Against War, Until That Morning

A reflection on the current Middle East crisis — Khamenei's death, Iran's long suffering, and the voices the world chose not to hear.

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I was walking my dog on a Saturday morning on a quiet Oxfordshire path when the news arrived. A coalition of the United States and Israel had struck targets in Tehran. Among them: the office of Ali Khamenei. Shortly after, his death was confirmed.

I stopped walking. I stood there and felt something I did not immediately know how to name.

I have spent most of my adult life opposing war. I was a child in a village south of Shiraz during the Iran-Iraq War, and I watched what conflict does to the people who never chose it — the mothers, the families, the cities, the painful silences and trauma wounds that never quite fill back in. And yet, standing on that path, deep inside, I was happy. I want to be honest about that — because it is the feeling of millions of Iranians, and it is a feeling the world has spent decades choosing not to hear.

To understand why, you need to understand what Khamenei's Iran actually was. Not the Iran of its people — ancient, layered, overwhelmingly secular in its instincts — but the state built in their name and then turned against them. A state that executed thousands of political prisoners over a few nights in the late 1980s. That redirected Iran's oil wealth toward missiles, drones, proxy forces, and nuclear enrichment while ordinary Iranians grew poorer. That made the October 7 attack possible, armed Russian drones over Ukrainian cities, and in late 2025 killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets under an internet blackout — over just three days.

For years, Iranians tried to warn the world. They asked not for invasion, but for acknowledgement. They said: this regime will not stay contained. They were not wrong.

So when I felt relief on that Saturday morning, it was not the clean relief of justice. It was something murkier and more human — the relief of a person who has carried something for a very long time and felt, for one moment, that the carrying might one day end.

The poet Saadi, born in my hometown of Shiraz eight centuries ago, wrote that human beings are members of a whole, and that when one suffers, none can be at rest. I have wondered, in the years since I first learned those words, whether the world actually believes them.

Perhaps now, at least, it is possible to wonder what it might mean to try.