Hundreds of anti-regime protesters gathered outside the stadium in Los Angeles where Iran will take on New Zealand in their opening game of the 2026 World Cup on Monday.Waving the flag used by Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution, demonstrators beat drums and chanted slogans denouncing the national side, which they insist is a propaganda tool for Tehran."This team is not the Iranian people's team, it's the regime's team," said Ava Amin, a philosophy student who came to demonstrate with a banner calling for "regime change." "When the people get murdered, they ignore it and stay silent," she told AFP.The match is taking place under tight security, with a large contingent from the Iranian-American community in Los Angeles vowing to make known their opposition to the regime.The city -- sometime dubbed "Tehrangeles" -- is home to the largest ethnic Iranian community outside of Iran, with a sizeable number made up of those who fled around the time of the revolution, or their descendants.Some of those people say they want to use the visibility of the World Cup to highlight the abuses committed by the military-backed clerics who have held power in Iran for 47 years. Some protesters held up collages of portraits of Iranians who died during the bloody crackdown on anti-regime protests in January -- a crackdown that claimed thousands of lives, according to numerous NGOs.