What Americans Are Not Hearing About Iran

I live here in the foothills and like many of you I have been watching the news with a knot in my stomach about Iran. I hear the worry in conversations at the grocery store, at school pickup: Why are we involved? What does this have to do with us? I understand the unease. I hate war. I grew up inside one.

But there is something Americans are not hearing, and I want my neighbors to hear it from someone who was there: most Iranians are not protesting the military strikes. They are relieved. That probably sounds strange. It would have sounded strange to me too, before I understood what that regime does to a family from the inside.

My father served in the Islamic Republic’s Construction Jihad for 30 years. He was a forester – a quiet man who worked with soil and trees. He never stole, never took bribes. By any measure, a good man. When I was 8, my mother told me to write his occupation on a school form: Jehad-gar. Jihadist. I wrote it in a child’s handwriting, not knowing what the word meant. That is how the system works. It does not ask your permission. It writes itself into your family, into your children’s homework, into the posters on your bedroom wall. By the time you understand what happened it is already who you are.

Years later, I asked my father about a friend killed in the Iran-Iraq war. His hands stopped on the garden shears. He told me about boys from our town sent to build trenches – bulldozer drivers, barely men. A mortar hit them directly. My father went to collect what was left. His voice broke. He could not finish. And when I asked about the journalists who disappeared, the writers who never came home; the answer was always the same: “Mistakes were made.” No subject. No agent. Nobody did it. A whole generation learned never to finish that sentence.

The Iranian people have tried to finish it themselves. They rose up in 2009 – millions in the streets. The world watched. Nothing happened. They rose up in 2022 after a young woman named Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police. The world changed its profile pictures. Nothing happened. They rose up again in January of this year. This time the regime killed over 32,000 people. Security forces shot teenagers in the streets. Families were sent to warehouses to search through black plastic bags for their children. Then the regime charged those families thousands of dollars to release the remains.

Each time, Iranians stood up alone. Each time, they were crushed alone. Each time, the world expressed concern and moved on.

Now, for the first time in 47 years, they are not alone. That is what you are watching on the news. Not an invasion. Not a foreign power imposing its will. You are watching 80 million people who have been trapped inside a burning building for nearly half a century and for the first time someone has broken through the wall.

I am a scientist. I came to this country to think freely, to do research, to raise my family in a place where my children do not wake up to slogans on their bedroom wall. I do not like war. Nobody who has lived inside one does. But I also watched my father – a good, honest man – spend 30 years inside a system that slowly broke him, and I watched a whole country try to free itself again and again, and I watched the world look away every single time.

The people of Iran are not the enemy. They never were. The regime that held them captive is. And that distinction – the one between a civilization and its jailer – is something I wanted my neighbors to understand.

Mohammad Bahrami holds a doctorate from Aryamehr University of Technology (now Sharif University) in Tehran and works in quantum computing research. He lives in La Crescenta and writes in a personal capacity.