As Iran and Israel continue to trade strikes and President Donald Trump brings the US into the fight, Iranians living in the US are anxious about loved ones still in the country - and about Iran’s future.
More than 400,000 people of Iranian descent live in the US, according to the 2020 Census.
Many left Iran to escape the current regime, which took control in the 1979 revolution, and remain deeply critical of the country’s leadership.
But some worry that the conflict will only hurt innocent Iranian civilians and further destabilise the country, while others support Israel’s effort to topple Iran’s supreme leader and back US involvement.
The divides are particularly evident in the Los Angeles area, a centre of Iranian American life where many community members have relatives and friends still in Iran.
“I don’t have anything in common with the Islamic republic,” said Roozbeh Farahanipour, 54, a leader of the 1999 student protests in Iran who sought asylum in the US after being sentenced to death. “I hate them, and I fight with them my entire life.
“But I’m anti-war,” said Farahanipour, now the president of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and owner of three restaurants in the area.
“I don’t like the war, and I don’t like foreign diversion to the country. Iranian people, they shouldn’t be victims.”
Masud Valipour, 69, who owns a bookstore in Los Angeles’s Westwood neighbourhood, said last week that he feared that Trump’s provocative social media posts - including one calling for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” - were exacerbating the conflict.
Valipour said that he doesn’t support Iran’s leader but that if Trump or anyone else were to topple the regime, it would destabilise the country and hurt Iranians.
“The people are innocent, and they will have to pay in the war,” Valipour said. “Trump’s giving permission for anyone to kill the leader.”
Another Angeleno, Kambiz Ghaemmagham, 84, said road closures trapped his sisters and nephews in Tehran. He tries to call them every night but is often unsuccessful.
Ghaemmagham, who worked with the National Front opposition party while in Los Angeles, was critical of both Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he didn’t see “very much difference between them”.
“They don’t understand democracy. They don’t understand the people,” Ghaemmagham said, adding that he worries the conflict will only help the current Iranian Government, not dismantle it.
“My only hope is someday, although I’m getting older and older, there will be a time that I see my country again,” he said.
“That’s one of my dreams, to take my son and show him Iran, you know, the streets of Iran, showing him the Persepolis.”
Farahanipour also worries that US involvement would mean that his money would help pay for the war. He pointed to Trump’s past campaign promise that he would not get the US involved in foreign conflicts.
“I don’t like my taxpayer money spent on the war [on the] other side of the globe,” Farahanipour said.
Some Jewish Iranians - a group that is a religious minority within the US Iranian diaspora and Iran itself - reported mixed feelings about the conflict.
Saeed Amirian, 76, the president of the Iranian Jewish Centre in Great Neck, New York, said that only other Jewish Iranians can understand how complex and difficult the past week has felt.
Between 1979 and 2016, nearly 90% of the country’s Jewish population emigrated to the US, Israel, and Europe.
“It’s a very difficult, heart-wrenching feeling,” Amirian said. “Our 5000-year religious culture is at odds with our 2600 years cultural background … We hope for peace.”
Other Iranian Jews in the US support Israel’s attacks against Iran.
Amir Kashfi, 28, who was born in Beverly Hills, California, to immigrants who fled the current regime, said the US should do “whatever it can” to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“When the ayatollah says death to Israel and death to America, he means it,” he said.
“We should believe it. This is just as much America’s fight as Israel’s, and I totally understand why the US would want to get involved.”
Farhad Novian, 65, a Jewish Iranian lawyer who fled in the 1970s, expressed a similar hope that Israel can “finish the job”.
“It’s mixed feelings right now,” said Novian, the co-president of Temple Emanuel, a synagogue in Beverly Hills, which has a sizeable Iranian Jewish population.
“What Israel is doing right now is something no other nation has had the courage to do. They’re standing up to their enemies.”
For university students with family in Iran, anxiety over the conflict has disrupted daily life and school.
Arshia Esmaeilian, 21, who is at the University of South Florida, said he paused studying for the MCAT and conducting research amid worries over his parents, who are in northern Iran.
In Los Angeles, Pashaei said she runs and writes to allay her anxieties. She has written several letters to a cousin in Iran, with whom she has lost contact since the conflict began.
“If I see her one day, I will hand [them] to her,” Pashaei said.
“It’s a way to keep myself going,” she added. “To imagine all those dreams I had with her, will happen one day.”
