‘The scale of war is getting bigger’: joy turns to worry for Iranian Australians cut off from family
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In a social media video, Ehsan Hakimi watches Iranians wade through rubble in the neighbourhood of Tehran he grew up in.
He sees the aftermath of an airstrike in the residential area of Narmak – where the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was known to have lived – from the first few days of the US-Israel war on Iran.
“This is just 200 metres away from my home,” says Hakimi, who is now based in Sydney.
“It is so hard to see your country bombarded in this scale.”
Hakimi, like many Iranian Australians, welcomed the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iran’s other top leaders.
“We are so happy that they are being killed,” he says.
“The problem is the scale of war is getting bigger and bigger. So we don’t know how many other innocent people will die.”
While the Iranian Australian community has expressed jubilation over the death of Khamenei, many are still in the dark about the fate of their relatives, amid an almost total internet blackout.
Hakimi, who migrated to Australia in 2014, has not spoken to his father or brothers in Iran since the first airstrikes on the country on Saturday.
The Sydney-based IT worker had a brief call with his mother, who lives in Tehran, about an hour after the strikes began.
“I asked her to come back home and she did a U-turn,” he says.
Iran was yet again plunged into an internet blackout after the first airstrikes, severely curtailing the spread of information, although some mobile phones still appear to be working.
For Iran’s diaspora in Australia, many remain cut off from relatives in Iran.
‘I’m really worried’
Perth-based Reza Abriz has not heard from one of his five sisters, who lives in Tehran, since he called about an hour after the conflict began.
“I’m really worried about what’s going to happen … not knowing what’s going to come out of this,” Abriz says.
“I try not to think too far ahead with so many things that can go wrong. It could turn into a civil war, internal conflict between supporters of the regime and people that don’t support the regime.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as the country’s supreme leader.
But Saeid Zand, who lives in Melbourne, has been able to connect to family members in Iran and says everyone he speaks to is “hopeful” about regime change.
“It’s a vibe of positivity that I can feel it when I talk to them,” he says.
Zand says a phone call from his mother, who lives in Shiraz in south-western Iran, on Sunday morning delivered the news about Khamenei’s death.
“She was screaming. She was over the moon and she kept saying to me, “he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” he says.
“They have been waiting for this to happen … not for weeks or for months, we have been waiting for it to happen for decades.”
Hakimi says if the conflict marks the end of the regime, it will be a “success”.
“If with all these costs and people dying and the entire country being bombed, and it doesn’t cause them to go, that would be a disaster,” he says.
“We’re just hoping to get the freedom for one day from our country, because we have been killed by them and tortured and arrested for many years.”
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