I'm interested to hear what the general young Iranian sentiment is towards the Iranian government, the US government, and the agreement.
I worked in Afghanistan at a telecom provider last summer. A lot of my coworkers were young 20-somethings whose parents had fled Afghanistan when the Taliban came to power from 1996-2001. The majority of them had been raised in Iran; the minority, in Pakistan.
The ones who had been raised in Iran were happy for the most part to have been able to return to Afghanistan. They told me stories of a paradoxical society that was quite forward-thinking while at the same time, extremely authoritarian and oppressive, especially with regards to youth education and expression. I kind of started to equate Iran with Singapore in my mind.
majority of young people are happy! to tell you the troth sanctions were a real pain for us, imagine every time i use internet and i forget to connect VPN i get the "Unavailable in your country message" while visiting Unity or Google Code websites.
but on the other hand there are some who are not that happy they think with this agreement we have lost decades of effort toward peacefull nuclear energy.
there is one thing for sure nobody in iran wants a nuclear weapon.
Speaking as somebody with no interest in the region, if I was an Iranian I'd want a nuclear weapon. Nobody invades a nuclear power. Nuclear powers get propped up instead of sabotaged.
It's too late for that now, though. The 5 nations that have them are the only five that will have them, if the 5 nations that have them have anything to say about it (and they do).
And it's generally understood that some other countries are only "non-nuclear" because the question hasn't come up yet. Does anyone doubt that Japan could have a nuke in three months or less if it really wanted to? Or Canada?
I am doubting the last sentence. Iran clearly has a nuclear weapons program and clearly that program has a constituency within Iran, although I am sure lots of Iranians don't want it or need it, but that's not the same as saying that nobody wants it
The ones raised in Pakistan (in general) enjoyed going back more often to visit family/friends who were still in Pakistan and didn't have too much to say about the governance of the country.
Also, I definitely want to reiterate that both groups were happy to have been raised outside of Afghanistan because they probably would've been persecuted/killed under the Taliban as the majority of them belonged to an ethnic minority group, the Hazara. The Hazara have more Asian blood than the Pashtun (majority group, typically what you would think of as "Afghan") -- I recommend that you do a quick google image search, you might be surprised at what some Afghans look like. I think I worked with mostly Iran-raised Hazara because the wealthier families fled to Iran and the children received a better education there than those who went to Pakistan, allowing them to get a relatively good job at this telecom.
As the US/EU troops have closed down bases and have all but exited the country, many Hazara are looking to leave again due to the increasing prevalence of the Taliban.
If I had to guess it's probably because they look a lot different than most Pakistani's...looks are usually the strongest influencer when it comes to discrimination.
I wonder why more of them don't go to Tajikistan/Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan where they would fit in ethnically. Probably because the socio-economic conditions there are still pretty poor, and the majority of their (usually very large) families are in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran.
> If I had to guess it's probably because they look a lot different than most Pakistani's...looks are usually the strongest influencer when it comes to discrimination.
A large majority of Hazaras identify themselves as 'shia muslim'[1]. While those, who target and kill Hazaras in Pakistan, belong to different sunni[2] militant/terrorist groups (for example, taliban, lashkar-e-jhangvi[3], their affiliated groups and offshoots in Pakistan) as they consider all 'shia muslim' heretics and fair to be killed. Since Hazaras look different and easily recognizable from a typical Pakistani, they are easy targets for their terrorist activities.
> I wonder why more of them don't go to Tajikistan/Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan where they would fit in ethnically. Probably because the socio-economic conditions there are still pretty poor, and the majority of their (usually very large) families are in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran.
I think you are not very far off the mark in your assumption here. :)
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[1] I'm a Hazara from Baluchistan, Pakistan.
[2] Btw, not all sunni muslims are extremist and after shia muslim. It's mostly follower of one particular sunni muslim sect (in Pakistan particularly): Deobandi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deobandi)
I worked in Afghanistan at a telecom provider last summer. A lot of my coworkers were young 20-somethings whose parents had fled Afghanistan when the Taliban came to power from 1996-2001. The majority of them had been raised in Iran; the minority, in Pakistan.
The ones who had been raised in Iran were happy for the most part to have been able to return to Afghanistan. They told me stories of a paradoxical society that was quite forward-thinking while at the same time, extremely authoritarian and oppressive, especially with regards to youth education and expression. I kind of started to equate Iran with Singapore in my mind.
Could you shed any light on this perspective?