Iranians on LI watch in horror, hope as protesters fall in violent 'revolution' unfolding in their homeland

Thousands of Iranian Long Islanders watched this week, horrified and hopeful, as upheaval spread across their homeland and the Iranian regime, embattled and isolated, responded with a lethal crackdown.

"This is not a protest anymore — this is a revolution," said Vahid Danesh, a doctoral student studying mechanical engineering and president of the Iranian Graduate Student Association at Stony Brook University, in a phone interview. "When a government starts massacring its own people, that means they are close to the end. We will never go back to what we had before. ... We want them to be gone, so we are not afraid of them anymore."

As President Donald Trump weighs a military response and promises protesters that "help is on its way," Danesh said he hoped U.S. forces would take Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "dead or alive," then destroy Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases. Danesh said he had not spoken to family in Iran since last Thursday, when calls for protest by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, helped drive Iranians into the streets and prompted authorities there to cut access to the internet and international phone calls, though some restrictions have since eased. "I guess they are safe," he said. "We have no idea."

The security forces’ crackdown on the demonstrations has killed at least 2,615, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported, a death toll that exceeds that of any other rounds of protest or unrest in Iran in decades, with 18,434 detained. Some news reports have put the death toll far higher. Hundreds of protests have taken place since late December, initially focused on market and currency instability but sometimes including calls for an end to the regime, according to research institution International Crisis Group.

Unlike some earlier protests, the current upheaval "spills across boundaries of geography, class and gender," spanning bazaars, universities and some rural areas, the Crisis Group said in a statement this week. The upheaval also follows the 12-day war last June in which Israel decimated Iran’s military leadership and the United States participated in bombing to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability.

Another Stony Brook graduate student, a computer scientist who spoke Wednesday but asked not to be identified because she said she did not want to endanger family in Iran, described nerve-wracking nights this week with fellow Iranian expatriate students amid a virtual information blackout: "It’s so hard to be here and not know what’s happening back home," she said. "A bunch of us were just sitting, scrolling news, not even talking. That’s all we can do now."

With independent news gathering in Iran severely restricted, the computer scientist and Danesh said they were using social media accounts. Both cited Vahid Online, an account with almost 600,000 followers on X. One video posted by that account appeared to show a makeshift morgue full of body bags, some of them open to show young men. Men and women in civilian clothes walk through the space, inspecting the bodies. In the background there are sobs and screams.

The computer scientist said Pahlavi’s calls for protest appeared to have been pivotal. "His first announcement had 80 or 90 million views — the outreach of that message was insane. Every time before, the problem was there was no leader. People came out on the streets, but to what end? There was no imaginable future. That announcement from Pahlavi changed it all."

Watching the protests from the safety of Long Island was an alienating experience, she said. "The amount of unworthiness and disconnect I felt was insane. That’s a feeling a lot of us have. If we were back home we would be on the streets, we would be with our people, fighting, but now we’re here doing close to nothing. ... A part of all of us wants to go there."

In Great Neck, one of the largest Iranian American communities on Long Island, Dr. Pedram Bral, the village mayor, said the last week had been "heartbreaking. So many people are dying because they want nothing but freedom. They want to be able to eat, to provide for their families. That’s all they want."

Bral, too, had seen the body bag videos. He mentioned Iran’s planned execution of a 26-year-old protester just days after he was detained. "He could have been my son."

Bral, who left Iran when he was a boy 40 years ago, said many of his constituents felt "complete desperation ... everybody is sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear some news, and there’s nothing."

He and several other people interviewed for this story said they felt betrayed by what they took to be public indifference to the fate of the protesters.

"We are actually seeing genocide in real time," said Great Neck lawyer Janet Esagoff. "There’s silence from these influencers and Hollywood celebrities."

Esagoff was grimly optimistic. "The regime has never been weaker. The economy is at the bottom. Nobody can sustain their lives. We’re at a tipping point."

Esagoff’s sister, Jacqueline Harounian, also a lawyer, likened the recent history of popular protests in Iran to a spouse leaving an abusive marriage: "It usually takes several attempts to leave." This time — with an emboldened United States, Pahlavi’s heightened profile, among other factors — "there is no turning back anymore," she said.

The end of the Iranian regime would be "a positive development for the entire world," Harounian said. In her social circles, she said, people were excited by the prospect of a "free Iran that’s a secular democracy." Some, she said, were even looking ahead to a time when tourism is possible.