Iranian Americans in Los Angeles react with mixed emotions as Iran conflict escalates

LOS ANGELES, California – Los Angeles — home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran — has become a focal point for the Iranian diaspora as tensions surrounding the conflict in the Middle East intensify.

Thousands of people gathered in the streets of Los Angeles following the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran that reportedly killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For many in the community who remember life in Iran before the 1979 revolution, the news brought a moment they said they had waited decades to see.

Roozbeh Farahanipour, an Iranian American who was just 7 years old when clerics took control of Iran, said he couldn’t believe it.

“I grabbed a bottle of champagne, opened it, and drank it up,” Farahanipour said. “It was the moment we waited for, for many, many years.”

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Farahanipour participated in student protests in Iran in 1999, events that eventually forced him to flee the country after authorities arrested him. He recalled learning that his execution had been announced in a newspaper before his trial, prompting him to escape Iran.

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“[The] night before my trial, they published my execution judgment in the newspaper, day before back to trial. That’s the last day I was in Iran,” Farahanipour recounted.

While he initially supported the U.S. and Israeli strikes that targeted senior leaders of Iran’s government, he now worries the military operation has continued longer than necessary.

“Minute one, after starting the war, they killed the head of state. They should announce the victory at minute two,” he said. “Why should we stay there and make it more complicated?”

Mohammad Ghafarian, who left Iran years before the revolution to study abroad, now runs a grocery store in Los Angeles. He said he has not heard from his family in Iran for nearly a month and fears for civilians caught in the violence.

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“I would love for the governments of America and Israel to overthrow the regime,” Ghafarian said. “But when they are bombing our country — facilities, power plants, water reservoirs, houses — they can’t divide the people from bad to good.”

Despite concerns about the ongoing conflict, some Iranian Americans believe the strikes could open the door for Iranians inside the country to challenge the regime.

Top Iranian official, commander killed in strike, Israel defense minister says

Iranian Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani and Basij Commander Gholamreza Soleimani have both been killed, according to the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz.

“I have just been updated by the Chief of Staff that Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and the head of the Basij — Iran’s central repression apparatus — Salimani, were eliminated last night and have joined Khamenei, the head of the annihilation program, along with all those eliminated from the axis of evil in the depths of hell,” Katz said, according to a translation provided to Fox News by his office.

The news comes more than two weeks since Israel launched a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran in conjunction with U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Ali Larijani, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the regime’s effective leader, has been eliminated,” the Israel Defense Forces noted in a post on X.

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“Throughout the years, Larijani was considered one of the most veteran and senior figures within the Iranian regime leadership, and was a close associate of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. During the most recent wave of protests against the Iranian terror regime, Larijani personally oversaw the massacre that was carried out against Iranian protestors,” the post added.

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Another IDF post noted, “Yesterday, the IDF targeted & eliminated Gholamreza Soleimani, who operated as commander of the Basij unit for the past 6 years. Under Soleimani, the Basij unit led the main repression operations in Iran, employing severe violence, widespread arrests, and the use of force against civilian demonstrators.”

The U.S. government had previously indicated that it would offer a reward for information on Larijani.

“Rewards for Justice is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on the key leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its component branches,” rewardsforjustice.net notes. “Under this reward offer, RFJ is seeking information on the following individuals,” the webpage notes, listing Larijani and others.

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“Over a dozen Basij officials were targeted in Iran last night in different strikes, including the head of the Basij forces Gholamreza Soleimani. This was a joint U.S. and Israeli effort,” a senior Israeli official noted. “A strike in Tehran targeted the Basij commander and around a dozen others, including the most senior figures in the Basij forces—people with a lot of blood on their hands.”

Al Jazeera op-ed praises US-Israel operation against Iran, says Dems, media critics are wrong

Operation Epic Fury is receiving praise from an unlikely source. Al Jazeera, the Qatari government-funded news organization, published an op-ed Monday declaring in the headline, “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working.”

“Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war… But this narrative is wrong,” the piece began. 

“Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are [cataloging] the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.”

Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, authored the piece. 

“When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air [defenses], its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades,” he continued.

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Seloom marveled at how “every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded” and “collapsing in real time.”

He also pointed out how Iranian ballistic missile launches “have fallen by more than 90 percent” since Operation Epic Fury was first underway, dropping from 350 to roughly 25 — similar to its drone launches going from 800 on Day 1 to 75 by Day 15.

“Hundreds of Iranian missile launchers have been rendered inoperable. According to some reports, 80 percent of Iran’s capacity to strike Israel has been eliminated,” Seloom wrote. “Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air [defenses] have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.”

