The Side of the Human Soul: Iran and Afghanistan, My Two Homes

On refusing regimes, refusing empires, and standing only with the living

Every morning in Tehran, I would take my five-year-old daughter by the hand and walk toward the neighborhood bakery for nan sangak. The air was thick with car smog, the streets buzzing with impatient traffic and vendors calling out their wares, windows rolled down so music from worn-out speakers spilled into the avenue. The pollution pressed against our lungs while the bright sun bounced off windshields and concrete, and somehow the exhaust, dust, and warmth mingled into a single, stubborn perfume. It mixed with the yeasty scent of fresh bread drifting from the oven, the crackle of dough on hot stones, my daughter tugging at my arm and skipping ahead. That smell—of smog and morning bread, of danger and ordinary life side by side—has stayed with me as a strange, sweet memory for the last two decades.

I understand the trauma and rage that erupt as celebration, but I cannot call the machinery of assassination and airstrikes a path to liberation. I was not born for empires or emirs. I do not belong to the turbans that ban my sisters from the sky, nor to the uniforms that baptize bombs as freedom. The regimes that rule my motherland Afghanistan and my adopted home Iran have broken my heart a thousand times, but I will not offer that broken heart to Washington or Tel Aviv as proof of my loyalty. I cannot dance in the streets for the killing of a man like Khamenei, even knowing what his orders did to bodies and dreams. I grieve the system that made him possible, and I grieve the system that kills him from the sky. In a world drunk on sides, my only side is the side of the human soul, which I refuse to sacrifice to any flag.

I am a child of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, a daughter of a country that once knew itself as a place of poets, pomegranates, and mountain light. Before we were reduced to headlines and ruins, Afghanistan was a rhythm of morning bread, schoolyards, and radio songs floating through courtyards. From that peaceful nation, we became a battlefield stamped upon by superpowers that spoke of freedom and progress while dealing in weapons and blood. Now, decades later, I watch videos of women being struck with batons by men with long beards and archaic attire, and it is not history; it is a loop. Their clothes are the same ones I remember from the villages of my childhood, but the cruelty has grown sharper, more organized, more shameless in its certainty that God is on its side.

Memory is rich when one can remember, but memory is also dangerous when the world prefers amnesia.

As a Cold War child who fled from Red Army tanks and the American-backed war of the mujahideen in Kabul, I know the intimate texture of loss that arrives by air—bombs that fall without learning your name first. I know the taste of nights spent in half-packed rooms, the way adults whisper the word “tomorrow” as if it is a fragile glass that might shatter if spoken too loudly. I know what it means to never go back home, not because you forgot the way, but because the map itself has been eaten by war. Those “good old days” of the Cold War, which some in the West now romanticize as a time of clear moral lines, were for us the days of shattered neighborhoods and burning futures.

There are images that will not leave me—the girls in Dasht-e-Barchi, their backpacks turned into coffins by a single blast outside their school; the students in Isfahan, their bodies pulled from the rubble after another “surgical strike.” They wanted nothing more than to learn, to live, to return home with ink-stained fingers and laughter. To kill a classroom, to silence that small chorus of pencils scratching at the future, is to destroy language itself. It is to kill the very idea of what tomorrow could be.

Years later, standing in another land that is also called home, I listen to my Iranian family speak. When I try to tell them this story—the story of bombs that did not ask for my passport before they took my childhood—they shake their heads. “No, you don’t understand,” they say. “We Iranians are different. Our oppressor is unique. Our enemy is unique.” They speak from their own wounds, which I do not deny: years of dictatorship, prisons, executions, their own streets washed with the blood of protesters. Their pain is real, and I bow to it. But pain does not need to be unique to be sacred.Bombs are bombs.Death is death.Destruction is destruction.Loss is loss.The accent of the crying mother changes, but her sound is the same.

When Khamenei was killed, I watched the split-screen of the world: in one frame, people dancing in the streets, fireworks and ululations; in the other, the long shadows of yet another assassination celebrated as a strategic victory. I understand the depth of rage that makes a person step into the street and dance when the symbol of their oppression falls. I understand the desire to taste some sweetness after decades of bitterness. But what trembles in me is the knowledge that the same missiles that killed the tyrant have been killing children whose names we will never learn. The same machinery that takes out “targets” has been mowing through homes, neighborhoods, weddings, schools. To call that machinery liberation is to place a wreath of flowers on the barrel of a gun and pretend it has become a flute.

