For Maryam Amini’s family, Persian new year has always been an important date on their calendar.
Each year, they would get together to exchange laughs and well wishes to mark the arrival of spring as part of the historical and cultural celebration of Nowruz.
But for the first time since the family moved to Canada nearly three decades ago, they broke with that tradition last month as Nowruz overlapped with the ongoing deadly war in Iran, their home country.
"The decision to not celebrate was deliberate, and the reason was because we were feeling so desperate,” Amini said in an interview. “We didn't see anything good coming out of this.”
Amini, who lives in Thornhill, Ont., said the cancellation of Nowruz celebrations is just one example of how the war thousands of kilometres away has impacted her daily life in Canada.
“I haven't been able to eat properly or sleep properly or even be very productive,” the 43-year-old said. “It's been very, very difficult to keep a level head.”
The intense bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel has also brought back the traumas she's carried since childhood, when she witnessed the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, she said.
"My nervous system has been shot to hell." Amini said.
“My earliest childhood memories are, in fact, from bombs that were being dropped and smoke silos that would come off.”
Amini said she was born and raised in Tehran and seeing photos of destruction there hit her “really hard.”
She works at a construction company but said she has been on an extended sick leave as she awaits a surgery.
She said she was already dealing with moderate depression caused by her pain and health condition, but a week into the war her anxiety went through the roof, prompting her doctor to put her on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in her life.
The war began after Israel and the United States attacked Iran on Feb. 28 and killed the country's supreme leader, followed by co-ordinated strikes on sites across the country. Iran responded with missile attacks on Israel and U.S. targets across the Middle East.
After 40 days of war, the Iranian and U.S. governments agreed to a two-week tentative ceasefire, but the initial round of talks over the weekend ended without an agreement to permanently end the conflict, raising questions about what will happen when the truce expires on April 22.
The U.S. military said it is imposing a naval blockade involving all Iranian ports as Iran continues its own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global oil supply and economy.
Amini said ahead of the weekend negotiations in Pakistan that she wasn’t optimistic about the future because the warring factions are not entering talks in good faith.
She said she doesn’t trust the Iranian government, and doesn't believe that the U.S. or Israeli governments are trustworthy either.
"I'm still very anxious because I don't think that this ceasefire is going to hold and I'm scared of what that's going to mean,” she said.
If the ceasefire turns into a permanent peace agreement, she fears Iranians will be left with a much more hard line government after the assassination of supreme leader Ali Khamenei, whom she called the "most moderate” figure in the regime.
Amini also said U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out Iran's population were “very disturbing.”
"When you're talking about annihilating an entire civilization, you are showing that you have zero regard for the lives of those people," she said.
Mona Ghassemi, the Montreal-based president of the Iranian Canadian Congress, called Trump’s threat “genocidal speech.”
Ghassemi said while their relatives including cousins, aunts and uncles in Iran have not been harmed by bombings, they worry about their safety all time because civilian sites have been targeted.
On the second day of the war, Ghassemi said many people showed up to the congress's board of directors meeting in tears.
“I cried during that same session as well,” Ghassemi said.
Ghassemi works as a software developer and had to take a few days off work in the early days of the war, but has since been busy advocating for the end of the conflict.
Before attacking Iran, the United States had been imposing crushing economic sanctions on the country for decades.
“The (Iranian Canadian Congress's) position is always against war and has been against the sanctions as well,” Ghassemi said. “Because we know sanctions are having a very negative economic impact and they are designed to increase the suffering of the people.”
Sarah Sabri, a researcher at the department of family medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said Iran has been under the control of a “theocratic dictatorship” that has violently oppressed government protesters for decades. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran came to power in 1979.
Sabri said she is concerned about the safety of her father, who visited Iran in November and has been stuck there ever since.
She said she knows someone who lost her mother in a bombing a few weeks ago. "It hit very close to home, because we are all worried about our family members in Iran."
Sabri said her biggest concern is the future of Iran under the current government, which she believes has been weakened by the U.S. and Israeli strikes.
“But a weakened regime is not really less dangerous for its own people," Sabri said. "To the contrary, I think that it would be even more aggressive."
While this year’s Nowruz wasn’t much of a celebration for Sabri, she got together with her family and friends on the first day of spring to wish for a “new beginning” in their home country.
She said members of the Iranian Canadian community have stepped up efforts to help each other during these difficult times.
"We have a very supportive community, luckily, in Halifax," she said. "We try to get together, go for a walk and just be with, for each other."
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout - Maryam Amini
