The Blood Price Paid by Ordinary Iranians
In September 2022, Iran’s morality police beat 22-year-old Mahsa Amini to death for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.
Her murder ignited the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The regime responded with bullets, batons, torture, and mass arrests. Young women such as Nika Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh, and Hadis Najafi became symbols of a generation punished for demanding the most basic human dignity.
The brutality did not end there.
Economic collapse, corruption, water shortages, and years of repression triggered further unrest in late 2025 and early 2026. Once again, Iranian youth demanding bread, water, and freedom were met with overwhelming force. For decades, the Islamic Republic demanded sacrifice from ordinary Iranians while offering privilege, protection, and escape routes to the ruling elite.
One Rule for the People. Another for the Elite.
For 47 years, the regime has preached hatred of the West while presenting itself as the defender of Islamic morality and anti-Western resistance.
But there is one rule for ordinary Iranians — and another for the families of the powerful. While young Iranians die in the streets, the children of regime officials study, work, and build lives in the very countries their fathers publicly condemn as immoral and corrupt. The Islamic Republic tells millions of Iranians that the West is evil.
Its own elite clearly disagree.
Ali Larijani’s daughter built an academic and medical career in the United States. Mohammad-Javad Larijani’s sons established successful careers in Britain and Canada. Masoumeh Ebtekar — the former spokesperson for the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage takers and later vice president of Iran — saw her son pursue an academic career in California.
Across the Iranian elite, relatives of senior clerics, IRGC commanders, and political insiders have studied, worked, and settled in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Senior regime insiders have repeatedly been accused by Iranian dissidents and former officials of securing residency, educational opportunities, and financial pathways abroad for their families while ordinary Iranians faced repression, economic collapse, censorship, and morality police patrols at home.
Even relatives linked to the family of Ayatollah Khomeini have publicly embraced lifestyles and freedoms unavailable to many ordinary Iranian women. These are not isolated cases. This is the system itself.
“Islamic Rule for You, Not for Us”
The same ruling class that sent tens of thousands of poor Iranian children — some as young as 13 — into human wave attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, often with plastic “keys to paradise” hung around their necks, spent decades ensuring that their own children would never have to live under the conditions imposed on everyone else.
Ordinary Iranians were taught that martyrdom and resistance against the West represented the highest virtue. Elite families quietly prepared escape routes to the very countries the regime publicly condemned.
Young men from ordinary families were sent into ideological wars and revolutionary campaigns. The children of the elite were sent to universities in London, Toronto, Sydney and New York.
For decades, the regime glorified sacrifice while shielding its own families from sacrifice itself. The sons and daughters of senior officials received Western educations, foreign passports, property abroad and professional opportunities in the very societies their parents denounced as decadent and corrupt.
Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians faced censorship, collapsing economic prospects, morality police and political repression. The Islamic Republic publicly condemns the West while privately treating it as the safest, freest and most desirable place on earth for its own children.
The Failure of the Islamic Republic
The Islamic Republic built its legitimacy on the claim that it represented moral resistance against the West. But the conduct of its own elite exposes the lie.
If the West is truly evil, why do so many children of the regime’s most powerful men choose to live there? Why are the universities, hospitals, banks, and freedoms of America, Britain, Canada, and Europe considered acceptable for the ruling class but forbidden in principle for ordinary Iranians?
The answer is simple.
The regime never truly believed its own slogans. Like authoritarian elites throughout history, it used ideology as a tool for controlling the population while privately benefiting from the very system it publicly denounced. Soviet commissars did it. Communist revolutionaries did it. Iran’s ruling clerics are doing it.
A Regime Losing Its Legitimacy
Millions of Iranians no longer believe the slogans. They see the corruption. They see the double standards. They see elite families living comfortably abroad while ordinary people are beaten, imprisoned, and killed at home.
The Islamic Republic spent decades teaching ordinary Iranians to hate the West while quietly choosing the West for their own children. When the time came to decide where their sons and daughters should study, work, build careers, and raise families, many of the regime’s most powerful figures did not choose Qom.
They chose America. They chose Britain. They chose Canada. They chose the very civilization they spent decades condemning. That may be the clearest possible verdict on the Islamic Republic itself.
Shalitha Bandara
Political Commentator
