OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Northeast Wisconsin Muslims are watching the violence in the middle-east play out.
Fox 11 spoke to a local member of a Fox Valley Muslim mosque and an Iranian-American from Wisconsin about the growing tensions with Iran.
Saad Ahmad came to the U.S. from Pakistan about 30 years ago.
“My parents live there in Pakistan, and Pakistan is just a bordering country with Iran, so it is quite concerning, based on the proximity, at a personal level, as well.”
He tells FOX the rising conflict between Iran and the U.S. is still too close for comfort.
“There is no place where you could say you are far enough from a conflict. It is very close to home.”
It’s even closer to home for Ali Soltani, who is fearing for his own Iranian family right now.
“People are afraid, because this regime is very brutal, and it doesn’t feel like anybody can stop them.”
Soltani, vice president of the Iranian American Community of Wisconsin, tells FOX 11 the Iranian American Community of Wisconsin is happy Iran’s top military leader is gone.
“I am really delighted by the fact that the United States actually, after so long, stood up against these guys. You’re dealing with a guy that was the number two person, and he was an instrument of suppression.”
Soltani says demonstrations at the general’s Tuesday funeral are all smoke and mirrors.
“Four or five percent of the population supports them. The rest of the people, if they say anything, they’re either banished or jailed, tortured and all that, so they’re forcing all the government employees, students and teachers to go and attend these things.”
Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said that Pakistan would neither let its soil be used against any other state nor become part of any regional conflict.
“I hope it ends before people have to take sides,” Ahmad said. “I hope cooler minds…I pray cooler minds prevail, and we don’t have to decide who is against who.”
President Trump saying cultural sites are not off-limits to bomb threats makes some locals uneasy.
“That’s not us,” Ahmad said. “That’s not being American, that we would target, deliberately, any civilian site, so I hope and pray that that’s just rhetoric.”
