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.

Me in Iran as a child

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.