Iranian Americans are divided on the war and Iran’s future: ‘Bombing is not the same thing as liberation’

Little joy could be found among Iranians in the diaspora as Friday rang in Persian new year and the war on their homeland reached the three-week mark When Israeli and American missiles first started falling on Tehran, and as news of the death of Iran ’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leaked out, Nasser, a sixtysomething Iranian American dad from Boston who regularly travels to Iran, briefly experienced something akin to optimism. He “felt a flash of hope”, he told me, “or maybe vengeance, when Khamenei and his circle were hit”. It was a common sentiment among the millions of Iranians in the North American diaspora who have, for multiple reasons, come to reject the rule of the velayat-e-faqih , or the “guardianship of the Islamic jurist”, the Islamic Republic’s governing doctrine.