Six months into the Iran war, Iranian Americans remain divided over what comes next

By Julia Vargas Jones, CNN

Los Angeles (CNN) — Six months since the United States and Israel launched the first strikes on Iran, the physical, financial and emotional impacts of the war have reverberated from Tehran across the world, including to the vast Iranian community in the US, which has been divided with varying opinions on how the war started and what is has – or hasn’t – accomplished.

The Iranian diaspora spans multiple generations and waves of exile, from those who left after the 1979 revolution to more recent arrivals who fled crackdowns and protest movements. Those experiences helped shape sharply different reactions to the conflict. Some Iranian Americans, particularly among anti-regime activists, welcomed US and Israeli strikes and saw them as a potential path toward ending the Islamic Republic’s rule.

Others feared the human cost of military escalation and warned that civilian suffering and regional instability could outweigh any political gains. The divide reflects not only differing political views, but competing experiences of exile, repression and what many believed the future of Iran should look like.

At the start of the war, CNN spoke with Arezo Rashidian, a longtime monarchist activist aligned with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah who helped organize protests in the Los Angeles area. At the time, Rashidian welcomed military action against the Islamic Republic and told CNN she hoped the United States and Israel would conduct “targeted attacks on bases to bring down that regime.”

Six months later, Rashidian says that optimism has largely given way to disappointment among many anti-regime activists.

“We really wanted regime change … it’s been six months now, and it didn’t get to that point,” she said, describing a mood of frustration and uncertainty.

Rashidian said her family members and contacts inside Iran have described what they see as a renewed climate of fear in the months since the height of the fighting.

According to Rashidian, people are increasingly reluctant to discuss politics or their involvement in January’s protests, fearing surveillance and retaliation. “Now that the war is a little bit quieter, now the secret police are starting to mobilize,” she said.

Her comments come as CNN has reported on a renewed focus on enforcing Iran’s mandatory hijab laws, with videos showing women being publicly admonished over their clothing and businesses facing scrutiny for alleged dress-code violations.

Rashidian also described accounts of arrests, executions and broader security crackdowns – claims CNN cannot independently verify.

Despite her disappointment, Rashidian said she continues to support tougher sanctions against Tehran, which she hopes will “tighten the rope” around the regime.

This week, Washington threatened further measures, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said will target a complex network built by Iran that allows its entities to evade the wide-ranging sanctions.

But the much-anticipated announcement of Trump’s “economic D-Day” measures left many underwhelmed, after Washington decided to hold off on imposing major new measures, instead focusing largely on expanding and stepping up enforcement of existing sanctions.

Iran has said it can inflict reciprocal pain, warning of expanded strikes on regional oil producers and European countries, and even teasing the weaponization of its nuclear program.

For Aria Rostami, a 38-year-old Iranian American museum professional in New York who grew up in Southern California’s Iranian community, the past six months have fundamentally changed the way he relates to other Iranian Americans, being at odds with how enthusiastically some embraced the military intervention.

“I was really disheartened by the community when they were on the streets cheering the war,” he told CNN.

The conflict, Rostami said, exposed divisions within the diaspora that have left him questioning assumptions he once took for granted. “There was a time where if I met somebody who was Iranian, or I’d hear people speaking Persian on the street, I had a specific feeling about it,” he said. “Now it’s changed to suspicion or an uncertainty. I don’t know where their politics are. I don’t know what they believe.”

Before the conflict, he said, supporters of intervention often argued that “Iran is different” — call it Iranian exceptionalism.

Personally, he says, he never accepted that premise. “Why would you want the United States to be involved in a war or have any military action in Iran, given what we’ve seen in the last 20 years with Iraq, with Afghanistan, with Libya?”

While Rostami acknowledges many supporters of the war are now disappointed, he believes they were sold false expectations about what military intervention could accomplish.

“People are being lied to, manipulated, played for a fool,” he said.

Still, he rejects a simplistic caricature of those who backed the war. “There’s real pain there,” he said. “I do think people have been taken advantage of and manipulated.”

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CNN’s Mostafa Salem contributed reporting.