Ir‏an’s prosecutor general’s office threatened on Monday to seize all property belonging to diaspora Iranians who expressed support for the United States and Israel, the most sweeping legal threat ever directed at Iranian nationals abroad, and one that arrived against a backdrop of mass celebratory rallies in dozens of countries where Iranians had gathered to mark the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and call for regime change in Tehran.

“Iranians abroad who align, accompany and cooperate with the American-Zionist aggressor enemy will face confiscation of all their property and other legal penalties in accordance with the law,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said, quoting the prosecutor general’s office.

The threat explicitly covered Iranians who sympathised with, supported, or cooperated with what Tehran called “the American-Zionist enemy” — language broad enough to encompass social media posts, attendance at rallies, financial donations to opposition groups, and any form of public celebration of the war’s progress. The prosecutor general’s office did not specify a mechanism for identifying targeted individuals, though newly established Telegram channels had already begun circulating the names and personal details of prominent Iranians abroad who had posted comments critical of the Islamic Republic, compiling dossiers that Iranian diaspora rights groups described as hit lists.

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The threat invoked legislation passed after Iran’s twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, which introduced asset confiscation as a penalty for cooperation with foreign enemies, a law rushed through Iran’s parliament at the time as a deterrence measure and now being deployed at far greater scale against a diaspora that had responded to the February 28 strikes with open celebration.

Celebratory rallies against the Islamic Republic were held worldwide after the start of the Iran war on February 28, led by the Iranian diaspora, where Iranians gathered waving anti-Islamic Republic symbols including the Lion and Sun flag.

The scale of those celebrations was unprecedented in the history of the diaspora: a rally in Toronto was reported to have 150,000 in attendance with zero incidents according to Toronto police. Demonstrations were held in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey, Ghana, Israel, Georgia, Armenia, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.

The Iranian government was simultaneously monitoring diaspora activity through a sophisticated social media surveillance operation. Newly created Telegram channels were compiling and publishing the personal details, names, photographs, cities of residence, employers, and family connections — of prominent Iranians abroad who had posted comments supportive of the US-Israeli campaign, creating public exposure documents that security researchers described as designed to enable physical targeting by IRGC-linked cells operating abroad.

The threat of IRGC extraterritorial violence against diaspora dissidents was not hypothetical: in March 2025, Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his London home following months of threats against the station’s journalists, and British counterterrorism police arrested four people suspected of spying on Jewish communities in London for the Islamic Republic on March 6, 2026 — the same day a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Pakistani-Iranian operative Asif Merchant of a murder-for-hire plot targeting US politicians. Foreign security officials warned following the February 28 strikes that Iranian sleeper cells abroad had been activated.

In Moscow, police detained members of the diaspora who celebrated the death of Khamenei. In Birmingham, England, clashes broke out between Islamic Republic supporters and diaspora counter-protesters.

In Washington Square Park in Manhattan on March 6, clashes between Khamenei supporters and diaspora counter-protesters resulted in multiple NYPD arrests.

The polarised environment in Western cities reflected a diaspora that was not monolithic, a significant proportion of Iranians abroad, particularly those who had left before 1979 or maintained Islamic Republic connections, opposed the war and mourned Khamenei’s killing, while the majority who had fled the clerical state celebrated it.

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Governments across Europe and North America were navigating the tension between protecting diaspora communities’ right to political expression and managing the public order implications of opposing groups confronting each other on city streets.

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah of Iran and the most prominent figure of the Iranian opposition in exile, responded to the asset seizure threat by calling it proof that the Islamic Republic was collapsing. Pahlavi stated he was ready to have his transitional government take over if the Islamic Republic was overthrown, and had urged Iranians inside Iran to prepare to resume protests as the Islamic Republic “collapses.”

His Iran Prosperity Project, affiliated with the US-based National Union for Democracy in Iran, outlined plans for the first 180 days of governance following the potential fall of the Islamic Republic, a document that had gained significant international attention in the week since the war began. Iranian Canadians had submitted a petition to the Canadian House of Commons to “designate the Islamic Republic as a foreign occupying entity lacking domestic support, recognise Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian transitional team as legitimate representatives, support their plan for a transition to secular democracy, and engage in discussions about Iran’s future governance.” Similar petitions were filed with the Australian Parliament.

The asset seizure threat, combined with the Telegram dossiers circulating diaspora members’ personal details, was described by the International Federation for Human Rights as an instrument of collective punishment designed to silence the diaspora’s political voice at precisely the moment when that voice was most consequential to the Islamic Republic’s international legitimacy and domestic narrative.

The Eastern Updates