When Shahrzad went to demonstrate in the streets of Tehran on January 2, she was buoyed by one fact: The day before, President Trump had promised that if Iran killed protesters, “the United States of America will come to their rescue.”
“We were all so hopeful,” the 29-year-old woman, who left Iran a few days ago for a nearby country, told me. Like many of those I spoke with for this article, she used a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against her family. “But when Khamenei started threatening us the day after, we were shit-scared. What if they came to a deal with Trump over our heads?”
In the two weeks since, the Iranian regime has committed its biggest atrocity since the 1980s, killing at least 3,919 protesters, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. Trump has yet to act on his promises, though he has repeated them several times. Many hope he might still intervene. But Trump has also disheartened Iranians by downplaying the regime’s violence. On Friday, he puzzlingly thanked Iran’s leaders for allegedly halting their planned execution of 800 protesters.
Over the years, I’ve often sought the opinion of Iranians for or against foreign intervention. And it has long been a contentious question that’s sharply divided the opponents of the Islamic Republic. But posing this question to about a dozen Iranians in recent days has yielded answers that feel strikingly new. First, most of those I spoke with favored one form or another of intervention by the United States. Second, many favored what would have been unthinkable not long ago: for Trump to take out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Melika, a 21-year-old Iranian student in Europe who left Iran a few weeks ago, strongly opposed the Israeli-American attacks on Iran last year. A socialist feminist who took part in the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022–23, she is generally skeptical of foreign intervention. But faced with the regime’s brutal violence over the past two weeks, she now can’t help but favor some kind of action from the U.S., especially given that Trump promised it.
“I’d frankly like Trump to kill Khamenei,” she told me. “I am worried about a broader war that would hurt Iran’s infrastructure. I wouldn’t like for us to become an Iraq, happy that Saddam is gone but becoming worse. But the Islamic Republic has to pay a price.” She speculated that killing Khamenei could heighten the power struggle inside the regime and perhaps stanch the repression and killing of protesters.
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Shahrzad told me that many of those who protested with her agreed. “The people of Iran would like to see a Venezuela-style operation,” she said, “even if it seems like a strange demand for Iran.”
She struggled to maintain her composure as we spoke. Two of her friends were killed last week, along with nine others known to her broader friend circle.
The sentiments of these young activists are shared by some internationally renowned opponents of the Iranian regime several decades their senior. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, the celebrated filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the scholar Mohammad Javad Akbarin, and four others issued an open letter calling for what they termed a “humanitarian intervention.”
Akbarin is a supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister of the Islamic Republic whose reformist candidacy for the presidency touched off the 2009 Green Movement. Mousavi has been under house arrest since 2011. Until a few years ago, for someone from his political corner to demand an American hit on Khamenei would have been unthinkable. But Akbarin, now based in London, told me: “Ali Khamenei’s elimination is a necessary condition for any change in Iran. If he stays in power, more people will be killed following the next protests.”
Akbarin opposes wider measures, such as striking the bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as Israel did in June. But he believes that taking out Khamenei would open a path for change, preferably led by domestic elements in Iran. “It will help us enter the transition period,” he said.
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Mostafa Saber, a Vancouver-based leader of a prominent left-wing Iranian party, does not share many political views with Akbarin but agreed with him on this point. “Regardless of what I think, many people in Iran want support from Trump,” he told me by phone. “They’d like him to hit Khamenei. This is what the people want. And if he does, this can benefit the revolution.”
Saber, too, doubts the utility of American military engagement beyond such an operation. “A broader military attack will help the Islamic Republic and hurt the revolution,” he said. “We oppose such intervention. An all-out war will surely benefit the Islamic Republic. They will militarize the atmosphere.”
He pointed to this past summer’s 12-day war with the U.S. and Israel, which paused domestic actions, such as a nationwide truck-driver strike that was then under way. “But to take out Khamenei,” as Trump did with the IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani, “is a different matter,” he said. “Khamenei’s loss will take cohesion out of the Islamic Republic and will add to the people’s morale.”
Some activists have a different view of what sort of action Trump should take, however. Ali Vakili, an activist in New York City with extensive contacts in Iran, expressed reservations about an American hit on Khamenei. The supreme leader “shouldn’t be a martyr,” Vakili told me. “The people of Iran should decide his fate themselves.”
Vakili told me that he’d rather see the U.S. hit IRGC bases, and that “U.S. jets should remain in Iranian skies for a while” so that people might feel that the United States is really behind them. Maybe such a threat could force the regime to change its behavior—or even lead it to transition Khamenei and those close to him out of power in favor of more technocratic elements.
The consensus for foreign intervention among those I spoke with was wider spread and more politically diverse than ever before, in my experience, but it was by no means unanimous. Elahe Ejbari, a student activist who fled Iran in 2022, started a counterpetition to the one that Ebadi and Akbarin signed. Ejbari’s petition supports the people’s movement against the regime but declares that “tying the destiny of Iranian popular struggles to foreign intervention is dangerous and irresponsible.”
[Arash Azizi: Change may be coming to Iran]
“History shows us that foreign intervention in the global South will never lead to freedom,” she told me by phone from Germany. Even a direct hit on Khamenei, she said, “will only make the region more insecure.”
Another statement, signed by 14 luminaries including the popular journalist and scholar Alireza Rajaee, condemns both the regime’s violence and “any foreign intervention in our dear country Iran.” It warns that unless “fundamental peaceful change” is brought about by Iran’s rulers, “more difficult changes will become inevitable.”
Ultimately, Iran’s next chapter will be the outcome not only of what America does or does not do but also of the interactions among regional actors, protesters, and the regime’s web of factions. How these will unfold is all but impossible to predict.
But one thing is clear. Until a few years ago, millions of Iranians repeatedly voted in the country’s mostly unfree elections, hoping that regime insiders could pave a path for reform. They wouldn’t have dreamed of demanding change from American bombers or drones, or of asking the U.S. president to please kill the supreme leader for them.
Khamenei’s obstinate refusal to effect any meaningful change and his bloody massacre of civilians in droves have brought Iranians to this point. The grand ayatollah has brought them only death, disaster, and misery, and so they are desperately seeking a way out—by any means necessary.
