Iranian Americans aren't mourning Gen. Qasem Soleimani. They're glad he's dead. But, now what?

Kristin Lam | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Iranian Americans in LA speak out on death of General Qasem Soleimani Iranian Americans in Los Angeles discuss Qasem Soleimani's death. Editor’s note: The video was edited to remove a family who mistakenly appeared on camera.

LOS ANGELES – Smoke from grills full of kabob koobideh wafted past Roxanne Mirzaee as she cooked at a birthday party with Iranian American friends.

Mirzaee smiled warmly as laughter filled the air, but rising tensions far from this Beverly Hills barbecue have left her uneasy. While Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Donald Trump exchanged threats after a U.S. airstrike killed the regime's top general, Mirzaee worried for her father living in Iran.

"We don't know what's happening, or what's going to happen next," she says.

Many Iranian Americans in Los Angeles are not mourning the death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, community members told USA TODAY, but they disagreed on the potential consequences for family here and abroad. Some feared war and restrictions on travel, while others hoped the assassination would dampen terrorism and spark another protest against the Iranian regime.

Whether it was safe to share reactions to Soleimani's killing further divided the community, with more than 25 people declining to talk with USA TODAY, expressing fears that speaking out could endanger the lives of family members in their homeland. Others cited concern of being blacklisted from Iran, and some said they feared retaliation from their own parents.

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Mirzaee, 51, faced her own daughter's disapproval for criticizing the regime on Sunday night. After refusing an interview, unlike her mother, the daughter asked over a video call: Why did you do that, mom? How are we supposed to get grandpa now?

But Mirzaee, who says she fled Iran about 40 years ago to be free to voice her opinions without facing execution, was adamant. Disapproving of Trump's decision to strike Soleimani, she said the move creates sympathy for the regime.

"The way it has been carried out just makes the people of Iran more supportive of the government because there are people like him," Mirzaee says. "Killing one is not going to do much. There are hundreds worse than him. There's going to be one tomorrow taking his place."

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Still, much of the Iranian diaspora celebrated the killing, says Nasser Sharif, president of California Society for Democracy in Iran. Calling Soleimani a terrorist and a murderer of Iranians, Syrians and American soldiers in Iraq, Sharif says his contacts in Iran are thrilled and not fearful of strikes from the U.S. for any retaliation.

"I feel like there are not going be any major developments in that area because, again, the Iranian regime is very weak and vulnerable and desperate," Sharif says. "At the same time, their worry is from inside Iran. The uprising of 191 cities in Iran had a big effect. The separation that took place shows that the regime is very unpopular among the public and the young generation."

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In Southern California, which is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran, Sharif says opposition to President Hassan Rouhani's government is widespread. Thousands fled to Los Angeles after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and today about 87,000 people of Iranian descent live here, according to the U.S. census.

Among them is Mateen Markzar, 15. During brunch with his father in the Little Persia enclave nicknamed Tehrangeles – a word formed through the blending of Tehran, the capital of Iran, and Los Angeles – he worried about the potential for war in Iran.

"I know that war is costly and unnecessary," Mateen says after a sip of Persian tea. "However, if war was engaged with Iran, it would serve a benefit of squandering the Iranian regime's hopes of an all-area supremacy. It would put a damper on the Iranian regime's oppression of women and minority groups in Iran."

Mateen, who has never visited Iran, also expressed concern for culturally significant sites Trump said are possible targets if Iran attacks any U.S. assets. He listed Persepolis and the Azadi Tower before his father cuts him off, saying: You don't know that.

We don't know, Mateen acknowledges, but it's possible.

The remains of their omelette and gata pastries had gone cold. The boy's father, Sam Markzar, 51, says their family in Iran cannot say much about the rising tensions because the regime monitors everyone's actions and communications. He says he left Iran about eight years after the revolution, and adds that he is not surprised by some media reports that U.S. officials detained Iranians at the Canadian border over the weekend.

"Whatever that they do in order to secure the borders, I think that's absolutely necessary because that's the only way that they can come in if they want to plot something inside United States," Markzar says. "I hope they're not crazy enough to do that, but from mullahs (leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran), anything can go. We cannot rule out anything from them."

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A few blocks away in Little Persia, Ray Kafi passed out flyers for a convention planned before the assassination but made more timely by it. Titled "Stand with the Iranian People's Uprising for Freedom," speakers at the Jan. 11 event plan to discuss recent developments in Iran.

Taking a break from talking with fellow Iranian Americans, the 66-year-old Kafi says people's reaction to the killing of Soleimani indicates whether they support the regime or democratic protesters.

"Whoever is happy today is on the side of democracy," Kafi says. "And whoever is unhappy and has an issue, he's to the side of mullahs or that kind of policy."

Back at the birthday party in Beverly Hills, Bijan Khalili says he doesn't expect discrimination against Iranian Americans to result from the killing. Since he immigrated to Los Angeles in 1980, Khalili, 67, says he hasn't experienced discrimination. He doesn't expect unequal treatment now.

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By the grill, however, Mirzaee disagreed. Since Trump's election in 2016, she says she has seen less tolerance and more divisiveness.

"Before it was all about tolerance, tolerating each other, tolerating each other's ideas," Mirzaee says. "That's why we came here, that's why all the immigrants came here for, to be able to voice out their opinion. Now it basically takes me back to the revolution, because I was there when it happened."

All she can do now, she says, is pray.