War in Iran elicits mixed response from Montana State campus community

As the war with Iran escalates, some MSU faculty and students from the country and surrounding regions are watching it unfold from thousands of miles away.

On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a series of strikes on Iran. The country’s supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei was killed in the strikes along with several senior officials.

President Donald Trump said the strikes were meant to neutralize “imminent threats” from Iran and stop the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon, according to a USA Today article from March 3.

An Iranian faculty member at MSU — who spoke to the Exponent on March 2 under the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the regime — said they have long imagined the death of the supreme leader.

“I was hoping for that news for 20 years, since I was a student in Iran,” they said.

Before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, they were part of a pro-democracy reformist group called The Iranian Green Movement.

“We were participating in every protest and every time we got oppressed — we got severely oppressed,” they said. “A lot of young, beautiful people got killed. I got arrested once, interrogated a couple of times and my (spouse) got fired from (their) job.”

They said they left Iran shortly after. While they were on a return trip in January to visit family for the first time in over a decade, the country was experiencing civil unrest.

According to Amnesty International, protests across Iran started just before the new year following an economic collapse. On Jan. 8, Iranian authorities responded with lethal force, resulting in one of the deadliest massacres in the country’s history.

The regime announced on Jan. 21 that 3,117 people died during the massacre. However, local officials said as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, according to a TIME article published on Jan. 25.

“The government started shooting at people very aggressively, unlike anything we have ever seen before,” the faculty member said. “This is what (the regime) does. They kill people. But this time, it was not killing to suppress the protestors — they were trying to scare people in a level that they would never come back to the streets again.”

According to them, the government did not just kill people in the streets. They went to hospitals and homes, killing anyone who had been injured in the massacre.

“Anyone with gun wounds, they headshot them,” the faculty member said. “There’s a lot of people — a lot of university students — around more than 50,000 people are now under arrest.

“I told you this because Iranian students in the U.S. and in other countries (were) shocked,” they said. “Each of them had maybe a friend, family, a relative that they lost this January.”

The faculty member said that during this time many Iranians worldwide felt hopeless as they mourned their loved ones. Following the massacre, the Iranian government cut all internet access to the country, according to Amnesty International.

The faculty member said many students could not get in contact with their loved ones. “This is the major thing that the students here are struggling with,” they said. “They don’t know if their families are safe or not.”

According to them, the supreme leader’s death on Feb. 28 sparked newfound hope for the future.

“Since the attack starts now again, we are sad, we are scared, but we are hopeful,” they said. “That’s the difference.”

The night of the bombing, MSU’s Iranian faculty and students gathered to support each other, they said.

“In two hours, all students got there, and they were dancing the whole night, chanting — then crying as we thought about all those people that were killed, recalling their names,” they said. “We were just dancing, but at the same time, we were scared. Is it going to be a better place? Is this country going to be a place to live for people?”

The following day, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held an emergency protest outside the Gallatin Courthouse in response to the U.S.-Israeli strikes.

SDS Vice President Homa Masood, a freshman political science major, said in an interview on March 2 that U.S. military interventions often destroy a country’s infrastructure and stoke fear in its population.

“Liberation doesn’t come at the end of a missile,” she said. “As a Muslim woman, I think it’s ironic that the administration and the supporters of this brutal attack are like, ‘We want to liberate the people, the oppressed women in Iran’ by dropping a bomb that kills 150 school children — school girls. You’re not liberating women by dropping bombs on little girls.”

Masood, who has family in the region, said the U.S. only has its own interests in mind, not the safety of Iranians.

“Those concerns and criticisms of the Iranian government are absolutely valid, but at the end of the day, I think that the U.S. doesn’t have the power to make that decision,” she said. “If the U.S. had the interests of the people of other countries, they would not drop the bomb on a school.

“It doesn’t have the right to unilaterally bomb the country simply because it determines that it doesn’t meet its own criteria of justice,” she said.

The faculty member said that, unlike the Iranian government, most of the country’s people do not think Americans are their enemies.

“(Americans) think that Iran is their enemy,” they said. “People in Iran love America. People of Iran (have always been) fighting with this government. They were trying to regain their freedom, and they got oppressed every time that they started a new movement.”