Iran International
Daniel Levinson, son of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson who vanished in Iran over 19 years ago, says the US‑Israeli strikes could bring long‑delayed justice to his family and strengthen the fight for freedom against Tehran's oppressive regime.
Few Americans have been more entangled with the secretive world of Iran’s intelligence operations than the Levinson family.
Robert Levinson, a 22‑year FBI veteran who spent his career dismantling criminal networks and pursuing corrupt regimes, vanished in March 2007 after traveling to Kish Island for what was later revealed to be an unsanctioned CIA mission.
He had gone to meet a source as part of an investigation into corruption and money laundering when Iranian intelligence detained him.
Washington later concluded that Levinson likely died in Iranian custody, though his remains were never recovered. In 2020, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Iranian officials Mohammad Baseri and Ahmad Khazai for their roles in his disappearance.
Baseri’s name resurfaced this week when Iranian state media confirmed he was killed in the joint US‑Israeli airstrikes on Tehran that also hit Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sites and intelligence facilities.
Learning of Baseri’s death, Levinson said, felt like a long‑overdue turning point, matched in significance only by the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on first day of war.
“Khamenei had the power to free my dad at any point and chose not to. He knew what was happening and did nothing, so for our family, it’s been an emotional moment — but not one of grief.”
His father, he said, “was a patriotic American who always wanted to make sure justice was served — not just in the United States, but around the world.”
The recent strikes, he believes, “may finally hold some of those responsible accountable.”
Levinson has spent nearly twenty years seeking answers and helping other families do the same. He was instrumental in advancing the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage‑Taking Accountability Act, which strengthened US tools for responding to hostage situations abroad.
From those efforts, he’s come to see patterns in how authoritarian states operate — and how they collapse.
“There are people who know exactly what happened to my dad,” he said. As pressure mounts on the regime, “maybe some will defect or reveal the truth.
Iran’s armed forces are reportedly under heavy strain as the war intensifies.
"There’s still a 25 multimillion‑dollar US reward for information about his case.” The strikes, he said, could finally create the conditions where long‑hidden information emerges.
Although the family continues to grieve, Levinson said they also feel a renewed sense of purpose.
“Justice is coming,” he said. “We’re not going to forget. Those involved still have the chance to do the right thing.”
Levinson drew a stark contrast between Iran’s leaders and its citizens, saying that ordinary Iranians “are living under unimaginable tyranny” yet continue to fight bravely for their rights. Many, he said, “want freedom — and they look to America with hope.”
The Levinson family’s fight has transformed from a personal search for truth into a symbol of broader resistance against impunity.
“We’ve worked to protect his legacy and make sure what happened to him never happens to another American family,” Daniel said.
“Now, with the regime shaken and the world watching, maybe it’s finally time for justice — and for freedom for the Iranian people.”
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Larijani had been killed in the strikes, while the Israeli military confirmed it targeted him in Tehran. The military separately said a strike killed Soleimani, head of the Basij paramilitary force, along with other senior officials.
Katz used stark language in comments released by his office after a security assessment.
“Larijani and the Basij commander were eliminated overnight and joined the head of the annihilation program, Khamenei, and all the eliminated members of the axis of evil, in the depths of hell,” Katz said.
The Israeli military said Soleimani was struck at a tent camp recently established by the Basij after earlier Israeli attacks damaged several headquarters used by the paramilitary organization.
According to the military, the strike also killed the deputy commander of the Basij and several other senior officials.
The Basij, which operates under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has long been associated with the enforcement of ideological policies and the suppression of dissent inside Iran.
The reported killings mark one of the most significant decapitation strikes against Iran’s leadership structure since the outbreak of the current conflict.
Larijani: Insider and wartime power broker
Ali Ardashir Larijani, born on June 3, 1945 in Najaf, Iraq, rose to become one of the most influential figures in the Islamic Republic over four decades.
He came from a clerical family originally from Mazandaran province in northern Iran. His father, Hashem Larijani, was a cleric, and several of his brothers also held senior posts within the Iranian state.
His political career began in the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and later moved into government posts.
Larijani served as deputy labor minister and later as deputy minister of information and communications technology before he was appointed in 1994 as the head of the state broadcasting organization, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
He led the state media network for a decade, a role that gave him a position in shaping the government’s propaganda during a politically turbulent period.
