Fatemeh Shams watched with bated breath as her native country came under military attack from the US and Israel over the weekend. Living in the US since 2009, she is among Iranian-American exiles who have opposed the Tehran regime from afar, and so she does not mourn the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Saturday’s bombing.
“We all have very mixed feelings about what’s happening,” Fatemeh, based in Philadelphia, added. “On the one hand, we are extremely happy that our killers… they no longer breathe. “The fact that [Khamenei] was killed in less than a moment, after 38 years of corruption and crime, it kind of feels that we didn’t have any control over the justice we had been fighting for.”
She’s not the only person in the American Iranian diaspora who feels conflicted. Concerns were raised by some regarding the number of fatalities and the potential duration of the battle. However, a large number of people gathered in locations from Boston to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles to commemorate Khamenei’s passing. Police in Los Angeles, which is home to over one-third of the 400,000 Iranian immigrants in the United States, stopped streets outside a federal building on Sunday to allow protesters to celebrate. The city is frequently referred to as Tehrangeles.
The Iranian-American crowd waved flags while a plane circled in the sky above, trailing a banner that said, “THANK U TRUMP”. Her daughter, Donya Cheshmaghil, said during an interview, “I was born in Iran. My family was forced to flee because we’re not Muslim and they’re very oppressive against anyone that’s not Muslim. “We’re hoping this leads to regime change. We’re very grateful to the US for finally intervening. The people in Iran have been asking for this. This is what the people in Iran want.”
Mona Cheshmhehil, her sister, expressed her regret that so many lives had to be lost for this to occur, but at the moment, all we can think about is how grateful we are to have the opportunity to return and see where we came from. “We couldn’t have thought this would happen.” But there was rage outside the LA City Hall a day earlier.
Actress Jane Fonda was among a few hundred who gathered to protest. “You may wage this war in our name, but not with our consent,” Fonda, 88, a longstanding anti-war activist, shouted to the crowd. In other US cities, demonstrators for and against the military action made their voices heard.
“We don’t call it a war,” Sherry Yadegari, of Atlanta, Georgia, told AFP news agency. “We call it the Iran Rescue Operation.” However, protester Layan Fuleihan told AFP during a demonstration in New York: “Bombing people does not help them free themselves.” “If Trump cared about democracy or if he cared about the well-being of Iranian people, he would have lifted the brutal sanctions on the Iranian economy that have made it impossible for everyday working Iranians to find enough to put food on their table.”
Divisions were laid bare, too, among US Congress members with Iranian heritage. Congresswoman Stephanie Bice, an Oklahoma Republican whose father is half-Iranian, posted on X: “Now is the time for Iranians to stand up and take back their nation and bring lasting peace to the Middle East.”
However, Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat from Arizona whose parents escaped the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to immigrate to the United States, voiced some reservations. She said in a statement she wanted a free Iran, but did not want the US embroiled in “another endless war in the Middle East”.
When they returned to the streets, many Iranian-Americans were ready to put aside concerns about what would happen next and celebrate the overthrow of an ayatollah whose government killed thousands of people this year to quell massive demonstrations.
“This is a great day,” Meraa Tcheshmaghio added at LA’s protest on Sunday. “Our country has been wanting this for a while. “It’s beautiful. It really is.”
