Or maybe, finally, freedom.

In Toronto, Iranian expats watch on with hope and dread. They are praying for something better. Their visions do not always align.

The Star spoke with several Torontonians from Iran this week about the tumult in their lives, the panic they feel for their loved ones back home, and the cost of U.S. intervention.

These are some of their stories.

Pouria Afkhami emerged from his second internment in an Iranian prison terrified and desperate to escape the country.

The 26-year-old had just been charged, again, for “encouraging corruption and prostitution.” His alleged method? Fashion photography. When his cell door unlocked after 21 nights of solitary confinement, he thought he was being taken to the gallows.

“It really messed up my mind,” he said of his 2016 imprisonment. “They told me they would execute me. That changed my whole life, my whole point of view on life.”  

As a teenager studying creative multimedia in Malaysia, Afkhami was captivated by vibrant fashion shows. When he returned, he invited models to his studio, where they uncovered their hair and posed in casual dress. The first time he was arrested for posting photos of them on Instagram, he was jailed for four months. He was 20.

In Toronto, Afkhami is an activist.

He said, “from the day I arrived, I was fighting” the Islamic republic on social media and at protests. In 2020, he met Salah Gholami, a boxer and devotee of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince. Afkhami has come to revere Pahlavi. He thinks he can restore democracy.

In Gholami’s Thornhill boxing gym, Afkhami and hundreds of other volunteers plan massive antiregime rallies. Afkhami said they receive “guidelines” and adhere to conduct expectations sent from Pahlavi’s office.

Back home, Afkhami said he knows some of the thousands of anti-government protesters estimated to have been massacred in recent weeks. He heard a close friend was arrested.

“We don’t consider this a war, it’s a rescue mission.”

The depths of Amir Azizafshari’s hatred for the Islamic republic are “unfathomable,” he says. Members of his family suffered and died because of it. But he says the regime isn’t the sole source of misery for Iranians. To him, this war is another cynical attempt by the West to destabilize the country and control its resources.

“I find it really hard to believe there is any democratic pretence to this invasion,” he said. “It’s another land grab, another operation for mining resources, for oil.” Last month, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal they were considering seizing Iranian oil tankers, as they did with Venezuelan tankers in December.

When Iran’s last democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized the oil industry in 1951, the U.S. and U.K. orchestrated a coup to oust him and install the shah. Under him, the country modernized and women gained the right to vote, but parliamentary power was reduced and political opponents were brutalized by secret police. He was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. 

Since then, mounting, U.S.-led international sanctions against Iran have devastated its economy. As a boy in Tehran, Azizafshari saw their effect. They caused drug shortages, which forced his aunt’s family to emigrate to get treatment for multiple sclerosis. His family felt the economic outlook in Iran was “bleak” and wanted him and his sister to go study abroad. They succeeded; he’s 24 now with a computer science degree working in tech downtown.

To Azizafshari, it’s naive to think that if the exiled prince, Pahlavi, takes the throne he would give it up and make good on his promise of bringing about secular democracy. Azizafshari attended an anti-war “Hands off Iran” rally at the U.S. consulate last weekend. 

For now, all he can do is hope a popular uprising takes hold. He watches the war with trepidation, worried for the health of his many loved ones who remain there, unreachable because of internet and phone blackouts.

“I just don’t know what’s going on with them,” he said. “And he footage that’s coming out is really terrifying.”

Iranian-Canadian activist and academic Shahrzad Mojab has been living in “fear and despair” since the war began. When it ends, she expects the regime will “emerge from the ashes” having reconfigured itself cosmetically, if forced to, without liberating the people.

“I don’t feel that there is any hope for Iran, with this much destruction and violation and interference of international forces,” she said. “This is a very dark future ahead if we don’t stand up and say ‘stop this war.’”

In Iran, Mojab struggled against the nascent Islamic republic with other leftist scholars before they were purged. Not long after the regime’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, seized power, he ordered attacks on university campuses, the last nodes of secular thought, arresting, wounding and killing students and faculty, forcing her and her young family to flee.

Mojab is now a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at U of T. She studies the effects of war and violence on women’s learning. The opening salvo in the war blew up an elementary school for girls adjacent to a military base in the town of Minab, killing more than 150 children. A New York Times analysis indicated the U.S. was likely responsible.  

“What we saw in the destruction of the school, in the brutality of the killing, is the hope of entire families being extinguished,” she said.   

Iranian women already live in the margins of a deeply patriarchal state. Wartime can only make the situation devolve, Mojab said. Women will be caged at home, policed and “burdened with maintaining some sort of resemblance of life.” 

“War affects women in an exacerbated, intense way,” said Mojab. It often “re-traditionalizes society,” she said. Fearing foreign invaders, men try to assert power through the “control and discipline of women’s bodies and beings.”

Mojab’s former student at U of T, feminist activist Yanar Mohammed, ran shelters and support services for women in Iraq. On Thursday night, Mojab got word Mohammed had been assassinated this week outside her home in Baghdad by two unidentified gunmen. Mojab said she believes Mohammed was killed by local fundamentalists “in revenge for what is happening in Iran.”