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The Qatari professor insisted the Iranian regime is facing a “strategic dilemma” — that firing any remaining missiles will expose the launchers and would promptly be targeted by the US and Israel while reserving missiles “forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war.”

“This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength,” Seloom said.

After highlighting the damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, Seloom pushed back against Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who claimed the Trump administration misjudged Iran’s retaliation, as well as CNN’s suggestion that the administration lost control over the war regarding the Strait of Hormuz, saying their framing “inverts the strategic logic.”

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“Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait,” Seloom wrote. “China, Tehran’s largest remaining economic partner, cannot receive Iranian crude while the strait is shut. Every day the blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.”

He continued, “Meanwhile, the naval assets Iran needs to sustain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded daily. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely damaged. The question is not whether the strait reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.”

Seloom also pushed back against the notion that the war is expanding through Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi militias, stressing that the command structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “has been decapitated at multiple levels” and that the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “eliminated the apex of the [authorization] pyramid.”

“When proxies launch retaliatory attacks across the region, this is not evidence of an expanding network; it is evidence of predelegated response authority, which is what a [centralized] command system activates when it anticipates its own destruction,” he wrote. “Predelegation is a sign of desperation, not strength. It means the centre can no longer coordinate. The attacks will continue, but they will become increasingly uncoordinated, strategically incoherent and politically costly for the host states where these groups operate.”

Seloom went on to say President Donald Trump‘s rhetoric “has not helped” combat critics who question the endgame, which the professor said is the “permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.” He also acknowledged critics like Murphy have a “legitimate concern” about what happens in Tehran after the fighting stops, something he says the Trump administration needs to lay out.

“Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003,” Seloom said. “The campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. War is never clean. But the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.”

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Iranian women’s soccer players practice with Australian club after being granted asylum

Two Iranian women’s soccer players, who decided to stay in Australia instead of returning to their home country in the middle of a conflict with the U.S. and Israel, were seen training with a club on Monday.

The Brisbane Roar posted photos on its Instagram account showing Fatemeh Pasandideh and Atefeh Ramezanisadeh with the professional club. It was their first publicly shared appearance since it emerged they were among the players granted asylum in the country.

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The two players were seen smiling without wearing a hijab as they posed alongside members of the Roar.

“We remain committed to providing a supportive environment for them whilst they navigate the next stages,” Brisbane Roar CEO Kaz Patafta wrote in the social media post.

Ramezanisadeh commented, “Thank you for everything.”

The club plays in Australia’s elite A-League women’s division. The club denied further comment and referred all questions to Australia’s Department of Home Affairs. Brisbane offered Iranian women’s soccer players a “place to train, play and belong” last week.

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The Australian government offered each member of the Iranian women’s soccer team asylum as they were leaving to head back to Iran last week. The scramble resulted in seven members of the team staying in Australia. But at least five left the country to return to their club afterward.

President Donald Trump was among world leaders who called on Australia to grant the women asylum.

At least one Iranian broadcaster called the women “wartime traitors” as they didn’t appear to sing their national anthem before a Women’s Asian Cup match.

An Iranian official brushed off suggestions that the women would be unsafe if they returned home.

“Iran welcomes its children with open arms and the government guarantees their security,” Iranian first Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref said. “No one has the right to interfere in the family affairs of the Iranian nation and play the role of a nanny who is kinder than a mother.”

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The rest of the team flew from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur and then to Oman.

MORNING GLORY: What will Donald Trump’s legacy be as a wartime president?

Every American alive today has been living in wartime. Every president since December 7, 1941, has been a wartime president. All of them. They can, and should, be judged by how they have waged war, both “cold” and “hot,” against imposing foes and against dangerous irritants. Provided he remains tough, determined and ruthless in this conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump will be the equal of any of them and far superior to most.

There have been stretches of time of largely noncombatant war since the conclusion of World War II, stretches that look a lot like the “peacetime” of the 1920s and 1930s.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 — 25 years ago this September — for example, the illusion of “peace” was pervasive. Indeed, a “peace dividend” was demanded and paid via deep cuts in defense spending because of that illusion.

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That illusion survived the United States invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, the American cruise missile strikes on Iraq in 1993 which President Clinton ordered, the dozen years of conflict with Saddam that followed under both the first Bush and Clinton with the “no-fly zones,” Operation Infinite Reach — when Clinton ordered cruise missiles fired at al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan — and NATO’s Operation Allied Force which was the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999.

Not until 9/11 did most of America collectively conclude that the world contained very bad actors and would never leave us alone or allow us to be indifferent to rising threats.

