This Is My War

On Iran, the experience of home, and a conflict that is ‘doubly mine.’

By Hooman MajdMarch 11, 2026

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

I WAS BORN in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, in the middle of the last century, a city of one-and-a-half million people, grown from the roughly 300,000 who lived there when my mother was born in her father’s house in the 1920s. Today, as American and Israeli missiles rain down from the sky, the population is over nine million.

I now live in New York, some 6,000 miles away from the city of my birth. I can only watch this latest war on my homeland through screens—the TV, my phone, my computer. What does an exile feel under these circumstances? It’s hard to put this into words, but perhaps it’s akin to the uncanny. What I see is both strange and familiar. My mother is no longer alive, nor is my father, so I can’t confirm the name of the hospital I was born in, and yet I recognize it in the horrible images of Gandhi Hospital in central Tehran, damaged by US-Israeli missiles. I am haunted by the scenes of baby incubators and infants being evacuated by nurses and doctors; I am haunted by the photos of the school in southwestern Iran that suffered a direct hit by a missile in the opening hours of the war, killing some 160 schoolchildren ages 7–15. The uncanny is coupled with a deep sadness and, yes, guilt for the privilege I enjoy in the United States. My fellow Iranians are suffering a brutal attack partly orchestrated by my adopted country.

This is all happening only weeks after massive protests broke out across Iran, initially over the dire economic situation, which had been exacerbated by debilitating international sanctions. These protests resulted in a brutal crackdown—in only 72 hours, the government had committed an almost incomprehensible killing spree, jailing and murdering anywhere between 3,500 (the government number) and 7,000 and growing (according to the authoritative Human Rights Activists News Agency). This in itself was enough to cause trauma and numbness for all Iranians, even those in the diaspora, only to be suddenly overtaken by the current horror—what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described as “death and destruction” rained on from above.

Some of my compatriots initially celebrated the attack—understandable considering the revulsion many Iranians felt toward the nezam, or regime, and the recent trauma. Many held the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responsible for the deaths of their fellow citizens, and his assassination during the opening salvo brought some joy. There were also crowds of mourners, the faithful who remain loyal either to the republic or to the Shia clerical hierarchy that anoints ayatollahs as the Catholic Church anoints (literally) bishops and appoints cardinals. Personally, I did not experience any joy over the ayatollah’s death, simply because I take no joy in the killing of any human, even humans I believe are guilty of the greatest sins. Nor did I feel like celebrating this new war because I was confident that those who started it had no intention, nor any desire, to bring about a better, more democratic system of governance in Iran. Only days into the war, my skepticism has been validated, though that is hardly comforting.

I have wondered over this past week about chance, luck, and fate. When I was born, my father was a budding diplomat in what was then a small foreign ministry that needed him abroad far more often than at the offices in the capital. Had that not been the case, perhaps I would have grown up in Iran and, like some of my cousins, stayed and worked after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, or, like some other cousins, would’ve found a way to immigrate to the West in search of opportunity and greater freedom. Had I stayed, would my cousins in the West be looking, desperately, for news that I was alive and safe after the internet and phone lines had gone dead, just as I am today trying to get news of family in Iran and succeeding only intermittingly?

I am, after all, an accidental—or, rather, a reluctant—exile or immigrant. Because of my father’s work, I grew up largely outside of Iran, attending American and English schools in places like London, San Francisco, Tunis, and New Delhi. My spoken Persian was always relatively fluent, as we used the language at home with my parents. But I was always planning to return “home” to Iran, to attain fluency in the more formal Persian language—to learn to read and write with ease, and to follow in my father’s footsteps into the diplomatic service. That return was on the horizon when I was graduating college in Washington, DC, in 1977, and then the revolution happened. My family could not go back. My father was stationed in Japan, was fired by the new regime, and eventually settled in London. My maternal uncle, an ex–deputy prime minister and ambassador, managed to escape Iran disguised as a woman in a chador, traveling by donkey over the mountainous border to Turkey. The revolution strongly and openly advised me to forget whatever personal or professional ambitions I had held.

