Ramtin Arablouei

We are here at the National Mall where there is a demonstration taking place in support of Reza Pahlavi, who many Iranian Americans support as a potential future leader of Iran if the Islamic Republic were to fall.

The crowd is about a couple of thousand people, it appears.

Organizers have told me they expect upwards of 100,000, but we're nowhere near that number right now out here.

The crowd is chanting, this is the final battle.

Pahlavi will return.

Yes.

So when we arrived, there was a very large crowd of diverse set of Iranians, mostly Iranian-Americans, flying flags, holding up the picture of Reza Pahlavi.

And we saw a bunch of different flags.

There was the Lion and Son flag.

which is the flag of Iran that was there before the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

We saw people holding American flags and even Israeli flags, which I know for a lot of listeners, that's confusing, right?

Like, why are they holding up the flag of a country that's attacking them?

But I think it's a pretty simple explanation.

For many of these protesters who we talk to, it's basically an enemy of my enemy is my friend situation.

And that's exactly what one of the protesters told me, named Leila Raqq.

So I think a lot of what we're seeing today and what we saw at the protest comes out of that movement and the frustration many people had or anger people had at the way the Islamic Republic responded to those protests.

By, you know, firing on protesters and killing, you know, the numbers not even actually agreed upon, but many thousands of protesters in the process.

And I think what we're also seeing is a real debate about what the future of Iran is going to be.

And everyone we spoke today, basically everyone, wants Reza Pahlavi, the son of the king who was overthrown in 1979, to return as what they call as a transitional leader.

But when you ask them, like, why, why do you want the son of a former dictator to be back in power?