For most people, the commanders Israel has just eliminated will be foreign names. For me and for the people of Iran they are the monsters who have terrorized our families.
I’ve spent the past four years of my life being hunted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They sent agents to kidnap me from my home in New York. They hired assassins to kill me on American soil. They even followed me to Davos, Switzerland, where I had to be helicoptered out from my hotel.
If not for the FBI’s protection—and the more than 21 safe houses I have shuttled between over the past few years—I might not be alive to write these words.
So yes, this moment is personal. But it is also far bigger than me.
For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has exported terror, crushed dissent, and pushed the Middle East to the brink of war, all while robbing its own people of dignity, opportunity, and peace. Now, the regime is feeling consequences at the highest level.
Israeli air strikes have reportedly killed some of the Islamic Republic’s most senior military leaders, Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); Amir Ali Hajizadeh, architect of the regime’s ballistic missile program; and Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.
For many people around the world, these will just be foreign names. For me and for the people of Iran, they are the monsters who have impoverished and tyrannized our families.
They are the ones who have made millions of people’s lives miserable, not just in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.
While sanctions choked the economy and hospitals ran short of basic medicine, IRGC commanders lived in luxury. Today, viral images on Persian-language social media show their rooftop pools, penthouse suites, and VIP elevators, many of these destroyed in the recent strikes.
These commanders didn’t defend Iran, they defended the regime from its own people. The only people who sacrificed for the sake of the country were the poor, the women who dared to show their hair, the students shot in the streets.
This is why many Iranians are not mourning today. Despite the profound uncertainty that lies ahead, they’re celebrating.
I’ve received thousands of messages from inside Iran showing young women dancing in the streets, or families cheering in their kitchens. They remember these commanders as the ones who gave the orders to shoot protesters in the eyes, jail teenage girls, and lie to the world while building bombs in secret.
One mother in Tehran who was imprisoned for protesting the 2019 murder of her child wrote to me that “waking up to the news of Salami’s death, I started to scream out of joy that I’m seeing justice.” She told me that “soon you’ll be back to Iran and we’ll dance on the graves of these killers.”
Another woman, whose mother was shot dead by the IRGC in 2022 for protesting the brutal death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody, wrote, “We’re all happy for the elimination of the killers of our loved ones. War comes with a price. Innocent people might get killed. But we know who we should blame: the Islamic Republic.” This particular woman shaved her head over her mother’s grave—an image that soon became a symbol of resistance in Iran.
Millions of Iranians have marched, danced, sung, and bled for a better future. In 2022, after Amini’s death, the world saw the courage of young women facing armed soldiers with nothing but their hair and their hope. That movement was not crushed. It is still burning, quietly and bravely, in homes, schools, and prisons across Iran. Today we are reminded of that. The courage of these Iranians might very well spell the end of the Islamic Republic itself.
Now, the world faces a choice. It can focus solely on missiles and maps, treating this as another geopolitical chess move. Or it can recognize the human story unfolding beneath the surface, the story of a nation rising from the shadow of its captors. The story of a rising lion.
Israel’s strike may have taken out top military figures. But the real victory is still ahead: the day the Islamic Republic falls under the weight of its own crimes and the strength of the people it has tried so hard to suffocate and silence.
The Islamic Republic built its empire of tyranny on blood: of protesters, dissidents, women, children. That empire is now cracking. The people of Iran are watching to see what will come next and hoping that the world is watching, too.
