Zainab Haider was making the drive home after work with her two young children Tuesday as she contemplated what might come from the deadline President Donald Trump had set for Iran to concede to U.S. demands. Would her relatives in Iran be safe or would they be wiped off the map?
Her emotions were heavy, ranging from anxiety and fear to even loneliness as others seemed to be going about their lives as normal despite what could have been pending doom.
Ultimately, Trump did not make good on his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” instead agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in the war.
It was another moment of whiplash for Haider and the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the U.S. who have been thrust into a seemingly constant state of uncertainty over the future of Iran and their relatives and friends who still live there.
For many, the tenor of the latest discourse around the conflict has consumed their thoughts, often preventing them from getting work done or focusing on anything else. Some are protesting the war, while others guard their opinions about what is happening in their homeland, anxiously watching and wondering what the future might hold.
Haider was among those protesting Wednesday in Austin, Texas, calling for an end to the war. Gatherings also were held in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.
Aside from speaking out against the war, Haider thinks that mobilizing will create “the kind of pressure that makes it harder for Trump to swing back to this aggressive posturing.”
“It’s a huge country,” she said of Iran. “Trump is not going to ever be able to defeat it or wipe it out, but it is possible to do damage. It is possible to do something that affects millions of people, millions of lives.”
Haider, a municipal planner and an organizer with the Austin for Palestine Coalition, said hearing Trump offer such an ultimatum was frightening.
She does not support regime change, saying that was something for the Iranian people to settle, not the United States. Still, she wanted to speak out even though she came to the U.S. by way of Pakistan with her parents when she was young. She has memories of the neighborhood bakeries and the juice shops she used to visit with her mother and their neighbors.
Iranian-American Sheila Amir said that Trump’s social media posts made her fearful on multiple levels.
Her first concern was for her Iranian relatives. She has not been able to confirm that they're OK in the past week amid an internet blackout that has blanketed the country.
But the North Carolina-based writer said she also was concerned that an escalation in the war could put her U.S. relatives who are in the military at risk. Their duty, she said, is to “serve and protect the United States of America," not to destroy the people of Iran.
Even those who are supportive of U.S. attacks that directly weaken the Iranian government are struggling to reckon with the most recent threats against civilians.
In recent weeks, Roya Rastegar has had many difficult conversations with her family about the conflict. Rastegar and her wife are both Iranian-American. Rastegar said people in her family have been killed by the Iranian government in the decades since the Islamic Republic took power, and the majority of her wife’s family is still in the country.
Rastegar, a filmmaker and cofounder of a pro-democracy nonprofit called the Iranian Diaspora Collective, said the frequent reversals have made it more difficult to explain the conflict to their children.
“It’s very hard to hold on to the idea that we do not know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Rastegar said that the war has presented an impossible moral dilemma. She is deeply concerned that intensified attacks on Iran could cause even more harm to civilians. But she also believes that de-escalating the war without dismantling the Islamic Republic will pose the greatest risk to Iranians inside the country, who would continue to face severe and deadly repression.
“It’s really nauseating to just think about my people as being stuck between a regime that’s still killing them and an administration — the U.S. — that is issuing these kinds of threats,” Rastegar said.