In 2005 he was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, placing him at the center of Iran’s security policy and nuclear negotiations. In that role he served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in talks with European powers.
Larijani later entered parliamentary politics and became speaker of the Iranian parliament in 2008, a position he held until 2020.
He ran for president in 2005 but finished sixth, and later attempted to run again in 2021 and 2024. Both candidacies were blocked by the Guardian Council, which vets candidates for high office.
In August 2025, he returned to the center of national security policy when he was appointed once again as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
Following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the 2026 US-Israeli strikes, some analysts and media reports described Larijani as acting as Iran’s wartime leader, relying on long-standing ties to security institutions and clerical networks.
The United States imposed sanctions on Larijani in January 2026 over his role in the violent suppression of protests inside Iran.
Iranian on social media blame him as the mastermind behind the massacre of around 36,500 protesters during January uprising. Israeli officials said their overnight strike targeted him in Tehran.
Soleimani: Basij commander
Gholamreza Soleimani, born in 1963 in Farsan in Iran’s Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, built his career inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia.
Despite sharing the surname, he was not related to Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Guard’s Quds Force who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Soleimani joined the Basij as a volunteer during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and later became a member of the Revolutionary Guards.
He steadily rose through the ranks and eventually became commander of the Basij Organization in 2019.
The Basij, a paramilitary network with branches across Iran, operates under the authority of the Revolutionary Guards and has played a key role in enforcing ideological policies and mobilizing supporters of the Islamic Republic.
The force has also been widely accused by human rights groups of participating in violent crackdowns on protests.
Soleimani was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for his role in the repression of those protests.
The United States Treasury placed him on its Specially Designated Nationals list later the same year.
Additional sanctions were imposed by the United Kingdom and Canada in connection with human rights abuses.
The strikes occurred as Israel and the United States continued a broad aerial campaign against Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Israeli air defenses detected a new ballistic missile launch from Iran toward northern Israel on Tuesday.
It entered their bodies – in sleepless nights, stomach illness, obsessive counting of the dead, and a persistent sense that something in their relationship to Iran had been permanently altered.
Now, two months later, as the United States and Israel wage war against the Islamic Republic and another far stricter internet blackout grips the country, that earlier rupture is returning with renewed force.
Images of death, the disappearance of communication, and the uncertainty surrounding Iran’s future have reopened a wound many in the diaspora say never fully closed.
A new qualitative study by researcher Nazanin Shahbazi, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, helps explain why.
Based on eight in-depth interviews with politically engaged members of the Iranian diaspora conducted shortly after the January killings and end of internet shutdown, the research explores how people far from the violence nevertheless experienced the uprising and massacre as a personal rupture – one that reshaped their bodies, their sense of time, and even what it meant to say “I am Iranian.”
“The protests, the killings, the internet blackout and the blocked funerals were not separate chapters,” Shahbazi told Iran International. “For the people I spoke with they formed one continuous shock that reorganized their lives.”
Human rights organizations have documented the repression in detail – the shootings, the arrests, the intimidation of families and the pressure placed on relatives of the dead. What those reports cannot capture is how such violence lives on in those who witness it from afar.
“They can tell us what was done to people and roughly how many were killed,” Shahbazi said. “But they can’t show what it feels like to live with that in your body, your sleep, your relationships and your sense of future.”
Body keeps the score
One of the most striking patterns in the interviews is how often the experience of the massacre appeared in the body.
Participants described vomiting after seeing images of burned bodies, sudden weight gain, eczema, IBS flare-ups, breathlessness, grinding teeth and persistent insomnia. Some lost their appetite entirely. Others said their ordinary routines collapsed into constant monitoring of news from Iran.
“When words ran out, people kept returning to their bodies,” Shahbazi said. “Sudden vomiting, weight gained in twenty days, neck spasms or grinding teeth were how they registered what they could not yet fully think or articulate.”
The body, in this sense, became both witness and container.
Political violence was not simply something they analyzed or debated. It was something that settled into digestion, sleep, muscles and skin.
Shahbazi believes those reactions reveal dimensions of suffering that familiar categories like trauma or PTSD sometimes fail to capture.
“Diagnostic labels can flatten experience into symptom lists,” she said. “What people described were very concrete bodily dramas tied to images and events in Iran.”