After 9/11, through the debacle of our collapse in Afghanistan in 2021, no one doubted we were in wars. There were obvious reminders in the tragic killings and wounding of American service members in both the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters. And there was the no-longer-possible-to-ignore threat posed by the rise of China into our “pacing threat,” the descent of Russia into dictatorship and the successful lunge of North Korea for a nuclear arsenal.

Through both the long period of illusory peace and the obvious wartime of 2001 to 2023, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States. It has been thus since the hostage crisis of 1979, through the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996 and the long shadowy campaign of Iranian surrogates against our military in Iraq which killed and wounded thousands of our troops. The fanatics in Iran have not stopped chanting “Death to America” since 1979. They have always meant it.

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Iran’s grand plan was to gain nuclear weapons. Its secondary plan was to amass a missile force so vast and threatening to its neighbors (and eventually Europe and perhaps even America) to assure that the United States and Israel would never strike at the nuclear weapons assembly line. With the immunity that comes with nuclear weapons, the ayatollahs would have been free to pursue their agenda of the destruction of Israel and America.

Presidents before Trump have all vowed that Iran would not be allowed to have such weapons. All of them since Iran set out on this path. None of them acted. They did not act either against Iran’s expeditionary force of terrorists — the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard built and deployed in the first instance by Qassem Soleimani — or Iran’s proxies. Until Trump.

President Carter was paralyzed by the mullahs. President Reagan, intent on confronting the Soviets, withdrew from the confrontation with a much smaller threat in the 1980s, and while President George H.W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s army in 1991, he did not advance to Baghdad, much less beyond and into Iran.

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President Clinton could not stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons because he believed the cost to be too high. He would not concern himself with a distant threat when he could not contain the immediate one. North Korea became a nuclear power on Clinton’s watch.

President George W. Bush was a superb wartime president as he battled Islamist extremism and eventually won through to stability in Iraq. He and every other leader in the West were wrong about WMDs, but he persevered, and the Iraqi people have a much brighter future ahead than they would have had under Saddam’s sadist sons. The conclusion of Bush’s intelligence community was that Iran, afraid and chastened, had abandoned its nuclear ambitions. That “IC” was wrong.

President Obama has been the worst of the post-war presidents because he failed even at doing nothing. He did worse than nothing. He acted to legitimize Iranian ambitions and made a $1.7 billion dollar down payment on his policy of appeasement followed by billions of dollars more in sanctions relief through the meaningless promises of the “JCPOA” — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry with the ayatollahs in 2015.

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When Trump gained the presidency in 2017, ruthless realism returned to the Oval Office. Trump tore up the JCPOA — as it had not been a treaty but simply an “Executive Agreement.” It was, of course, his right to do so.

Trump struck Syria twice for using chemical weapons, restoring a “red line” Obama had erased. (Will the new Obama Library have a “Red Line” room into which visitors disappear?) Trump also ordered the destruction of Russia’s “little green men” who dared to attack U.S. forces in Syria. And when Iran would not stop trying to kill Americans in Iraq, Trump ordered Soleimani killed in January 2020, when the Iranian terrorist set foot in Iraq.

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Then the 2020 election and the disaster for the world that was the long regency of whomever was running Joe Biden around while the sadly diminished Biden inhabited the Oval. We won’t know for years who designed the national security policy in those years, but we know whoever was making the decisions oversaw the debacle in Afghanistan which led to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine —the first had come under Obama — and Iran’s lurch towards nuclear weapons and more and more missiles with which to defend that lurch.

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Five months after he returned to power, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer and the Iranian nuclear weapons program was obliterated. At that point, Trump gave the theocrats in Tehran a choice — abandon your ambitions or face another round of punishment. Ayatollah Khamenei misjudged Trump. The Iranians began again to seek nuclear weapons and, this time, to also produce so many ballistic missiles that no one dared stop them.

Trump, along with the Israeli prime minister, dared. Iran’s military, including their nuclear weapons facilities and their missile factories are in ruins. The ongoing campaign is leveling the regime’s ability to rebuild others, and it may yet destroy the oil infrastructure it would need to begin to pay to start again down this path.

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By being tough with the mullahs, indeed ruthless and transparent, Trump has already done the world a great favor. The “Alliance of Tyrants” has suffered blow after blow since Trump returned and more are coming as Iran shudders and communist Cuba teeters on the brink of throwing off their dictators.

President Trump really would like to leave a legacy of peace. But he is the sort of tough and indeed ruthless commander in chief the U.S. needs to put away its enemies, not merely put them in timeout. Here’s hoping he sees this battle through until Iran cannot menace us, Israel, the Gulf Nations or anyone for a generation or three.

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