“What I’m talking about with you is enough, in Iran, to be hanged. They would hang me overnight,” says Shawn Maafi, who came to Canada from Iran in 1998. The last time he visited was when his son was still a baby, on the child’s first visit to their home country. Maafi has never returned. His parents remain in Iran, as do his five brothers and their families. But to them, he doesn’t exist. He can’t exist.

In Canada, Maafi is politically active. He helped found the Iranian Canadian Congress, though he says he has since split from the organization. He now helps co-ordinate protests against the regime through the Cyrus the Great Organization. But his family back home can’t risk even having his number in their phones.

He said that while he personally dislikes Donald Trump, the war is an opportunity for Iranians to finally bring about the future for which they’ve been longing. “Hopefully,” he said, “the end of the war goes the way people want to see it. With freedom.”

Arsham Sajjadi, a 21-year-old student at the University of Toronto, says he exists in two worlds at once. In class, the internet browser on his laptop has two tabs open, one that shows the class reading, and another where he’s constantly refreshing X for the latest news on the war.

After Iran’s currency plummeted in December, protests ignited across the country. He remembers one from January where “you couldn’t contact anybody. You just see news of people dying on the streets. It was terrible for my family.” He had just left class when he learned from a friend that 200 people were killed in the small city of Sari, where his family is from, a number later confirmed.

Sajjadi said he’s not strongly pro-intervention, but feels there was no choice. “Every reformer is either in prison or has been assassinated.”

Sajjadi said he feels anxiety and anger. Sometimes, there’s hope. When he thinks of the future he wants for Iran and his place in it, he envisions himself at a bazaar, surrounded by people free to wear what they want and act as they please, people who can return home without worrying about whether there will be electricity or running water.

The nightmares keep coming. Shima Raeesi dreams of corpses, of political prisoners executed by hanging, like what she saw as a child.

In Iran “I have a huge extended family, I have friends, I have lovers, I have people that I’ve kept in touch with,” said Raeesi, and she’s worried about them.

Raessi, 29, lives in Toronto, working as an artist and bartender, and most of her close family is here. They first moved to Malaysia when her brother faced mandatory military service in Iran, and then Canada when she was a teen. Her brother is now a lawyer with the Canadian government so “he’d be accused of espionage,” she said, while her father is an anti-execution and women’s rights advocate. Together they cry on the phone about Iran, about their loved ones, about the future.

“Inside Iran, people are just demanding that they deserve to eat, they deserve to live, and deserve to be free,” said Raeesi.

But she says she has heard some Pahlavi supporters chant “death to the three corrupt: the mullah, the leftist, and the mujahedeen,” a slogan targeting Iran’s clerical establishment, left‑wing groups, and the religious‑militant opposition group Mujahedin‑e Khalq. She worries about how the term “leftist” is loosely defined. It could mean people with more progressive values around women’s rights and democracy. 

“I really don’t want to live in that world, because death would include me, and my dad.”

In the very early hours of Saturday, Sasan Issari, 44, lay in bed, phone in hand, when the news broke: bombing had begun in Iran, the country he left decades ago as a young child.

His thoughts went first to his family in his homeland. They also went to the people he spends his days caring for as a licensed clinical social worker. Issari offers services in Ontario to racialized people experiencing marginalization, many of them Iranian women. As a solo practitioner, he’s given free sessions to people before and said more culturally informed, accessible mental health care for Iranians is needed. 

In the days since Saturday, he said he’s seen deep exhaustion and sleep deprivation, driven by constant worry about loved ones in Iran, and the quiet strain of trying not to look at their phones.

“There’s also vicarious trauma to witness how we can be represented in the media as a monolithic group. There’s a danger in the single story.”

Issari said he’s committed to amplifying a message he worries is getting lost; it is not mutually exclusive to be anti-war and for human rights when it comes to Iran.

“I don’t want our community so divided,” said Issari. “Iran’s society still needs help but bombing is not going to make it democratic.”

Darya Rahbar, a recent law school graduate now articling for a Toronto litigation firm, says it is agonizing every time the regime cuts off communication with loved ones back home. The internet in Iran has been shut off for about five days now, she said. 

“The hardest part is not knowing how they’re doing,” she said. When she finally does get through, she tamps down on her anxieties, she doesn’t want to burden them with it. “You have to be strong for them.”

Outside of that, she said, everyone is elated to be “watching the regime crumble.” Even with the emotional constraints she places on herself when she calls her family in the war zone, she feels freer to express herself to them than ever before, now that the government’s grip seems to have loosened.

“Before, everyone was so worried about the regime tapping phones,” said Rahbar. “I know families who spoke about politics with their relatives abroad, only for the police to show up at their houses after. Now, there’s a lot less fear, I haven’t heard those stories this time.”

Rahbar grew up in Karaj, near Tehran, and left for Canada as a child during the Green Movement in 2009, when protesters, alleging the presidential election was stolen, were violently suppressed.

She said it irritates her and her family in Iran when anti-war advocates without connections to the region opine on the conflict. 

“There are activists here who don’t know the situation saying ‘Stop the strikes, stop the war,’” she said. “It’s really disheartening for my family, that they don’t have a voice and those people do. I want Persians to be at the centre of this, not activists.”