A Voice from Exile: Why Many Iranians See Intervention as the Last Remaining Option

UPDATED I am writing this as an Iranian living in exile in Ireland, grateful for the freedom I can breathe here and burdened by what that freedom represents. I can speak openly. Millions of people inside Iran cannot. They know that a sentence spoken too loudly, a video shared, or a protest attended can lead to arrest, torture, psychological abuse, or death.

For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic has governed Iran not through consent but through fear. That fear is not abstract. It is enforced through arrests in the night, interrogation rooms, coerced confessions, public executions, and the criminalisation of ordinary life, particularly for women, students, journalists, artists, and anyone who refuses to perform loyalty.

Internationally, Iran is often discussed as a geopolitical problem: nuclear negotiations, regional alliances, diplomatic balance. For Iranians, it is a lived trauma. Nearly nine million Iranians now live outside the country, not because they wanted to abandon their homeland, but because the state made normal life impossible.

Exile is not freedom without cost. You may be physically safe, but you live with constant fear for those you love. Many exiles lost parents while abroad, unable to return safely, unable to secure visas for visits, unable even to grieve properly. You live with freedom, but your heart remains injured, tied to a country that continues to punish those you care about.

Inside Iran, repression is systematic. Journalists, filmmakers, writers, lawyers, professors, and activists are targeted precisely because they document, analyse, and question. Many are sent to Evin Prison, a site repeatedly documented by international human rights organisations as a place of torture, psychological abuse, and denial of due process.

Children have paid the highest price. Some left home and never returned. Others stayed and never came home. Families have buried sons and daughters without justice, without truth, often without even the right to mourn publicly. This collective grief defines a generation.

This is the context missing when the world asks why many Iranians do not respond to US or Israeli intervention with the same fear others feel. The answer is painful but clear: Iranians are more afraid of abandonment than of intervention.

For decades, peaceful protests were met with bullets. Calls for international solidarity were met with statements of concern. While the regime executed protesters and tortured detainees behind closed doors, there were no emergency international responses for our dead children, no meaningful accountability, no protection.

Yet now, when the regime’s power is challenged, international law is invoked with urgency. This contradiction is impossible to ignore. How can a state that kills its own citizens, systematically tortures prisoners, and silences an entire population continue to be treated as a legitimate interlocutor, while efforts to disrupt that machinery are framed as the primary legal scandal?

Sanctions are another painful chapter. Intended to weaken the regime, they devastated ordinary people. They reduced access to medicine, raised food prices, destroyed purchasing power, and pushed families into poverty.

Meanwhile, those connected to power adapted easily. The children of regime officials travelled, studied, and lived comfortably abroad. Parents of exiled dissidents were denied visas because they lacked money, while regime families remained untouched.

Electricity cuts and water shortages are not new to Iranians. We have lived in darkness for years — literal and political — while the regime invested in military expansion and ideological warfare instead of hospitals and schools.

Repression inside Iran is enforced largely by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, repeatedly implicated in the killing of protesters and mass arrests. Despite overwhelming evidence, it continues to operate amid international hesitation.

For years, Iranians asked the international community to expel regime representatives, close embassies used for intimidation, and stop granting legitimacy to those who do not represent us. Those demands were largely ignored.

So the question many Iranians now ask is blunt: what option remains for an unarmed population facing a regime with guns, prisons, courts, propaganda, and billions in stolen wealth?

Irish people understand something essential about power and resistance. Ireland did not regain sovereignty by waiting for an empire’s permission. Freedom required struggle and sacrifice. Iranians, too, have tried peaceful resistance repeatedly, and repeatedly it was answered with massacre.

This does not mean Iranians want another dictatorship. We are not asking to replace one tyrant with another. We are asking for Iran back.

Many Iranians remember that Iran was once on a different path, pursuing modernisation, education, and engagement with the world. The late Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, remains a contested figure, but many today recognise that his removal led not to freedom but to a far more brutal theocracy.

That historical wound shapes the present.

Today, the name of Reza Pahlavi is openly chanted by Iranians inside and outside the country, not as a call for absolute monarchy, but as a symbol of national unity and transitional leadership toward a democratic, secular Iran.

No one claims to know the final shape of Iran’s future. What is clear is the demand: an end to theocracy, fear, and rule by clerics who have crushed a civilisation far older and richer than their ideology.

Iranians want to live without fear, without morality patrols, without whispering their thoughts, without watching their children die for demanding dignity.

Those of us in exile will continue to speak, because silence is what this regime relies on.

And if this moment has shown anything, it is that Iranians are exhausted — but they are not broken.