In normal times, Hanieh Ghazali likes to FaceTime her family every day.
Ghazali moved to Kansas City from Tehran, Iran, in 2023. She’s a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she studies mechanical engineering and researches 3D-printed biomedical technology.
But since the United States and Israel began their war against Iran three days ago, she’s hardly heard from them. Access to the Internet has been largely cut off in Iran, making it hard to get in touch.
“They were able to call me from a landline a few days ago and say, ‘Hey, we are fine. We are at home. We are safe for now,’” Ghazali told KCUR’s Up To Date. “But that's it.”
That lack of access is anxiety-inducing, says Mercedeh Tavacoli, an Iranian American from Kansas City. She too has family still in Iran, but hasn’t heard from them since just after the strikes started Saturday.
The war could continue for weeks or longer, President Donald Trump said on Sunday. The initial attacks, aimed at forcing regime change, resulted in the death of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but no new leader has been named.
Many Iranians and Iranian Americans are “optimistic” about the possibility of establishing democracy in the country.
“It's a weird feeling… that you hope another country attacking your country will make your situation better than before,” Ghazali said. “But that's what I'm hoping, that we can have democracy at some point. But I don't really know.”
Tavacoli says that democracy would give her cousins in Iran an opportunity to think about their futures that they don’t have right now.
“They're living under this theocratic regime that has stripped away them being able to buy a house, to live comfortably, to be able to travel wherever they want to in the world, to study whatever they want to,” she said.
However, the New York Times reported Tuesday that many of the people the U.S. had in mind to lead Iran have been killed in the ongoing attacks.
Both Ghazali and Tavacoli say Americans generally misunderstand the conflict between Iran and the U.S., because they don’t understand the historical context for the fighting.
“I've seen so many anti war protests – that is, all over the U.S., not only in Kansas City. I don't think that any Iranian would go to those protests. This is the misunderstanding,” Ghazali said.
“When… we are talking about the people getting killed in a war, you should also talk about less than two months ago, this regime killed more, like, almost 40,000 people on the street over a weekend. When people are getting killed… it doesn't matter if it's in a war, if it's by the government, for any reason. You just have to talk about the whole thing.”
- Hanieh Ghazali, Iranian Ph.D. candidate living in Kansas City
- Mercedeh Tavacoli, Iranian American from Kansas City
