Iran war sows bitter divisions for diaspora in US

A woman holds an Iranian flag as part of a pro-government campaign in downtown Tehran, Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)Short Urlhttps://arab. news/z24fu The war on Iran has created divisions among the Iranian diaspora in the US Some Iranian-Americans feel ostracized for opposing the war while disliking the Iranian regime Updated AFP September 18, 2026 Follow WASHINGTON: When the war on Iran began seven months ago, Washington area Iranian-American Soroush quickly found himself losing friends. He hates the Islamic government in Tehran but believes “nothing is going to be better” . Fellow exiles in the United States began accusing him of supporting their oppressors. Another Iranian-American, Bahar, also found herself being cut off within the diaspora -- but in her case because she strongly supported the war launched . The 750,000-strong Iranian community in the US is overwhelmingly united in opposing Iran’s Islamic regime whose top leadership has been decimated -Israeli offensive that has destroyed swaths of the country’s military and prompted global economic shocks. But deep fault lines have appeared among expatriates and exiles over whether the war will succeed in ending 47 years of clerical rule in their homeland. “Family relationships have been strained or broken... Even lifelong friendships have ended over this,” said Sahar Razavi, director of the Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center at California State University, Sacramento, who says the war exacerbated pre-existing tensions. AFP spoke to Iranian community members around Washington about the tensions. Some requested their full names be withheld as they talked about their own friends and relatives. ‘No other solution’ Soroush, a 3D artist and animator who came to the US a decade ago, described rifts with close friends and even his own brother and sister-in-law after the war started on February 28. “People (in Iran) are going to lose friends, family members. They’re going to lose their job, their savings,” he recalled telling them, citing the negative impacts of past US wars in the Middle East. “They are the ones who are living it, not the Iranian diaspora,” the Christian convert told AFP as he nursed a beer at a Washington bar. At a downtown coffee shop, Bahar, who works in the medical sector, and Aahoo Sigarchi, who works in a bank, took an opposite view. Polling commissioned , an advocacy group that opposes the war, suggests that support among the Iranian diaspora quickly diminished. At the start of the war, the community in the US was split about half-and-half, but a second poll a month later found 66.1 percent opposed the war and only 32.7 percent supported it.