An Anglican bishop who left Iran after the 1979 revolution has warned the West that the regime in Tehran “shouldn’t be underestimated” as it does everything it can to survive another day.
Iran “constantly seems to surprise the West”, said the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani. “I’m not a politician, but I imagine that [US President Donald] Trump is probably quite surprised at the response by Iran to these latest attacks.
“So, I think people underestimate their ability to have planned for this event – they probably knew it was coming.”
Bishop Francis-Dehqani, 59, was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1966. Her father was Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran and presiding bishop of the Episcopal church in Jerusalem and the Middle East.
In the wake of the revolution in 1979, there were raids on their house, her father was imprisoned and there was an assassination attempt on her father’s life in which her mother Margaret was wounded.
Then, while her father was on duties elsewhere in the Middle East, her brother Bahram was murdered.
After the funeral, Guli, her mother and her sister Shirin joined her father abroad and they eventually settled in the UK as refugees when Bishop Francis-Dehqani was 14 years old.
Reflecting on the current situation in Iran, the bishop said she believed this regime is in its death throes.
“But death throes can last for a very, very long time,” she said in an interview with PA. “I don’t have any clear sense of when it will end, but I believe it will end, and so I think they feel a sort of existential threat.
“I think everything they’re doing is about surviving another day, hence the brutality of the crackdown we saw at the end of last year into the beginning of this. It was utterly, utterly barbaric.
“I think everything they’re doing is about trying to survive another day and that shouldn’t be underestimated.”
The bishop, who in 2021 used her maiden speech in the House of Lords to detail the “intense persecution” she and her family suffered during the Islamic Revolution, added that she thinks it was right that the UK stood by international law and refused to join in with the initial US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Her fear is that Iran will descend into a civil war.
“There is no credible opposition around which people will coalesce," Bishop Francis-Dehqani said.
“If the regime does kind of collapse in some form of chaos, I really worry that there will be civil war.
“There are factions who are seeking change. Some of them are no better, if not worse, than what we have at the minute. And I really fear civil war and massive bloodshed.”
Bishop Francis-Dehqani added that any regime change will have to come from within Iran.
“The West has intervened so often in the politics of Iran, the people almost have lost the ability to work out their future for themselves,” she said:
She added that the West should “give support to dissident groups, help the Iranian people, but they have to have agency in working out what comes next”.
“And, certainly, democracy is a far-off dream. Democracy doesn’t come to a nation overnight, it has to be learnt. And Iran has never been democratic,” she said.
As she discussed her concerns, the bishop recalled a message she received from someone in Iran during the protests in January, who told her that there are terrorist dissident groups making use of the unrest.
She said that while there were some reports of celebrations in Iran at the death of the Ayatollah, her worry is that, as time goes on and “the reality kicks in that this is not going to be over quickly”, that the elation “will turn to real fear”.
“I really weep for what could be coming in the coming days and weeks,” she said add that she is “not getting anything out of Iran at the minute, my messages aren’t getting through and nothing’s coming out”.
