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Iranian exiles deserve a place in the pantheon of global exiles along with the Miami Cubans.
With the exception of the Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK) terror group, they are not as deadly as those Cubans who affixed themselves to the US National Security State. Think: Bay of Pigs, Watergate, the drug lords who worked in the service of the CIA and, of course, the Cuban CIA man Felix Rodriguez's role in tracking Che Guevara and overseeing his execution by soldiers of the Bolivian army.
But the level of hatred and willingness to "liberate" their countries from "usurping" Communist and theocratic governments by any means necessary and at any cost is a thing to behold.
As for the Iranian exiles who are concentrated in places such as "Tehran-geles" on the US West Coast, I am simply bemused as to how they are taken in by every negative about the anti-Islamic government regardless of its truth, semi-truth or untruth.
I will say that much of the Western media-disseminated narrative about the protests in Iran has consisted of many distortions and outright untruths.
Yet many in the Iranian diaspora who listento the anti-Mullah propaganda on BBC, US and Gulf Arab-owned Persian-language stations are either oblivious of this or do not care that the aim of those foreign actors who wish to destroy the Islamic government care nothing about the harm and destruction to ordinary Iranians if any of their so-far failed regime change plots ever come to fruition.
First of all, the US government together with Israel and its Arab Gulf allies attacked the Iranian currency through a series of currency manipulations that led to the collapse of one Iranian bank and misery for the Iranian population and its business class known as the Baazaris.
How can you be an Iranian "patriot" if you know the sort of harm crashing a currency does to the wider population?
The Bazaaris staged peaceful protests due to the hardships caused by the devaluation of the currency but this led to stage two of an intended regime change plot.
The discontent created the opportunity for Israeli intelligence, no doubt with the backing of their American counterparts, to infiltrate the protests and expand them.
I ask myself whether those in the exile community backing the so-called protests are aware that among those who took to the streets were Mossad and CIA-trained and directed Kurds, Baluchis, and Arabs. Many of the Baluchis and Arabs were sleeper cells activated for the purpose of stirring violence, while Kurdish infiltrators (many of who were caught trying to enter Iran because of a tip off by Turkish intelligence) sought to join in the mayhem. It is also likely that members of the Iranian MEK who commit acts of terror within Iran at the behest of Israel and the United States were shipped in from their base in Albania.
These gunmen and saboteurs destroyed mosques, government buildings and attacked Iranian police, killing over 300 of them.
They also shot and killed ordinary Iranians.
Thus, what happened earlier this month were not a series of "peaceful protests" organised by democracy-loving members of the Iranian populace but was in fact an armed insurgency orchestrated by foreign actors with motives which are far from wanting to engineer the creation of a powerful and successful Iranian nation state.
The violent insurrection was put down not by the Iranian government mowing down thousands of "peaceful protests" with gunfire, but by the Iranians -perhaps with the help or either Russia or China- hacking into Starlink and cutoff the instructions being relayed to the puppet gunmen by their Mossad handlers.
The falsehoods in relation to the amount of casualties and the duration of the disorder still seem prevalent among Iranian exiles.
What all should bear in mind, especially those among the Iranian exile community, is that if the attempt at regime change had succeeded, the result would not be the enthronement of "democracy" with the promise of "peace" and "prosperity" but the balkanisation and impoverishment of Iran including the Persian heartland.
The largely non-Persian (apart from the MEK) gunmen belong to separatist movements whose goals fit into the long-term objective of Zionist Israel to split the neighbouring Arab and Muslim world into small ethno-states.
The present United States government for its part, just as the predecessor administration which authorised "Operation Ajax" in 1953, wants American oil companies to control the oil and gas resources in the Persian Gulf region.
It also wants to end Iran's pivot towards the emerging Eurasian world by blocking an essential part of China's new "Silk Road". An important component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which seeks to consolidate a trade route from China to Russia via Iran.
If any of the exiles stop to think rationally about their support for the dismantling of the Iranian government they would discover that both Israel and the American government would not care if what remains of a fractured Iran lives in poverty and is engulfed in perpetual wars among ethnic Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis and others.
There is no opposition waiting within Iran to succeed the Mullahs. The narrative that the son of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would be a unifying figure capable of amassing huge levels of support is a laughable one which covers up the reality of the chaos which would follow the toppling of the Islamic government.
It is doubtful that any figure or movement within the Iranian diaspora has any influence in US government circles. But even if they did, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves about Niccolo Machiavelli’s frequent warnings about the danger of using desperate and emotionally-driven exiles in foreign policy and statecraft.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.