FRESH AIR
Diaspora Iranians hope for more attention to the plight of the Iranian people
July 24, 2025 | Alana Schetzer

A recent episode of ABC’s “Four Corners” program focused on the continuing struggles that the Iranian people face, featuring interviews with exiles who spoke rawly about their experiences living in terror under the ever-watchful eyes and control of the regime that hands out unspeakable punishments for the smallest of ‘offences’. It couldn’t have been more timely, reflecting an international trend of renewed focus on the plight of Iranian people in the wake of the 12-day Israel-Iran war last month.
However, the program was made before the war. What are Iranians saying in the aftermath of the highly successful Israeli and US military strikes against the Iranian regime’s illegal nuclear weapons program, including the elimination of multiple top military commanders?
Basically, Iranians in the diaspora, including in Australia, are today speaking out and asking all people of goodwill to listen to what is happening in their home country.
Historically, there has long been widespread opposition to the Iranian regime from the very people it controls, but efforts to overthrow the regime have so far all failed, including the 1980 Nojeh coup plot and several mass protest movements, including 2009’s Green Movement. The 2022 ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement, which was spurred by the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the state’s ‘moral police’ for failing to wear her headscarf properly, grabbed global headlines, but the regime pushed back aggressively, killing hundreds of protesters and imprisoning thousands more.
During the strikes last month, the regime, led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, escalated suppression of the Iranian people, including a widespread internet blackout to prevent them expressing support for Israel or the US, and to fend off any uprising.
But outside of Iran, where millions of Iranians and their descendants live, many have been forthcoming in their relief and and gladness that the strikes eliminated Hossein Salami, Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Mohammad Bagheri, Chief-of-Staff of Iran’s armed forces, and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, engineer of the regime’s ballistic missile program, and many other senior military figures who help the desperately unpopular theocratic regime stay in power through repression.
Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad is one of the most outspoken and has been the target of multiple assassination attempts by the regime across the world because of her anti-regime work. She recently wrote of the eliminated IRGC commanders:
They are the monsters who have impoverished and tyrannized our families. They are the ones who have made millions of people’s lives miserable, not just in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.
I’ve received thousands of messages from inside Iran showing young women dancing in the streets, or families cheering in their kitchens. They remember these commanders as the ones who gave the orders to shoot protesters in the eyes, jail teenage girls, and lie to the world while building bombs in secret.
One mother in Tehran who was imprisoned for protesting the 2019 murder of her child wrote to me that “waking up to the news of Salami’s death, I started to scream out of joy that I’m seeing justice.” She told me that “soon you’ll be back to Iran and we’ll dance on the graves of these killers”.
Associate Professor Hessom Razavi, whose family fled Iran for Australia in 1983, wrote that he heard of groups in Teheran chanting, “Israel is not our enemy, the regime is our enemy.”
“I understand the allure of this hope; to an extent, I feel it myself,” he wrote, adding that Iranians held mixed views of the strikes.
“I am also worried about the raised hopes of Iranians. I have seen this before, when a spark – sometimes an inspirational act of courage from an ordinary citizen – leads to public surges in solidarity.”
There has been hope that the strikes could lead to a public revolt against the regime, a final drive that would finally see the end of their oppressors. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
MEL Iran Australia, which campaigns for an end to the regime and highlights the brutal human rights abuses occurring every year in the country, believes that its country-people are ready for the regime to come to an end.
Spokesperson Omid Rokni told AIJAC that the regime, “has been controlling people and the country for 46 years. This is enough. We believe now is the time for change.”
Rokni said the regime wasn’t even ‘Iranian’, deliberately calling it the ‘Islamic Republic regime in Iran,’ to differentiate it from the country and its people.
“They have shown us who they are as an ideology and it’s not even Islamic. I believe we are at a milestone in the Middle East; we have a common enemy and I do believe that we will see peace in the Middle East one day soon.”
Meanwhile, Australian-Iranian Ek Taghdir was supportive of the Israeli and US strikes continuing, saying that the ceasefire had given the regime, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, a “lifeline” to continue their repression.
“People in Iran are largely reporting that Israel has been striking IRGC military installations and figure heads,” he said. “There are civilian deaths and we do grieve over that but the fear against the regime is so intense that people are more scared of a ceasefire.”
He added that many Iranians in the diaspora had hoped that western powers would topple the regime.
Ek Taghdir’s opinion is shared by Jasmine, who came to Australia with her family from Iran and who has been lobbying the Albanese Government to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
“I don’t believe in the ceasefire. We have been waiting for Israel to target the leadership for such a long time.”
Jasmine added that she worries the regime will use the ceasefire as a cover to retaliate against Iranians, including further arbitrary arrests and executions against those who support the strikes.
What could succeed the Islamic Republic?
GAMAAN, an independent, non-profit research group based in the Netherlands, surveyed 200,000 Iranians during the 2022 ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protests, and asked if they supported the regime – 81% of respondents who lived in Iran said ‘no,’ while 99% of respondents who lived in the diaspora also said ’no’.
The same survey revealed that 80% of respondents inside the country supported the protests; Respondents outside the country overwhelmingly support the protests; of these, 90% had thought they would succeed, and only 9% thought they would not.
Iranians in the diaspora have varying goals for a post-regime future – some are campaigning for the return of a monarchy under a descendent of the former Shah, despite his rule degenerating into a dictatorship and corruption, while others are determined that Iran become a democracy.
The GAMAAN survey gives an idea of what the Iranian people may prefer. Of those living inside Iran, 28% said they preferred a presidential republic (along with 32% from the diaspora), 12% living in the country and 29% living across the world favoured a parliamentary republican regime. Lastly, a constitutional monarchy was preferred by 22% of Iranians living in Iran and 25% from the diaspora.
This varied thinking was also reflected in a June 27 interview with ABC journalist Nassim Khadem, in which she spoke to several Iranians in their 20s and 30s, who said, following Israel’s strikes, the regime can’t hang on to powder indefinitely. But when it comes to who would lead the country afterwards, they too are split on who or what type of system would be best.
The article also quoted Iranian-born and US-based writer and historian Arash Azizi, who argued that the regime is able to stay in power precisely because there’s no genuine alternative, and is well aware of this.
“The regime’s heavy repression and its jailing of opponents inside and killing them in Iran and abroad has helped keep it that way,” Mr Azizi said, adding that any such organised opposition would need to have “political heft” that could unite the country’s diverse population.
“This could theoretically be a liberal democracy, that’s a common demand for the opposition, but the Iranian opposition is more divided and incoherent than ever,” Mr Azizi says.
He says the major difference in 1979 was that there were organised efforts against the monarchy, and it was “the unifying leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini who brought Marxists, Islamists and nationalists together against the shah”.
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