I was born in Iran. But the abhorrent regime ruling my homeland, which sponsors and supports Hezbollah, does not speak or act for me – nor most Iranians.
When the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, calls Israel a “vampire” and fires hundreds of missiles at the Jewish state, people watching the news thousands of miles away may get the impression – consciously or subconsciously – that most Iranians also support the Lebanese militants, given the decades of violent antisemitism spewing from Tehran.
I myself can only watch from a distance, having fled to the UK long ago and found freedom here as a refugee. I know the only images that most people here ever see of Iranians come from state TV footage of anti-Israeli street protests, perhaps where the Star of David is being burnt.
To think that all of us, or even most of us, feel this way is wrong.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian people have been held captive by a militant cult of Shia Islam. We should never see the regime as representative of them.
It is a theocracy in which all laws are based on a fundamentalist interpretation of this religion. The clergy prosecute and silence dissenters, even in their own circles.
Their barbarity can sometimes be overlooked by people who are angered by Israel’s military actions, first in Gaza and now in Lebanon. When they read that Iran is fighting back, some may instinctively feel that all views on the Middle East are binary, that any enemy of Israel is their friend, and that the regime should be supported.
The truth is, people who feel sympathy for innocent Palestinians being bombed by Israel should feel the same towards innocent Iranians who have suffered or perished under dictatorship.
The regime’s existence is dedicated purely to its survival and spreading the revolution beyond its borders. It is not about the survival of Islam, nor the survival of Shi’ism. It is about the survival of this fundamentalist militant cult.
For those in power in Tehran, that involves trying to impose their extremist form of Islam upon millions more people. That means all women become second-class citizens, and all gay people potentially face the death penalty; peaceful protesters being locked up, shot, or hanged in the streets, a constant fear of being arrested that permeates everyday life.
This is what life is like in Iran. It’s a never-ending nightmare. This is what they want for the rest of the Middle East, while enriching themselves in the process.
Hezbollah plays a crucial part in all this. It isn’t just some independent group of freedom fighters that the Iranian regime happens to agree with and decides to help.
Hezbollah was born in Iran during the 1979 revolution to assist the clerics in consolidating their power. It was expanded to Lebanon in 1982 during the country’s civil war. The Islamic Republic arms and trains its fighters and provides it with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The two have a symbiotic relationship.
Hezbollah is still active inside Iran – helping to oppress our people.
In 2022, during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings, the regime couldn’t find enough basijis – Iranian paramilitary volunteers – to confront crowds, so they relied on Hezbollah men instead. It was these diehards who were shooting hundreds of peaceful protesters in their eyes with pellets or paintballs last year, blinding many of them.
When people were beaten up, accounts emerged of the attackers speaking Arabic or speaking Persian with Arabic accents – showing they had come from abroad.
We have learned from defectors that some Hezbollah fighters even guard the country’s nuclear facilities, because the regime would rather trust people from their borderless “umma” – roughly their equivalent of a caliphate – than ordinary Iranians.
Hezbollah are the henchmen of bullies, who are against anything that this modern world is based on. I can never celebrate any death, but many Iranians were pleased by the elimination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an Israeli air strike last month.
The regime in Iran also trains and sponsors Hamas, despite the group being Sunni (this is a marriage of convenience). My heart goes out to the ordinary Palestinians who are being killed in Gaza, but not to the Hamas fighters who dig their tunnels under schools and hospitals and who raped and massacred innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023.
Tehran’s support for these groups comes at the expense of the Iranian people. Money should be invested in Iran for better schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Instead, it pays for weapons to be shipped to Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, too. While Iranian teachers, nurses, labourers and pensioners face high inflation with meagre salaries, their money is used for a terrorist battle they don’t believe in.
One slogan being used on the streets of Iran is: “Neither for Lebanon nor for Gaza, my life is for Iran.”
If you’re in any doubt about how Iranians are oppressed, read human-rights reports from the United Nations or Amnesty International.
As a journalist, I have spoken with young activists who have taken the risk of calling me to say: “We know that we will be taken into prison and that we will be killed, but we want Iranians outside the country to know there are people like us inside, and as long as you know our names, our work has not been in vain.”
As a peace-loving Iranian exile, I find myself crying when I think about my country potentially being bombed and people being killed in reprisals for the regime’s missile attack on Israel.
In the current crisis, an all-out attack by Israeli forces remains the worst scenario in my mind. Yet that might now happen, because the past four decades of trying to change the regime’s behaviour through sanctions and concessions have failed.
But I’m an idealist, an optimist. In the best scenario, the elimination of the regime’s proxies, its firepower and its capability to spread violence – inside Iran and in the wider region – will empower Iran’s 88 million hostages to free themselves rather than be killed. Iranians have proven time and again that they will take care of their problems.
There have been many attempted uprisings since the clerics took power, but they have gathered pace since the 1999 protests: there was 2009, then 2015, then 2017, 2019, 2022 and last year. The slogans used by demonstrators have become progressively more strident.
The Israelis have been saying recently that the Islamic Republic and the IRGC are like Swiss cheese because defections and divisions have left so many holes in them. I hope that’s true.
The next step could be an implosion. I believe we are starting to see the regime disintegrate, even if it’s too gradual for most people to notice before it collapses.
I hope a new order will emerge in the region with peace and progress – a chance for international accords to allow the economic and social reintegration of a secular Iran into the Middle East, and even into cooperation with Israel.
In the meantime, I hope people recognise that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that started in 2022 is alive and kicking. The bravery of Iranian women has shown outsiders the injustice that we will continue to face until the regime is toppled.
In the words of the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi, whose verses adorn the entrance of the UN headquarters in New York: “Human beings are members of a whole / in creating one essence and soul. / If one member is afflicted with pain, / other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, / the name ‘human’ you cannot retain.”
As told to Rob Hastings
Nazenin Ansari is an Iranian journalist in exile who is the managing editor of the Persian-language publication Kayhan London and Kayhan Life in English
