Mehdi M. Kashani · for CBC First Person

· Posted: Mar 21, 2026 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: March 21

This First Person column is the experience of Mehdi M. Kashani, who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

A costly war is raging in the Middle East and as an Iranian, I’m constantly asked about it. Non-Iranian friends, colleagues and neighbours offer unsolicited sympathy. They hope a ceasefire will be brokered sooner than later. They say they can’t imagine how devastated I must feel with my immediate family in Tehran.

It’s true that I’m devastated, but that’s not the whole truth.

In 2004, I immigrated to Canada to pursue my studies. Around that time, I heard about Cuban exiles in Florida who openly wanted the United States to help overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. The idea baffled me. Why would anyone want their own country to be invaded?

At the time, Iran’s reformist movement — though weakened — still breathed. The election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 had inspired millions of Iranians who believed gradual reform from within the system could lead to meaningful change. The path forward seemed difficult but possible. From that vantage point, asking a foreign power to intervene militarily felt not only misguided but also treacherous. However flawed our government might be, the idea of outsiders “liberating” us seemed both naïve and dangerous to me.

Twenty years later, I understand that impulse in a way I never expected.

My parents still live in Tehran. Since the war began on Feb. 28, the government has shut down the internet. The only way they can reach me is through expensive one-way international calls they initiate. When my mother asks about my newborn daughter, I try to describe her latest facial expressions because I can’t send photos or videos.

Mehdi M. Kashani, with his newborn daughter, in a photo taken six days before the war began in the Middle East. (Submitted by Mehdi M. Kashani)

Sometimes reports emerge that their neighbourhood has been bombarded. Until the next time they are able to reach me, I sit in Canada refreshing the news and scrolling through random images on social media while feeding my baby — fearing that one might show their building in ruins.

This is a horrific image, I know. I’m supposed to abhor this war and condemn it everywhere, but why can’t I bring myself to do so?

WATCH | 3 million displaced in Iran:

For nearly three decades, Iranians have tried to change their country through peaceful means. In 1997, as a teenager, I witnessed the euphoria of people voting for what many described as the “least bad” candidate in a state-supervised election, hoping incremental reform might lead to something better.

Again and again, that hope was shattered.

Every couple of years, there comes a period when I wake up in Canada to the news of protests, deaths and arrests: the demonstrations of 2017 over rising food prices, the countrywide uprising in November 2019 over a spike in gasoline prices, the uproar in 2022 following Mahsa Amini's death in police custody and most recently this January, when in just two days, at least 7,000 civilians lost their lives.

The moment that felt most personal to me was the downing of Ukrainian Flight 752 over Iran in January 2020. Several of the passengers were Iranian Canadians — people like me. It could easily have been me on that flight, had I travelled to visit my family for the new year holidays.

Meanwhile, daily life in Iran has steadily grown more difficult. Pollution chokes major cities. I sometimes have to ask my parents to stay home until rain clears the air. Power outages disrupt ordinary routines. My mother, who has mobility issues, has to remain at home when the elevator stops working. Strict dress codes remain enforced. A worsening water crisis looms. And basic freedoms — from freedom of expression to the rights of women and 2SLGBTQ+ people — remain tightly constrained.

So every time the news breaks about a new bomb or drone strike, I feel torn.

People clean debris from their apartment damaged when a nearby police station was hit Friday in a U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, March 15, 2026. (Vahid Salemi/The Associated Press)

On one side is the visceral fear for my family’s safety and for the preservation of the country’s infrastructure, cities and history. On the other is a quieter, deeply unsettling recognition: that for many of us — including some of my friends inside the country — the status quo has already become intolerable.

Like many Iranians, I fear the war. But I also fear what it would mean if it ended and nothing changed.

Living in Canada adds another layer to that conflict. I’m surrounded by well-meaning people for whom the moral lines seem much clearer: war is wrong; violence only brings suffering; surely there must be another way. 

Protesters in South Korea stage a rally against U.S. President Donald Trump asking multiple countries to send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. (Ahn Young-joon/The Associated Press)

Part of me agrees instinctively — maybe, after all, my parents were better off living in a poor, broken country than under bombs looming overhead. But another part hesitates, because the reality is not a straightforward choice between war and peace. It’s a choice between a political system that has repeatedly resisted meaningful reform and the unpredictable, frightening consequences of its collapse.

Over time, I’ve come to understand something that once puzzled me when I heard about Cuban exiles decades ago: sometimes the desire for change becomes so overwhelming that even terrifying possibilities begin to feel like the only remaining path forward.

This war feels like one more piece in a 47-year-old puzzle filled with loss, repression and unfinished hopes. Many of us are watching the destruction of our country with grief and, at the same time, with a cautious sense that change may finally be possible. Sometimes I think about my daughter, and about the hope that one day I might take her to a different Iran.

Holding those two emotions at once isn’t easy to explain. Which is why, in conversations with well-meaning Canadians, what matters most to me is often the simplest thing: their willingness to listen — to us, contradictions and all.

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