Early on March 1, a dozen bullets shattered the windows of Saliwan Boxing, a gym in Thornhill, Ont., owned by the Iranian‑Canadian activist and boxer Salar Gholami.
No one was injured, but the gym — known for displaying pre-revolutionary Iranian flags — was badly damaged.
Gholami told media he believed his business was targeted for his criticism of Iran’s regime.
The shooting occurred mere hours after a gathering at the gym to celebrate the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by U.S.-Israeli air strikes on Feb. 28.
The celebrations — and shooting — highlight the divisions within Canada’s Iranian diaspora community over Khamenei’s killing and its fallout.
“People are super excited … extremely optimistic, just celebrating,” said activist Shermineh Esmati Novak, who along with Gholami organized a widely attended rally in Toronto on Feb. 28.
But Banafsheh Cheraghi, 31, a master’s student at the University of Toronto, says Iranians’ “feelings are complex.”
“I personally am against war and against … intervention [at] this scale,” she said.
“But Iranians are not a monolith — while I’m against the war, there are actually many people inside the country who wanted this; there are also many inside who don’t want this.”
Decades of protest
For decades, Iranians have protested the theocratic Islamic Republic, which was ruled by Khamenei since 1989.
Those who have dared to protest the regime from within Iran have often faced brutal crackdowns, mass arrests and even executions.
Most recently, Iranians took to the streets in late December and January to protest economic hardship and political repression.
Authorities reported about 3,000 deaths during this period, but activists and rights groups say the true number is much higher. They estimate as many as 7,000 were killed, with most of those deaths attributable to the government’s infamously brutal security forces.
Many Canadians follow these events closely.
With more than 280,000 people of Iranian ancestry, Canada hosts one of the largest Iranian diasporas in the world.
On Feb. 14, an estimated 350,000 people rallied peacefully in Toronto in support of the protestors in Iran. Two weeks later, on Feb. 28, demonstrators returned to the streets in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Shermineh Esmati Novak, an activist, described the atmosphere at the Feb. 28 rally in Toronto as energetic and collaborative. Groups across the political spectrum are “working together,” she said.
Novak hopes to see Iran’s monarchy, which ruled Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, play a central role in any transition away from the current regime. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, has spent decades in the U.S. advocating for regime change and has said he would be prepared to return to Iran to help lead a transition.
But Novak worries the theocratic regime will not be that easy to depose. “The head of the snake is gone, but the tail is still there,” she said.
She also worries about how the period of instability will affect people on the ground in Iran.
“My mom’s entire family is largely in Iran, so my mom’s … on edge.”
Cheraghi, of the University of Toronto, is deeply critical of the regime but also wary of foreign military intervention.
“Years and years of suffering and oppression may lead people to want any means that may destroy their oppressors,” Cheraghi said. “But at the same time, with war, people are reduced to just passive survivors and not political actors, and now all people can think about is, ‘Am I going to be alive tomorrow?’”
Cheraghi also noted relief over Khamenei’s death is tempered by anxiety and grief over the fast-mounting civilian death toll.
“At the same moment that I was relieved that the leader was dead, I was mourning for those innocent girls,” she said, referring to the dozens of Iranian schoolgirls killed by a strike in Minab on Feb. 28.
“No single human life should be a means to an end.”
Emily Regan Wills, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in the Arab Middle East, migration and social movements, notes that mixed emotions are common in diaspora communities during periods of conflict.
“It’s more unusual if they only feel one thing,” she said.
Generational differences further shape how people react to conflicts, she says.
“People who permanently migrate outside of Iran to the West are much more likely to be opponents of the current governing structure, or … at least have disagreements with it,” she said.
“Younger people who don’t have direct experience of the regime, or … who were born in Canada, for instance, might respond to this a little bit more through a lens of a political analysis that is not personal.”
Lasting change
Nara Farhani, a student at a Canadian university, spoke under a pseudonym due to concerns over her safety.
She notes the regime maintains control through fear.
“Many of us receive strange messages and threats directed at ourselves or our families because of the work we do, speaking out about the regime,” she said. “In some cases, family members inside Iran are contacted or intimidated as well.”
Farhani cited cases of anti-regime Iranian-Canadians being targeted.
Masood Masjoody, a Burnaby, B.C., mathematician and vocal critic of the Iranian regime, has been missing since Feb. 2. The province’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team is treating his disappearance as unusual and possibly targeted.
Before he vanished, Masjoody had been active on social media advocating for investigations into transnational repression. He had also publicly warned of alleged Iranian intelligence activity in the Vancouver area.
And these are not the only ways Canadians can be caught up in the conflict.
On Jan. 8, 2020, amid heightened U.S.-Iran tensions, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard mistakenly shot down a civilian airplane shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 passengers — including 55 Canadian citizens and 30 Canadian permanent residents.
Farhani says her greatest concern now is for the civilians still in Iran.
Internet blackouts have made reaching family difficult. “They can occasionally call for a few minutes to let us know they are okay,” she said.
But there is no assurance this will last. Since Feb. 28, “the regime has already begun a new wave of repression — arbitrary arrests, intimidation, and threats meant to silence people and prevent them from protesting again,” she said.
Farhani hopes the Iranian people themselves will bring about meaningful change.
“For years, Iranians have taken to the streets demanding the end of the Islamic Republic, protesting with bare hands for their most basic rights, and they have been met with bullets, mass arrests, torture and executions,” she said.
“[T]he machinery of repression has remained intact, and many hope this moment could finally weaken it.”
Wills, of the University of Ottawa, said this tension is common in diaspora communities, with some opposed to foreign intervention, and some willing to accept it as a means to an end.
But Wills also warns against foreign powers installing their preferred leaders.
“One of the big issues with Iraq’s reconstruction was putting in place people from the diaspora who had no meaningful domestic power,” she said, referring to the post‑2003 reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion.
For this reason, she is not optimistic about Pahlavi returning to lead Iran.
“The family of the former shah, which some advocate for, has almost no base inside Iran, and a non‑democratic installation would not be accepted,” she said.
Cheraghi agrees that political change must come from within Iran, not through external strikes.
“Khamenei’s death — that’s not what we deserve. We deserve to take him down on our own and with our own will,” she said. “I wanted him to answer for the rest of his life to all the families that have lost someone.”
“Many of us here might not go back. We have our lives built here,” she added.
“The future of Iran belongs to the people of Iran, and it’s them who should decide what comes next.”