Afghanistan taught me early that the world’s empires only pretend to be different from one another. One calls itself socialist, another democratic, another a guardian of faith. They fly different flags, change their slogans, but the pattern is familiar: our lands as their chessboards, our lives as their expendable pieces. The Soviet tanks that rolled through Kabul and the American drones that hummed over Afghan skies spoke different languages but carried the same message: your sovereignty is negotiable, your suffering is collateral. When I see people in Iran dancing for the death of a man brought down by foreign missiles, I see again that cruel mirage: the fantasy that someone else’s empire will finally be the righteous one, the one that kills only the “right” people.

But I have lived long enough in exile to know: there is no clean bomb. There is no pure airstrike. There is no holy assassination. A system that believes it can deliver justice by raining death from the sky is not delivering justice; it is rehearsing its own justification for the next war, the next sanction, the next ruined childhood. I refuse to let my grief for Afghanistan and my grief for Iran be used as fuel for anyone’s imperial narrative. I will not let my heartbreak be repackaged as consent.

I do not stand with the regimes that rule my motherland and my both adopted homes, Iran and the United States. I do not stand with the bearded men who strike women in the streets in the name of God. I do not stand with the prisons, the censorship, the executions, the ideology that shrinks God to the size of a courtroom or a torture chamber. But refusing them does not require me to bow to Washington or Tel Aviv. Refusing one form of tyranny does not obligate me to cheer for another power that has learned to drape its violence in the vocabulary of democracy and human rights. I can oppose the Taliban and the Islamic Republic with every breath in my body and still say: not in my name to those who rain their missiles upon us and call it order.

Sometimes my Iranian relatives ask me, “So what do you want? If he was a dictator, shouldn’t we be happy he is gone?” I hear the weariness in their voices, the exhaustion of a people who have carried fear in their bones for forty years. I do not answer with philosophy; I answer with the memory of a little girl watching tanks roll past her window. I say: yes, I understand your relief. I, too, have dreamed of seeing tyrants fall. But I refuse to celebrate a death that arrives as a lesson in the language of empire. I refuse to erase the hands that orchestrated the strike simply because they happened to point at a man we all feared.

The older I become, the more I mistrust any politics that requires me to dehumanize someone in order to feel whole. If I must dance on a corpse to feel free, then my freedom is already poisoned. Humanity in its full essence and Truth, for me, does not mean pretending there is no injustice or flattening all suffering into a vague oneness. It means seeing that every system of domination—whether in a black turban, a military uniform, or a tailored suit—relies on the same illusion: that some lives are expendable for the sake of a higher goal. My refusal is simple: I will not participate in that illusion, even when it arrives wearing the face of my enemy.

I am not for the regimes. I am not for the empires. I stand in the uncomfortable, sacred place between, where grief does not ask for permission and compassion does not need a flag. I stand with the women in Kabul who dare to walk, even as batons rise above them. I stand with the young people in Tehran who shout for dignity in the face of guns. I stand with the children in Gaza, in Baghdad, in every city where the sky has become a source of terror instead of rain. I stand with every mother who has buried a child and does not care whether the weapon that killed them was stamped with Cyrillic, English, Farsi, Hebrew, or Pashto.Bombs are bombs. Death is death.

Destruction is destruction. Loss is loss. These are the few truths that remain when every side has finished shouting its slogans. In a world that keeps demanding that I choose, I choose the human soul. I choose to remember, even when I am told my memories are inconvenient. I choose to honor my childhood in Kabul, my family in Iran, my sisters under Taliban rule, without surrendering my conscience to any state, any army, any empire. If there must be dancing, let it be for the day when no one’s liberation is written in the language of missiles. Until then, my resistance is to keep my heart from becoming what wounded it.

Anosha Zereh

Anosha Zereh is an Afghan-born writer, poet, and meditation guide who spent almost two decades in Iran as a humanitarian. Her work weaves Afghan memory, Sufi mysticism, and women’s lives under war and exile, and has appeared across digital platforms and community spaces. She is the founder of a contemplative publishing initiative dedicated to voices living between homelands