Iranian American who fled Iran to escape death says war brings a 'weird sense of hope'

An Iranian American whose family fled Iran after witnessing public whippings and a man set on fire by the regime said the current conflict has filled him with sadness but also a strange "sense of hope" as he looks to stand in solidarity with Iran's underground Church. 

Armin Assadi, who now lives in Minnesota with his wife, Ashlee Assadi, was only 7 years old when his family fled Iran in 1988 after witnessing “many atrocities,” according to KMSP-TV. The family first traveled to Pakistan before arriving in the United States.

While it has been decades since Assadi left the country with his family, he has mixed emotions about the current conflict sparked Feb. 28 when the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against Iran that reportedly resulted in the death of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several other leaders. 

"Fear, sadness, grief, mourning, but at the same time, you have this weird sense of hope," Armin Assadi told the local Fox affiliate in an interview. "Where, wow, Iran might be free for the first time in 47 years if what we think is happening is happening."

The Assadis say the Iranian Christian community in Minnesota had already been praying for people in Iran before the latest conflict began.

"That’s a level of desperation I don’t know how to convey to people. This culture has existed thousands of years before this regime ever existed," Assadi said. "In honor of the Iranian underground Church, this is where we are going to be doing church in solidarity with them."

Following the strikes late last month, President Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Khamenei had the “blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands and was responsible for the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people all across many countries.”

“Last night, all over Iran, the voices of the Iranian people could be heard cheering and celebrating in the streets,” Trump said.

The conflict has since expanded, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard firing missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf Arab states.

Assadi’s reflections about his home country and the latest conflict drew public attention after Ashlee Assadi shared a viral post on Facebook on Feb. 28 asking people to pray for the Iranian people.

“Lord, protect our troops. Protect the Iranian people from the casualties of war. Shield the innocent,” she wrote. “Comfort the grieving. Strengthen the underground church. Let a holy battle cry rise from Your people across the world. Shake complacency. Awaken intercessors.”

In the post, Ashlee Assadi stressed that Iranians have long been at war, but their weapons have been prayer and fasting. She highlighted atrocities committed by an Islamic regime that took control in the late 1970s, which she said has imprisoned and killed Iranian citizens.

“We feel grief. We feel the weight of the innocent lives that’ve already been lost and the ones who may be caught in the crossfire of war,” Ashlee Assadi said about how she and her husband feel about the conflict. “War is never light. It’s never clean. It costs something. But beneath the grief, something else is rising.”

“Hope,” she added.

The wife also shared some of her husband’s backstory, revealing that he and his family fled in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. According to Ashlee Assadi, her husband’s family believed remaining under the Islamic regime in Iran meant death.

In another Facebook post on March 3, Ashlee Assadi provided more details about her husband’s childhood in Iran, saying he was only 4 when he witnessed the public whipping of a man accused of speaking out against the regime.

“This was not something he heard about later. He saw it. He felt the chaos of the crowd. He saw the brutality,” she explained. “Blood splattered onto him as he wiped tears from his eyes. He was a child trying to understand how words could end a life.”

As a young child, Armin Assadi also once helped his grandmother try to stop a man from burning after the regime intentionally set him on fire. Public punishments meant to intimidate citizens and neighbors disappearing are part of “normal life” for many Iranian families, Ashlee Assadi said in her Facebook post.

“When you hear that the Iranian people are crying out for freedom, please understand this is layered with decades of lived trauma,” she wrote. “It is the cry of mothers who have buried sons. It is the cry of fathers who have been silenced. It is the cry of children who grew up too fast.”

“This is not political for us. It is deeply personal,” she added.