As U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran entered their third week, Freedom House convened a group of the world’s foremost Iran experts, activists, and advocates on March 16, 2026 for a one-hour virtual summit addressing a question that military planners in Washington have been slow to answer: what happens to the Iranian people after the bombs stop?

The answer, the panelists insisted with near unanimity, must not be decided in Washington or Jerusalem — but by the Iranian people themselves, 47 years after the Islamic Republic first imposed its rule by force.

Iranian-born actress and human rights advocate Nazanin Boniadi opened the discussion by reading from a message she received via satellite connection from a dissident inside Iran — a rare window into the psychological reality of a population trapped between bombs above and a regime below.

Boniadi framed this dual terror as the essential lens through which the international community must understand Iran’s current moment. She noted that expressions of celebration when senior figures in the regime’s security apparatus were killed — which shocked some outside observers — reflect not callousness, but the weight of decades of personal suffering at those individuals’ hands.

“For every innocent life taken,” she said, “there is a family still seeking justice that has never arrived.”

The panel did not allow the current conflict to eclipse the atrocities that preceded it. Gissou Nia, Director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council, pressed the audience to reckon with the January 2026 massacre — which she described as one of the worst single-day mass atrocities in modern global history.

Nia noted that the kill rate during the January massacre, when averaged out, was comparable to that of the Rwandan genocide — and that unlike mass aerial bombardment, much of this killing was carried out individually, with firearms and extreme brutality. “Globally, it is one of the worst,” she said plainly. “And I don’t think that the gravity of that has been fully understood.”

Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, reported that inside Iran, nearly all known opposition leaders have been jailed and communications are severely disrupted by the regime’s internet blackout. The weight of resistance, she said, has shifted to the diaspora.

Among diaspora forces, she identified the monarchist movement led by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as currently the most organized, with Pahlavi publicly positioning himself as a transitional leader toward secular democracy. Alongside this, she noted emerging republican factions still in early stages of coalescence. Kurdish forces on Iran’s borders represent a third distinct stream of anti-regime activity, though their coordination with other opposition groups remains limited.

Holly Dagres, Libitzky Family Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, offered an analysis of what she called the regime’s “Operation Madman” strategy — a three-pronged gamble premised on fatally wrong assumptions about American resolve.

“So far it hasn’t been working,” Dagres said, “because the president has doubled down.” But she cautioned that this could change rapidly depending on how battlefield dynamics and domestic politics evolve in the weeks ahead.

Gissou Nia raised the near-total communication blackout inside Iran as one of the most underreported dimensions of the crisis. In place since January — with only a brief interruption — the shutdown resumed the moment U.S. and Israeli strikes began on February 28th. The result: the international community is receiving most information about conditions inside Iran through phone calls, informal networks, and limited satellite connections rather than any open channel.

Nia described ongoing efforts within a coalition of digital rights advocates to bring direct-to-cell satellite internet to Iran — a technology that would allow any smartphone built after a certain date to bypass local carriers and connect directly to satellites overhead. “The challenge,” she noted, “is that unlike Ukraine, Iranian carriers under the Islamic Republic are never going to agree to internet being available to everybody. They’ve specifically cut it off for that reason.”

Perhaps the sharpest note of urgency in the entire discussion came from Dagres, who warned that unlike the 2003 Iraq war — which at least included the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project” consulting over 100 Iraqis across different backgrounds — there has been no equivalent planning process for Iran’s post-conflict transition.

Dagres pointed to executions already at record highs — over 2,100 in 2025 alone — and warned that a regime that survives the current operation, wounded and humiliated, would likely turn its violence inward with unprecedented ferocity.

All three female panelists, and the moderator, noted what Holly Dagres described as the historic and ongoing leadership of Iranian women — particularly younger generations — in the struggle for freedom. From the hijab protests of March 8, 1979, to the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, to the current generation of Gen Z activists risking their lives inside a blacked-out country, Iranian women have consistently anchored the resistance.

“The Islamic Republic has waged a war first and foremost on them,” Dagres said. “That’s not going to change — and neither is their courage.”

The panel closed with a set of concrete calls to action directed at governments, civil society, and international organizations — with particular emphasis on Europe’s untapped capacity to act without endorsing or opposing military operations.

Boroumand drew on Europe’s own post-WWII experience with democratic transition — pointing to France’s model of a government-in-exile, a national council, and provisional government backed by constitutional expertise — as a template for what Iranian opposition groups need now: a platform, expertise, and external pressure to unite around a credible democratic program.

Nia listed specific accountability measures that European governments could take immediately: structural investigations into crimes against humanity by Germany, Sweden, France, and Canada; asset freezes and seizures of Islamic Republic officials’ wealth held abroad — including, she noted, reports of the new Supreme Leader holding multi-million pound properties in the United Kingdom while receiving medical treatment there.

“There is so much that can happen that does not involve endorsing military strikes,” Nia said. “Regrettably, that hasn’t happened — which is why we are in the quagmire we’re in.”

Follow @freedomhouse and @NazaninBoniadi on X. Faith & Freedom News continues live coverage of the Iran conflict at fandfnews.com.