The Weight of a Feeling I Was Not Supposed to Have

I was walking my dog on a Saturday morning when the news arrived. A coalition of the United States and Israel had struck targets in Tehran. Among them: the office of Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Shortly after, his death was confirmed.

I stopped walking. I stood in the quiet of an ordinary morning on an quiete Oxfordshire walking path, and I felt something I did not immediately know how to name.

I have spent most of my adult life opposing war. I know what it costs. I was a child in a village south of Shiraz during the Iran-Iraq War, and I watched what conflict does to the people who never chose it, the mothers, the families, the cities, the societies, the painful silences and trauma wounds that never heal or quite fill back in. I became a scientist partly because I wanted to deal in evidence and reason, not in the cycles of violence and political games I had grown up beside. I have written about this before. I am writing about it again now.

And yet.

Deep inside, I was happy. I want to be honest about that, because it is the feeling of millions of Iranians, and it is a feeling the world has spent decades choosing not to hear. And so here we are again.

To understand why, you need to understand what Khamenei's Iran actually was. Not the Iran of its people, -- ancient, layered, overwhelmingly secular in its instincts -- but the state that was built in their name and then turned against them.

After the 1979 revolution, the new order moved quickly. School textbooks were rewritten. Boys and girls were separated. Arabic replaced English. And every book opened with a portrait of the Supreme Leader and two commitments printed like commandments: to wipe Israel from the earth, and to export Shia ideology across the world. Opposition was not debated. It was removed.

In the late 1980s, thousands of political prisoners were executed over the course of a few nights, summarily, without lawyers, without trials, in an act so extreme it drew condemnation even from senior clerics within the regime. The international case remains open to this day.

I know this world intimately. In 1989, I was expelled from my boarding school for carrying a photograph of Salman Rushdie in my pocket, shortly after Khomeini's fatwa. It was there purely out of curiosity, to read a book whose author had been ordered killed by our leader. What could that book possibly be? I was lucky: good teachers intervened, and I was readmitted after signing a document promising never to commit such a crime again. Many others were not lucky at all. My school had the highest number of student executions of any in the province, young people guilty of nothing more than emotionally aligning with opposition groups or speaking a different truth to the state.

When Khamenei succeeded Khomeini that same year, the machinery of the state did not soften. It sharpened. The Revolutionary Guards were restructured. Universities came under direct ideological control, with deans appointed personally by the Supreme Leader. Three key ministries, foreign affairs, security, and Islamic culture, were placed under his personal appointment, beyond the reach of any elected government. Rivals within the clergy who might challenge him began, with uncomfortable regularity, to die.

Abroad, the project was equally deliberate. A vast share of Iran's oil revenues, wealth that belonged to its people, was redirected toward missiles, drones, nuclear enrichment, and a network of proxy forces across the Middle East. After the United States removed Saddam Hussein, Iran moved into the resulting vacuum in Iraq with extraordinary efficiency, ensuring the country's fragile democracy would remain fractured. In Lebanon, Hezbollah became what it is today largely through Iranian money and weapons. In Gaza, Hamas received support that made the attack of 7 October 2023 possible, an act that triggered a chain of consequences still unfolding. And all of this, while ordinary Iranians grew poorer and poorer.

I am not interested in assigning the greater moral weight between competing powers. I have written elsewhere about what it means when civilians pay the price for decisions made far above them, and nothing I say here changes that. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the spiralling violence in Gaza, all of it follows the same ancient pattern I first recognised as a boy: that ordinary people board planes and walk into streets, trusting the world to hold, while somewhere else the decisions are being made.

What I want to say here is something different. It is about a voice.

For years, Iranians tried to warn the world. They asked for help, not military invasion, but acknowledgement. They said: this regime will not stay contained. It is only a matter of time. They were not wrong.

The drones that Russia used to strike Ukrainian cities were mostly Iranian. The missiles that armed proxy forces across four countries were Iranian. The ideology that justifies the rape and killing of young women arrested for their manner of dress is Iranian state policy. And through all of it, through the Green Movement, through the protests after the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, through the Woman Life Freedom uprising, through the terrible days of late 2025 when an internet blackout preceded the killing of tens of thousands in the streets over just three days, those voices were heard politely and then set aside. Chosen to be ignored, even by politicians who knew better.

War is easy to start, difficult to manage, and far more difficult to end. There is a cost to that silence. Not only the cost paid by Iranians, though that cost has been paid in blood across four decades, but also the cost borne by a world that believed it could manage a regime like this indefinitely, at arm's length, through negotiation and patience. That calculation was made in good faith by serious people. But it was wrong.

So when I heard the news on that Saturday morning, standing still on a quiet street with my dog at my side, my companion, the creature that offers me uncomplicated kindness, I felt something heavy and complicated and honest.

I felt the weight of Flight 655, shot down in 1988, 290 civilians gone in an instant because of decisions made by powerful actors. I felt the weight of Flight 752, 175 people including children, and my own desperate flight out of Tehran the night before it fell. I felt the weight of every protest, every arrested girl, every family that lost someone to a regime that had decided its own survival justified anything.

And I felt, I will not pretend otherwise, relief.

Not the clean relief of justice. Something murkier and more human than that. The relief of a person who has carried something for a very long time and felt, for one moment, that the carrying might one day end.

I do not know what comes next for Iran. I have learned to be cautious about hope. History does not move in straight lines, and the end of a leader does not automatically mean the end of the system he built. There are people, institutions, and interests that will outlast him. But I know this: the millions of Iranians who felt what I felt on Saturday morning are not celebrating violence. They are marking the possible end of something that was done to them, to their country, their culture, their children, their futures, without their consent, and often over their explicit resistance.

The poet Saadi, who was born in my hometown of Shiraz eight centuries ago, wrote that human beings are members of a whole, and that when one suffers, none can be at rest. I learned those words as a child. I have wondered, in the years since, whether the world actually believes them.

Perhaps now, at least, it is possible to wonder what it might mean to try.

To those who don't know me: I am an Iranian-born scientist living in the United Kingdom. This piece is a continuation of my essay "When Civilians Pay the Price."