparents were Christians and he had other ties with them. Yazid has Christian and Jews as advisors also, not that he needed pushing a plan to do away with the family of the Prophet Muhammad, whose foundations were laid from the time of the first Caliph and strengthened through the second two. Yazid failed to stop the will of Allah, though firstly his father had Imam Ali assassinated then his son Imam Hasan then Imam Hussain in Karbala, where only one adult remained. But like I said, Allah is the best planner, the family of the Prophet Muhammad flourished to the point now that they number in millions plus hundreds of millions of shias who are followers. The same is happening now, it's descendants of Jews and Christians combined with the installed puppet bedouins who are doing the same. Yes another Ali martyred. Don't lie, Ali Khamenei wasn't a tyrant, tyrants and their families live like kings, these people live like the poor, they trust Allah and don't go about protecting themselves. Millions mourn him in Iran and hundreds of millions mourn him across the globe, just like they mourn his ancestor imam Hussain buried in Karbala, Ali Khamenei was also a Syed a Hussaini Syed, martydom and then the following lies are our heritage but they don't effect us. Every year forty to fifty million people gather in Karbala on Arbaeen, mostly shias including Syeds but there are thousands upon thousands from Christians Jews Hindus sunni Muslims and from all walks of life. If you are not a Muslim, then stay in the great pedophilia colony America, you will have your freedom in every way that want.
This is the truth not a rant. The Christians have destroyed the world through their hypocrisy, but Israelis have got them in their clutches through Epstein and you should know the story better than me.
My sympathy is for the truth that has been martyred so many times in the shape of so many in Iran Lebanon Iraq Yemen Egypt Libya Pakistan Afghanistan by the evil of our times.
Read and reflect, ask for forgiveness from whatever you believe in.