WASHINGTON: When the war on Iran began seven months ago, Washington area Iranian-American Soroush quickly found himself losing friends.

He hates the Islamic government in Tehran but believes “nothing is going to be better” by going to war.

Fellow exiles in the United States began accusing him of supporting their oppressors.

Another Iranian-American, Bahar, also found herself being cut off within the diaspora -- but in her case because she strongly supported the war launched by US President Donald Trump.

The 750,000-strong Iranian community in the US is overwhelmingly united in opposing Iran’s Islamic regime whose top leadership has been decimated by the US-Israeli offensive that has destroyed swaths of the country’s military and prompted global economic shocks.

But deep fault lines have appeared among expatriates and exiles over whether the war will succeed in ending 47 years of clerical rule in their homeland.

“Family relationships have been strained or broken...Even lifelong friendships have ended over this,” said Sahar Razavi, director of the Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center at California State University, Sacramento, who says the war exacerbated pre-existing tensions.

AFP spoke to Iranian community members around Washington about the tensions. Some requested their full names be withheld as they talked about their own friends and relatives.

‘No other solution’

Soroush, a 3D artist and animator who came to the US a decade ago, described rifts with close friends and even his own brother and sister-in-law after the war started on February 28.

“People (in Iran) are going to lose friends, family members. They’re going to lose their job, their savings,” he recalled telling them, citing the negative impacts of past US wars in the Middle East.

“They are the ones who are living it, not the Iranian diaspora,” the Christian convert told AFP as he nursed a beer at a Washington bar.

At a downtown coffee shop, Bahar, who works in the medical sector, and Aahoo Sigarchi, who works in a bank, took an opposite view.

They are fueled by outrage over the thousands of protesters killed by Iranian security forces in January 2026 which they say necessitated military action to topple the regime.

“We all have our family, our friends inside Iran, and we are just speaking the words that they can’t,” said Aahoo, a firm supporter of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah of Iran who called for an uprising then rallied support among the diaspora.

“I think we are on the right path with the war, and I believe soon we are going to get to what people are looking for,” she said, batting away questions about the failure of the military intervention to unseat the regime.

“To be realistic, we have no other solution,” Aahoo said.

‘Dug their heels in’

The war is deeply unpopular among the wider US population grappling with the knock-on effect of rising fuel prices.

Polling commissioned by the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group that opposes the war, suggests that support among the Iranian diaspora quickly diminished.

At the start of the war, the community in the US was split about half-and-half, but a second poll a month later found 66.1 percent opposed the war and only 32.7 percent supported it.

Razavi said opponents of the war who were skeptical about externally driven regime-change feel vindicated, but many supporters “have dug their heels in further.”

She said there is also a significant minority that switched stance to rally around the Iranian government as it stands up to the United States.

“That’s something among Iranian diaspora that I see accelerating,” she said.

‘Liberation struggle’ pressure

Mohammad Reza Mousavi, a former Tehran-based journalist who opposes both the war and the regime, detects waning war enthusiasm. And he bristles at the intolerance of those who have advocated for it.

“They can label you very easily with whatever they want if they realize that you’re not with them in every respect,” he said.

According to Razavi, Iranian community organizations that would host Farsi language classes or Persian poetry readings would be “raked over the coals” for not overtly expressing support for the “liberation struggle.”

Pahlavi’s supporters say communal pressure is not a one-way street.

Bahar said she has been called a fascist for voting for Trump and lost 100 Instagram followers. She has pulled her eight-year-old son from a school that teaches about Iranian art and music after a teacher kept bringing up the war in class.

But Mousavi was pragmatic about the way the war has shaken up the community.

“At these times of hardships, you understand the people around you,” he said. “You understand what sort of people they are.”