Safe but summoned
Another recurring theme was the strange moral position created by exile.
The interviewees were physically safe – living in UK, Europe, North America or elsewhere outside Iran – yet many said they did not experience themselves as distant observers.
“I would describe their condition as safe but summoned,” Shahbazi said. “They lived outside the field of bullets but inside a field of responsibility.”
Again and again participants returned to a painful question: why am I here while others were killed?
Exile did not reduce the emotional weight of the uprising. In many cases it intensified it.
“Safety, mobility and an intact body were experienced not simply as privileges,” Shahbazi said. “They were felt as a kind of unpaid debt to those who stayed and faced lethal risk.”
That sense of symbolic debt helps explain why many interviewees described weeks in which work, sleep and daily routines collapsed into constant monitoring of events in Iran.
Some called friends inside the country repeatedly. Others spent hours tracking death tolls or watching newly emerging videos.
They were not simply following the news. They were trying to answer a moral demand they felt placed upon them.
Language at its limit
The scale of the violence also strained language itself. Participants repeatedly reached for extreme words – “catastrophe,” “slaughter,” or “something like a Holocaust” – because ordinary vocabulary seemed incapable of holding what they had seen.
“Everyday language felt too small,” Shahbazi said. “So people borrowed the biggest words they could find.”
Even those words felt insufficient.
Many interviewees hesitated as they spoke, qualifying their descriptions with phrases like “something like” or “nothing else really covers it.”
Numbers became another way of trying to grasp the event.
Several participants described compulsively tracking death tolls or attempting rough calculations of how many people might have been killed.
“Counting was a way of making the killings halfway thinkable,” Shahbazi said.
A different Iranian-ness
Despite the suffering described in the interviews, the research also uncovered something unexpected. Several participants said the uprising had changed how they understood their own identity.
For years, many had associated being Iranian internationally with embarrassment tied to the Islamic Republic’s image abroad. After the protests, that feeling began to shift.
Shahbazi said several participants described a “partial lifting of shame” when saying they were Iranian.
“In its place they spoke about pride in the courage and sacrifices of protesters,” she said.
Some described renewed attachment to Iranian culture, language and land. Others spoke about admiration for the mothers who stood at the forefront of demonstrations.
Shahbazi believes this shift may have political consequences as well.
“It recenters being Iranian around equality, justice and shared humanity,” she said, “rather than around the state’s ideology.”
That transformation remains fragile.
The war now unfolding and the renewed blackout mean that images of violence are again entering Iranian homes and diaspora communities alike.
But if the interviews reveal anything, it is that the event did not remain confined to the streets where it began.
As Shahbazi put it: “For many Iranians in the diaspora, the massacre did not stay on their screens; it cut into their bodies, their sense of time, and even the way they dare to say, ‘I am Iranian.’”
The players had been part of Iran’s women’s national team delegation competing abroad before leaving the team and seeking protection in Australia.
In a statement posted on social media, chief executive Kaz Patafta said Brisbane Roar was committed to providing a supportive environment for the players while they considered their next steps.
The crisis surrounding the team began earlier in the month when the players refused to sing the Iranian national anthem before their opening match against South Korea in AFC Women's Asian Cup.
The silent protest came shortly after the escalation of war involving Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and was quickly condemned by state media in Tehran as an act of “wartime treason.”
In the days that followed, several members of the Iranian delegation sought asylum in Australia. But according to informed sources, pressure from Iranian authorities soon intensified, with messages relayed to the players through members of the team’s own staff urging them to abandon asylum plans and return to Iran.
One member of the technical staff, Zahra Meshkinkar, who had also sought asylum, has been relaying messages from Iranian football officials to players, encouraging them to withdraw their requests and rejoin the team.
Remaining members of the squad were later moved to Kuala Lumpur, where sources say the players have been kept under tight supervision in a hotel.
Journalists and outside visitors have been barred from entering, and some players have had their mobile phones confiscated or are allowed to use them only under the supervision of officials linked to the Iranian Football Federation.
Despite the earlier asylum requests, several players have now withdrawn their applications and are en route to return to Iran, after what sources described as sustained pressure on the team and warnings that their families could face consequences if they refused to go back.
Human rights groups have warned that athletes involved in the anthem protest could face punishment upon their return.