I think back to those early days of the revolution, and I remember going to the Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to vote in a referendum the new Iranian regime had organized. What should the future government look like? There were dozens of Iranian students there—the wave of immigrants fleeing Iran was then just a trickle, and most Iranians in the United States were students—and I marked my “yes” or “no” (to an Islamic republic) ballot in the company of mostly excited young men and some women who were voting for the first time in their lives. Years later, I met one of those students, someone who had traveled that day from New York to DC to cast his ballot. He was then an ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in our conversation, we discovered that we had both been in the embassy on that same day, casting competing ballots. I’m not naive enough to think that there was a real choice. Another senior official of the Islamic Republic I met later in life mused that had he known me in those early days of the revolution, he would’ve been at my throat. Again, so many incidents of fate and chance. Did this war begin all those years ago? Is the war today an extension—or, perhaps, the end—of a war that started the day the Islamic Republic was born?

I have now lived in the US for more than half a century; I consider myself American—if not as far as apple pie, then at least as much as hot dogs, burgers, and football. And yet, throughout these 50-plus years, I have maintained an almost telepathic and intellectual connection to Iran that has shaped me as a person, which has made it difficult, to this day, to define where “home” is for me. That connection is what makes me and so many of my fellow Iranians in the West agonize over what is being done to the country that, despite our divorce from it, we still love passionately. The distance has not made these past five decades easier, and this uncanny feeling is not new. We agonized over the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, with the images of boys—yes, boys—being slaughtered by the tens of thousands; we agonized over our compatriots gassed to death by Saddam Hussein; we shuddered when demonstrations like the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009–10, and the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022–23 were crushed; and we wept at the sight of body bags piled up in the wake of this year’s protests.

I weep at the sight of the road to Mehrabad Airport and the airport itself in flames. This is where my family and I would land on our rare holiday occasions back; this is the road that would eventually lead to my grandfather’s house. I weep, even through my fury, at the images of children’s coffins in Minab: little girls who were just going to school. I am haunted by the image of a father holding his children in an elevator, all covered in the debris of pummeled concrete—eerily similar to the footage of my fellow New Yorkers coated in the concrete dust of the fallen Twin Towers. I can’t help but think of the fathers holding the hands of their terrified children everywhere in Iran while I can easily hug my happy son (if he lets me).

Aside from my own personal history caught between Iran and the United States, there is, of course, a long history between the two nations. I think of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when the American missionary and teacher Howard Baskerville died fighting for the constitutionalists in Iran. During World War II, the United States’ allies invaded Iran to create a supply corridor from the gulf to the Soviet Union, and Iran’s dictator king, Reza Shah, was forced to abdicate and sent into exile. American troops, dispatched a couple years later to help operate the corridor, were given little booklets that explained the country, its customs, and its people—but do American airmen and sailors today know anything about the country they’re bombing? I wonder why I never asked my parents, who were teenagers then, what they thought of the foreign soldiers on the streets of their towns. Then, of course, a 1953 coup reinstalled Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was eventually elevated to Shahanshah—king of kings. Fate and chance again. Would there have been a revolution in 1979 had that coup not succeeded? Would there be a war today?

There have now been 47 years of acrimony between my two countries. What comes next? What happens after this war, with Iran bombed and with the US under an administration—a regime—that itself doesn’t seem to know or, perhaps, even care?

It leaves us exiles—the men and women of chance—without any clear path forward. We are connected and yet at odds. I see some Iranians in the diaspora doing the “Y.M.C.A.” Trump dance while their country burns. I dread opening X or any social media, which I do every morning anyway, just to see fellow Iranians applaud Donald Trump’s war on their country, deny atrocities, or even blame the regime for the missiles landing on their compatriots’ heads. Yes, I, too, am a self-hating Persian in those moments.

The truth is that few will likely return to Iran even if their ideal regime—a revived monarchy—replaces the current one. I’m scornful of Iran’s feckless dauphin, former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who has allied himself with Israel, the nation whose defense forces are bombing the country Pahlavi allegedly wants to lead. In his nearly half century of exile, he has spent precious few moments doing much of anything to organize a real opposition to the Islamic regime—less, even, than the almost universally despised Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization, which joined Saddam Hussein in his war on Iran. I’m embarrassed for Pahlavi and his supporters, many of whom voted for Trump, who, in his turn, will not even meet with Pahlavi.

As for me, what choice do I have but to mourn what is happening in a country that is both so far from and so dear to me? Iran is suffering from a war imposed on it by figures who simply do not care about my people, and certainly not about democracy, freedom, or security. I mourn because this war is doubly mine. This is my war because it is my government that is waging it, brutally and mercilessly. It is mine because the target is a place I love. I yearn for her, my Iran.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Azadi Tower with smoke in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026, by Davoud Ghahrdar, Iranian Students' News Agency. Image has been cropped.