Iranian Australian Neda Zeyghami writes about how her community is coping with the confronting events in their homeland.

For many Iranians in Australia, the latest escalation of violence in Iran has not arrived as “news.” It has arrived as confirmation of a long-running reality — one documented in blood, silence, and loss.

According to Iran International news agency, based on verified documents, messages, and video footage from inside Iran, more than 12,000 people have been killed by the Islamic Republic during its sustained crackdown on its own population[1]. Within days, that figure reportedly rose to over 16,500.[2] These were not combatants. They were civilians — protesters, students, workers, ordinary people demanding dignity and freedom.

Neda Zeyghami

This moment is not experienced from a distance. It is lived through constant checking of phones, fractured sleep, and a persistent sense of dread. In recent weeks, the regime cut internet access for days at a time.[3] For many families, this meant up to ten days with no contact — no calls, no messages, no confirmation that loved ones were alive. Silence becomes a weapon. Every unanswered phone call carries the possibility of the worst.

Living outside Iran does not bring peace of mind. It brings a different kind of torment: knowing something is happening and being powerless to reach those you love. Parents wait. Children wait. Siblings wait. Time stretches painfully when you do not know whether silence means safety — or death.

Within the Iranian-Australian community, reactions vary, but the emotional landscape is shared. There is fear for loved ones, grief for lives already lost, anger at decades of repression, and exhaustion from a cycle of violence that feels deliberately sustained. Yet there is also resilience. Many Iranians have lived through war, sanctions, uprisings, and repeated crackdowns. Survival, adaptation, and quiet resistance are deeply ingrained.

In recent weeks, that resistance has taken visible form. Almost every Iranian I know has tried, in whatever way they can, to show up. They attend protest gatherings in front of Parliament House and outside the U.S. Embassy.[4] They hold photos of the dead. They chant names of cities and victims. They stand there not because they believe these actions alone will stop the violence, but because silence feels like betrayal. Because forgetting would feel like complicity.

These gatherings are acts of moral insistence. They are attempts to keep Iran visible in a world that moves quickly from one crisis to the next. Iranian-Australians understand how easily attention fades. They know outrage has a short lifespan. So, they stand there to say: do not move on. Do not normalise this. Do not let these deaths become background noise.

Anyone who calls themselves a human-rights activist, an opponent of violence, a defender of safety, or a supporter of children cannot ignore the fact that a regime is killing its own people in order to remain in power. These are not abstract violations. They are deliberate acts of state violence against civilians. To look away is not neutrality. It is a failure of moral consistency.

In countless conversations within the community, the same questions keep resurfacing. How is it possible to be this brutal? How is it possible, in a technologically advanced world, to cut internet access for ten days and effectively erase a nation from communication? How is it possible that families can be left in total darkness, unable to confirm whether their loved ones are alive?

These questions are not rhetorical. They come from genuine disbelief — and from the growing recognition that cruelty, when left unchecked, has no natural limit.

We were once a nation known for poetry, art, culture, and beauty. That identity has been systematically stripped away. Politics was forced into every corner of life. Hope was replaced with fear. What remains for many families is grief — unresolved, inherited, and ongoing.

The trauma does not stop at Iran’s borders. Two days ago, a close friend of mine — an Iranian living in Australia — called me in distress. They told me they had been waking from sleep shouting, “Don’t shoot,” words they had never spoken aloud before. This is how deeply the violence travels. Even in safety, the body remembers. Even in Australia, fear follows people into their dreams.

Our bodies may be here, but our hearts bleed in the streets of Iran. These deaths are not numbers. They are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, friends and neighbours. Each death leaves behind a shattered family and an erased future.

The imbalance is stark. The regime carries guns, prisons, surveillance systems, and execution orders. The people carry only their bodies and their courage. They protest unarmed. They speak knowing the cost. And for demanding freedom, they are met with bullets.

Yet for many Iranians, the international system has not felt like protection. It has often felt like abandonment. Broad sanctions, issued in the name of accountability, have too frequently deepened everyday suffering while leaving those in power insulated. The people inside Iran are not participants in this regime; they are hostages of it. Any response that treats an entire population as leverage misunderstands the reality on the ground and risks compounding the harm.

Courage alone cannot stop gunfire — but neither can policies that punish the very people they claim to support. Without a shift in approach, violence becomes normalised and repression deepens. Statements of concern are not enough when a state wages war on its own people. And punishment that falls primarily on civilians is not justice.

A message to policymakers

For policymakers in Australia and across democratic nations, this moment demands more than careful language or familiar tools. Broad economic sanctions do not weaken authoritarian power; they often harden it. Those in control know how to profit from isolation. It is ordinary people — families, children, workers — who absorb the cost.

Iranians are trapped inside a system they cannot escape. Supporting them means shifting from population-wide punishment to targeted, people-centred action. This includes sanctions aimed specifically at decision-makers and institutions responsible for violence; sustained efforts to keep internet access open and secure and international pressure that amplifies Iranian civil voices rather than speaking over them.

Helping people change an imposed regime cannot come at the cost of destroying their ability to live. A system that starves a population while condemning its rulers is not accountability — it is moral failure. The international community must stop confusing pressure with punishment, and solidarity with distance.

There is one belief I have heard repeatedly among Iranian-Australians, regardless of age, background, or political position: if we are not their voice, this guilt will consume us. The weight of knowing and saying nothing is unbearable. Speaking out is not optional. It is a moral necessity. It is the only way many can live with themselves.

Iranian-Australians continue to speak because many inside Iran cannot. We speak because the dead deserve to be remembered as human beings, not statistics. We speak because distance does not absolve responsibility.

The world is watching. The question is whether it is willing to stand with the people, not over them, and not against them.

They were not numbers. They were lives.

1 Iran International, “At least 12,000 killed in Iran crackdown during internet blackout,” Iran International website, 13 January 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601130145

2 Iran International, “Reports indicate at least 16,500 people killed in Iran amid crackdown and internet blackout,” Iran International website, January 2026, reporting on figures compiled by doctors and sources inside Iran.

3 Reports from international media and monitoring groups indicate that Iran’s nationwide internet shutdown, imposed on 8 January 2026, lasted around ten days as communications were severely restricted amid the ongoing protests and violent crackdown.

4 ABC News, “Iranian Australians in Melbourne protest in defiance of government crackdown,” 13 January 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-13/iranian-australians-in-melbourne-protest/10622302