Coventry councillor Mattie Heaven is hopeful that her country will change for the better
Arash Beheshti was killed by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers during protests in January in his home city, Tehran, the capital of Iran. He was 26.
He was the cousin of Vehid Beheshti, an Iranian based in Coventry, who on February 23 completed three years of his sitting protest outside the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London, demanding that the UK proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist group.
UK Govt has still not proscribed the IRGC
Britain is the only major Western nation yet to do so. Australia, Canada, the US and Sweden have done. The EU made its declaration on February 19. The UK remains the outlier. Something that, in addition to a reluctance to let US forces use UK airbases, may have contributed to Donald Trump branding PM Keir Starmer “a loser.”
When Israel and the US began their assault on Iran’s IRGC sites a week ago, Vehid’s wife, Mattie Heaven, a Conservative councillor in Coventry, punched the air with gratitude, while at the same time continuing to share her husband’s despair at the UK Government’s apparent lack of willingness to grip this issue.
‘This war has been going on for 47 years’
“This war did not begin five days ago,” Mattie says, explaining that the regime has been “suppressing anyone who disagrees with it” since 1979 when it seized power.
“What Israel and the US are doing is saving humanity a great threat. Iran had 60% enriched uranium, and Iran is not North Korea. If this regime managed to make a nuclear weapon, they have declared to use it first on Israel and then the rest.
“They want to turn the world into an Islamic caliphate, and to a large extent they have been doing this in Iran, through their proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah etc) across the Middle East as well as by infiltrating Western politics – just look at the newly elected mayor of New York [Zohran Mamdani].”
Iranian Islamic regime’s propaganda machine
Perhaps the Islamic regime’s most effectively deployed weapon of war is its propaganda, in the form of video content posted on countless bot accounts.
Mattie, a Muslim born in Iran who moved to the UK in 1988 after her father, a Royal Navy captain, fled the country, says “the regime relies on ideological brainwashing”.
“The Islamic regime and its proxies use anti-Semitic Jew hatred to unite the world against Israel. That’s the trick. For them, Palestinians must remain refugees to keep the narrative of oppression alive, and to keep Western leftists fooled.”
This is a narrative that has been swallowed wholesale by so many across the West, which is seeing a truly shocking resurgence of antisemitism. This arguably led to the slaughter of two Jews in their place of worship in Manchester on October 31 last year, six weeks before the atrocity at Bondi Beach, Sydney.
Four arrests in London
On Friday (March 6) four people – one Iranian national and three dual British-Iranian nationals – were arrested in London as part of Met Police counter-terrorism investigation. They are suspected of assisting a foreign intelligence service by conducting surveillance on locations and individuals connected to Jewish communities in London.
MI5 has foiled over 20 Iran-backed plots in the UK since January 2022, with more than 20 additional potentially lethal plots tracked in just the single year between October 2024 and October 2025, according to open-source records.
As many as 100,000 killed this year by the IRGC
This carnage, however, pales in comparison to the scale of the brutality of the Islamic regime against its own people. In the past eight weeks, since uprisings began in January, US intelligence estimates put the death toll at 32,000. In truth, the number is very likely closer to 100,000, although it is impossible to independently verify, says Mattie. Each one of these staggering numbers is a life cut short, like Arash Beheshti’s.
“All our relatives in Iran know someone who has been killed,” she says.
“So many are wounded, too. The IRGC is also injecting people with poison, so they die after being released, and so their deaths do not feature in the official data.”
20 years raising awareness about the threats emanating from Iran since 1979
Mattie’s husband, Vahid, has spent the past 20 years raising awareness about the abuses and dangers of the Islamic regime. A fatwa has been issued against him, yet he remains undeterred. Recently, the couple established the Iranian Front for the Revival of Law and National Sovereignty, working with different political, ethnic and religious groups to support a lawful transition period in Iran.
“I’m optimistic things will change for the better as a result of all this, but any transition must be handled well, and must result in a democratic secular society,” Mattie says.
‘Iranians just want to be free‘
“Iran is incredibly diverse – Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews. Most people don’t care what their eventual government believes. They simply want to be free and live in a secular society.”
According to intelligence the US is starting to arm Kurdish militias on the ground in the region, to go against the Regime. She disagrees with claims that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have embarked on a war with no strategy for what comes next.
“If you track back, you can see a clear method. For example Venezuala – with its illicit oil trade and other dealings with Iran, Venezuela was in effect Iran’s back garden, and Trump dealt with it [President Maduro’s dramatic extraction in January],” she says.
‘This is about so much more than petrol prices’
“Since beginning the operation in Iran, as well as killing the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and 40 regime leaders on day one, the US and Israel have completely destroyed IRGC sites across Iran. It has been incredibly effective. There is a plan.”
The major risk to the full execution of this plan, however, could be the views of voters back in America. If oil supplies remain constrained through the Strait of Hormuz, consumers will feel it at the gas pumps. With the US midterms approaching, it’s a case of watch this space.
