UW-Milwaukee students with ties to Iran have been closely watching the U.S. and Israel's continuing military action there.
“We have a lot of family, and my husband’s family, they're living in Iran,” says Zara Fakhri. She is one of the officers of Iranian Student Association and is a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee’s Lubar School of Business. “I have a lot of relatives, and my grandmothers, they're living there.”
Fakhri is a second-generation Iranian-American. Her parents fled from Iran in 1979 after the revolution, and she says it’s never been safe for them to go back to the country, because they’d face execution. The revolution in 1979 replaced Iran’s 53-year-old monarchy with an Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
"Since 47 years ago, we have had a lot of uprisings,” Fakhri explains. “But the most recent one and the most brutal one has happened almost two months ago. The country was under blackout for more than two weeks, and around 40,000 people have been slaughtered around the street.”
Fakhri is referring to the Iranian government’s crackdown on and mass killing of its own people as they took to the streets in protest starting late last year. According to Amnesty International and many other human rights organizations, security forces fired at people, often targeting their heads and torsos. There were mass arrests, and Iranian authorities cut all internet access in an attempt to conceal their crimes.
The number of dead is disputed but estimates range from thousands to the tens of thousands that Fakri mentioned.
“So after that, there have been a lot of things going on. Most of us were not able to reach out to our family and friends inside Iran. [We] have to be our voices for them, trying to do our best to kind of inform all the non-Iranians and everyone outside of Iran what’s happening there,” Fakhri says.
On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, killing its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other government leaders. Fakri says she supports the military action. She says the Iranian regime is more deadly than the U.S. attacks have been.
“We are seeing that Islamic regime is more than a thousand times worse than all the bombs that are coming to Iranian people [by the U.S.],” she says.
“I don't know any Iranians who lived inside Iran recently who opposes the overthrow of this regime, the war, or King Reza Pahlavi or military action by President Trump,” says Parya Payami. She’s a PhD student at the UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning and the previous president of the Iranian Student Association at UWM.
Payami and the other Iranian students WUWM spoke with are hopeful that opposition figure Reza Pahlavi will take power. He is the exiled crown prince of Iran who some Iranians see as a transitional leader to help the country towards becoming a secular democracy.
“This is not just about one person,” says Payami. “The whole system needs to go. And King Reza Pahlavi is the one and only leader of opposition that Iranians want and accept.”
Payami was born and raised in Iran. “I lived my whole life there. I came to the United States four years ago to study for my PhD. So all my family members, all my friends, my parents, my siblings, whoever I know, extended family is in Iran.”
She says her brother, her cousins and others were asking for help. “Like, where is this promised help that is on the way? When they are attacking? And now that they are attacking, they are all happy. They are cheering for them,” she says.
“We, Iranians, say this is the final battle,” says Payami. “Pahlavi will return. So after all these rounds, this is the final one. This is the fall of Berlin Wall moment for Iranians.”
Critics of the U.S. intervention in Iran say the attacks were launched without Congressional approval, and are against the will of a majority of Americans. CNN reports that nearly 60% of Americans disapprove of the Iran strikes and most think a long-term conflict is likely.
Payami says that people shouldn’t be opposed to this operation just because it’s being waged by a Republican presidential administration and Israel.
“People are entitled to have any opinion on their president, and that's OK,” she says. “But if that becomes the whole identity and whole worldview of someone to say whatever President Trump is going to do is going to be a failure, that's bad. Because if any ideology or mindset you have will make you a terrorist supporter, you need to re-evaluate, revisit that decision.”
All of Narges Khodadadi’s family and friends are living in Iran right now. She’s a PhD student in public health at UWM and the president of the Iranian Student organization. She left Iran in 2024 when she came to Milwaukee for her studies.
She says of her friends and family: “They were waiting for an intervention and help from outside of Iran. It's not a political issue. It's about human rights. The children had been killed, the students, specifically women were raped in the prisons and [the] regime killed people and then sell their body to their family. So obviously, this is a human rights [issue] and people inside Iran want this intervention, and finally, U.S. and Israel supported them. So because of that, [the] Iranian community [is] so thankful for this intervention.”
The BBC and others report that Iranian authorities have been demanding large sums of money from families to get back bodies of dead protesters.
Earlier this week, Khodadadi lost her connection with her friends, but one called her through a direct phone line.
”He said, ‘Yeah, we can hear the sound of the explosion. We see it every day. We feel it every day. But we aren't worried about them,’” she recounts. "'We are continuing our regular life, our routine, but, yeah, we can't go shopping, or we can’t go to restaurant[s]. We have to stay at home. But everything is OK with us. We [are] willing to pay this price, this cost, if it means we will get rid of the Islamic regime.’”
She says she understands that there are people around the world that don't want the war with Iran.
“But I wanted to ask them, ‘OK, what's your alternative?” says Khodadadi. “Are you caring about the human rights? If you care about them, so want the human rights for Iranians as well. Iranians themselves want to pay this cost and get rid of the Islamic regime.”
Ultimately, the students feel the Iranian people and their roughly 4000-year-old culture will prevail.
“One of the things that we celebrate in Iran [is a holiday] called Yalda,” says Khodadadi. “It is on the first night of the winter, and that since that night, the days are becoming longer and nights are becoming shorter. And we celebrate that night because this is a sign and a symbol [that] light will overcome the darkness. So we value that, and we celebrate that, and we hope that one day comes that the light overcomes the darkness of the Islamic regime.”
The students say the Persian community in Milwaukee is a close one, and they have several chat groups set up on Telegram and elsewhere to support each other during these times.
