Exiled Iranians say that the power regime “weakening day by day”, and are ready to build a new future

Erbil, Iraq – Israel has been hammering Iran Nuclear and Military Sites For a week. To achieve their objectives, Israeli combat aircraft must cover approximately 1,000 miles, crossing up to three countries, including Iraq, which is right on the western border of Iran. For decades, the Iranian groups opposed to the theocratic rulers of the Islamic Republic have organized in exile through the border in Iraq, including the ethnic Kurdish factions that have been organized well and armed.

Kawsar Fattaahi is a leader of one of the opposition parties that has been prohibited in Iran and labeled as a terrorist organization by Tehran authorities.

“The regime is weakening day by day,” he told CBS News. Fattahi believes that the government led by Ayatolá Ali Khamenei It could collapse under the pressure of the Israeli assault. If he does, she said they would be only deserts for Islamic uncompromising who have governed the nation with an iron fist for almost half a century.

“Okay, the war is bad. People are dying. But it is not yet to kill (as) the Iranian regime in itself,” he told CBS News, arguing that Iran’s leaders have killed more Iranian over the decades that the Israelis with a war week. Iranian officials have only recognized about 220 deaths from Israel’s strikes, but Washington human rights activists in Iran Group, which is based on a network of sources in the country, He says that the death toll is really greater than 650With more than 2,000 others injured.

Ayatollah Khamanei, the 86 -year -old man who ruled the nation of 90 million people for almost four decades, is only the second supreme leader of Iran since the 1979 revolution that led to the conservative and deeply anti -American power of the Islamic Republic. The revolution demolished a pro -western, but deeply corrupt family that had led Iran to become a bastion of secularism and relative prosperity in the region.

Many major Iranians can still remember those days before the revolution, and many younger Iranians, even with their censored vision of the outside world, yearn freedoms that the regime has brutally suffocated.

The regime is deeply unpopular with many Iranians, and that has manifested in mass protests several times in the last decade, including those who ask for the end of the forced Islamic clothing codes and other restrictions on women. The demonstrations have been met with the mortal force.

Iranian opposition wants support, but not we “boots on the ground”

Seeking to take advantage of the vein of discontent over low heat within Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appealed to the Iranians to get up against your own government Once again, say now is the time, with the regime in its weakest thanks to the assault of your country.

“People brave from Iran, your light will defeat the darkness,” he urged last week after throwing the attacks.

Fattahi said it is not an extravagant expectation.

Due to the war, the “Iranian regime has lost its control to suppress people, because much the leadership of IRGC (body of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard) has been murdered,” he said. “Now the power of suppression is weakening within Iran, so it can lead people to return to the street.”

But Fattahi told CBS News that Iranians do not want Israel, or the United States, to design a regime change in Tehran. She said that while US air attacks could help further weaken the government, Iranians want to overthrow their leaders, and decide who replaces them, on their own.

“We don’t want your boots on the ground, obviously,” he said. “We do not want (a) invented state.”

What kind of support does Fattahi and his largest group in the world want?

“They would not commit you to the regime, because they are killing people,” he said. “The world would be a better place without the Iranian regime, for all of us.”

She said that the Iranians, with enough support from the international community, are ready and willing to build their own new government, and “we want a democratic Iran. We want a secular Iran.”

She said her party was already arguing with US officials.

“We are negotiating,” he said. Fattahi would not enter into the response that his group was receiving from the White House at this stage.

The exiled heir prince of Iran says that “discussions have begun on a postislamic republic that Iran has begun”

The Kurds groups are not the only Iranian exiles anxious to see the back of the clerical regime, however, nor the only ones who will probably talk to officials in Washington about what is coming later.

The heir prince Pat Pahlavi, the son of the last real leader of Iran, the Shah who was shot down in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has also lived for years in exile, and has also been an open critic of Ayatollah. Pahlavi, who lives in the Washington DC area, has indicated in interviews this week that he wants to lead a political transition, and has already been in discussions about the future of his country.

“Informed sources within the country that have been in contact with me say that the regime’s command and coordination structures are broken down at a remarkable pace.” Pahlavi said In a message posted on social networks on Friday. “On the other hand, the international community is realizing that the Islamic Republic has no future and that our discussions about a postislamic republic have begun, which could accelerate and facilitate the fall of the regime.”

It is not clear how much support the son of the expelled Shah, whose family is seen as close to the United States and Israel, or the exiled Kurdish groups, could actually obtain among the Iranians. Nor is it clear how many Iranians still in the country could feel safe enough to return to the streets, or when you can reach that point, given how quickly and violently the previous popular surveys have been described.

Any US military participation in the offensive against the regime could bring that point closer, but Khamenei warned that such movement would find “irreparable damage” for the United States.

The US military bases throughout the Middle East are possible objectives for Iranian reprisals, along with the approximately 40.00 US troops based in them.

In 2020, they would attacked an American base here in Iraq with ballistic missiles. CBS News was there only a few days later to witness extensive damage, although members of the US service were not killed. Uu. Now, Israel has superiority in Iranian airspace, which has used to remove missile and drones sites. Iran’s regional proxy groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, which for a long time have raised a threat to the US bases in the region, have also been seriously exhausted by months of Israeli strikes.

Even so, it is not clear what they could be able, even in their weakened state.

Tucker Reals and

Steve Berriman

contributed to this report.