Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.

Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.

Those singled out for criticism include Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security adviser, who has a daughter living in the US and two nephews in Britain and Canada, despite having long been one of the Islamic Republic’s most vocal critics of western values.

Larijani – a former parliament speaker and senior Revolutionary Guard – is believed to have played a key role in the deadly crackdown against opposition protests that gripped the country in January. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is reported to have tasked him with coordinating preparations for a possible war with the US.

Anger at the aghazadehs, as the scions of the elite are known, is acute after the crushing of the protests resulted in a death toll that some sources put in the tens of thousands.

“People are upset that the aghazadehs are getting dollar stipends to go to the west – the United States, Europe elsewhere – to study essentially on the state’s dime,” said Alex Vatanka, the Iran programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

After the protests, Washington vowed to “revoke the privilege of Iranian senior officials and their family members to be in the United States”, according to a social media post. It is unclear, however, how such measures will be implemented.

One Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander who criticised the practice said 4,000 children and relatives of regime officials were believed to be living in western countries in 2024.

Kambiz Ghafouri, an Iranian writer and human-rights activist based in Helsinki, said: “They made Iran a hell for Iranian citizens and sent their children to the west to live happily. If there was a referendum voting on whether people want children of the Iranian authorities sent back to Iran, I think more than 90% would say yes.”

Larijani’s daughter, Fatemeh Ardeshir Larijani, was an assistant professor at Emory University medical school in Atlanta until last month, when the institution said it had terminated her employment after an online petition called for her deportation.

Larijani’s brother, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, also an adviser to Khamenei and a former head of the country’s human rights council, has one son, Hadi, who is a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University’s technology centre in the UK, according to Regime Out, an opposition website. Hadi’s brother, Sina, is a director for the Royal Bank of Canada in Vancouver.

The former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s niece, Maryam Fereydoun – daughter of Rouhani’s brother and former aide, Hossein Fereydoun – works for Deutsche Bank in London “overseeing financial flows from the Middle East”, according to Regime Out, which has urged the bank to dismiss her.

Another US-based regime scion is Eissa Hashemi, an associate professor at the Chicago School in Los Angeles. He is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, a former MP who earned the nickname “screaming Mary” as a spokesperson for the radical students who held 52 diplomats hostage at the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days at the height of the 1979 revolution.

Habibollah Bitaraf, a former energy minister and another leader of the embassy siege that triggered the rupture between Washington and Tehran, has a daughter living in the US.

Also US-based is Mahdi Zarif, whose father, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal subsequently scrapped by Trump.

A petition accuses Mahdi Zarif of “living a luxurious life in the United States”. “Until 2021, he resided in a $16,000,000 home in Manhattan,” it states.

Elias Ghalibaf, the eldest son of Mohammad-Baqer Ghalibaf, a former IRGC commander, presidential candidate and one-time mayor of Tehran, lives in Australia and has been the target of a similar petition.

Vatanka said the adult children’s western lifestyles were starkly at odds with the values their parents preached.

“The core of the matter is hypocrisy.” he said. “You have an Islamist ruling order that for 47 years has been preaching all sorts of ways to behave, and we then see, one after another, children or grandchildren of the members of the elite living a very different life than the one their politically connected families back in Iran are preaching.”

Vatanka said western countries might be reluctant to deport well-connected sons and daughters of the regime, seeing them as potential intelligence assets.

“There’s always an intelligence value, if you are the CIA, MI6 or whoever,” he said. “Some of these connections might bring nuggets of information that can be useful. They become messengers.

“There has been fundamentally no policy on how to deal with the offspring of the regime elite’s children. The west, by and large, doesn’t want to get involved in collective punishment or punishing someone just because of their origins.”