Yesterday evening, U.S. Central Command announced that it had launched strikes on Iran after the Iranian navy attacked a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media reported explosions in the southern port cities of Bandar Abbas, Sirik, Chabahar, Bandar-e Deyr, and Asaluyeh.

The latest attacks followed an earlier round of fighting this week, during which the United States carried out a series of airstrikes against Iran, while Tehran responded by targeting several American military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. On Thursday, July 9, Iranian officials also accused the United States of striking areas around the southwestern city of Bushehr. Multiple explosions were reported and videos circulated widely on social media. Washington has denied involvement. If the United States was not responsible, then who struck Bushehr? For now, the culprit remains a mystery.

Aftermath of an airstrike captured by citizens of Bushehr, July 8, 2026. Source: Vahid Online

Perched on a narrow peninsula jutting into the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, Bushehr has for decades occupied a prominent place in discussions about Iran’s nuclear program and, more recently, the war. Beyond the nuclear facility, military installations, and geopolitical calculations, however, lies a historic port city renowned for its rich maritime heritage, vibrant music, distinctive cuisine, and centuries-old cultural ties to the Arab shores of the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, East Africa, and South Asia. For generations, the sea has shaped the rhythms of daily life, carrying goods, people, languages, and traditions across these interconnected worlds.

As the regular readers of The Guarded Domains know, I recently began translating excerpts from Radio Tragedy, a podcast produced in Iran that chronicles the experiences of ordinary citizens caught up in the war. In a compelling episode, the program traveled across the country, collecting firsthand accounts of how people experienced the conflict. So far, I have shared stories from residents of Tehran, Bandar Abbas, and Kharg Island. The latest installment of the journey takes us along Iran’s southern coastline to the city of Bushehr, which endured some of the war’s heaviest strikes and continues to face periodic attacks.

What follows is a testimony from Yasin, a resident who returned to the city on the second day of the war [March 1] and remained there throughout 40 days of bombardment. In plain, unembellished, and remarkably observant language, he recounts what he saw and heard as he walked the streets of the port city. Through his daily encounters and conversations, we witness the public’s confusion, fear, and uncertainty, as well as their humor and resilience. As Yasin describes, the people of Bushehr managed to employ hundreds of ordinary ways to endure and “hold on to life” amid the destruction and uncertainty of war.

He begins with a brief geography lesson, helping listeners understand the physical landscape of Bushehr before guiding them through the city as the war unfolded.

Bushehr is a peninsula connected to the mainland on one side, while the sea embraces it on the other three sides. If you imagine it, it is almost like a very elongated triangle. From the tip at the top to the very end, it is about 20 kilometers [12.4 miles] long. At the beginning of it, where the city center is, you have the four old neighborhoods—the historic quarters of Behbahani, Shanbedi, Dehdashti, and Kuti. As you move farther down, you come to the newer neighborhoods like Sangi, Ashouri, Bagh-e Zahra, Solhabad, Jofreh, Jalali, Bisim, and the rest.

We have a large air base, almost about four by five kilometers, located beyond these neighborhoods. After this large military area, we get to the Bahmani districts, meaning Bahmani, Davas, Makh-e Boland, Khajehha, and those areas.

Then we have another large naval base, which is also about three by four kilometers. This is the military’s Navy base. On its periphery, there are the neighborhoods of Tangak, Runi, Sartal, Imamzadeh, and farther down it reaches Halileh, Bandargah, and Rishahr.

Video clips of Bushehr’s hisoric districts. Source: Instagram

There are also other sections that belong to other military institutions, including the large compound of the nuclear power plant. You could say that roughly three-fifths of the city is non-residential and not privately owned. Large parts of the city are under the control of military institutions. On the day all this happened [February 28], it was around 9 or 10 in the morning in Tehran. In Bushehr, the first attacks on the city took place at around 2:30 am.1

When they struck at 2:30, by around 3:00 or 3:30 people rushed to leave the city or to fill up their cars with gasoline. Naturally, all of the gas stations—the two or three stations in the city—were backed up with traffic stretching for kilometers. People trying to leave, whether from Borj, Bahmani, Imam Ali [neighbourhoods], or elsewhere, spent hours in traffic before that first wave was finally able to get out of the city.

Maybe around 30 percent of the population tried to leave during that initial wave of attacks. Those who had small children, pregnant wives, or homes outside the city where they could stay found it much easier to leave Bushehr.

I wasn’t in Bushehr on the first day. I was in Asaluyeh [a port city in the Bushehr province about 180 miles away from the city of Bushehr]. I had been awake all night until the morning. I had barely fallen asleep—less than an hour had passed—when my phone rang. We heard the commotion and everything else. We woke up, and that’s how I learned the news. I had to stay there for another 24 hours. Those 24 hours passed. The news that everyone heard, we heard too. Including the rumors and all the anxiety that everyone was feeling.

When I entered Bushehr on Sunday, the first thing I saw was the Choghadak Aerospace Base, near Bushehr, burning. After that I entered the city and never left again. I stayed in Bushehr the whole time. I didn’t spend much time inside the house. Most of the time I walked around the city. By then, around 30 percent of the people had already left. Then, on Tuesday [March 3], at around 10:00 in the morning, I think, they dropped a bunker-buster bomb. Because of the sound, the blast wave, and the force of that bunker-buster, another 30 percent of the population left the city. Compared to all the previous bombardments, this bunker-buster, which hit the ammunition depot at the air base I think—caused another 30 percent of the people to leave.

It was an incredibly difficult and frightening experience. When the bunker-busters struck, they shattered the windows of shops, buildings, and houses. A large number of buildings near the base had their windows blown out. Several cars crashed into the boulevard. One soldier riding a motorcycle was thrown to the ground and broke his arm. There was also a security guard, a civilian guard, working inside a compound where they were filling water tankers. He was hit by shrapnel in the leg. Those are the kinds of injuries and damage that we witnessed. The windows of Persian Gulf Hospital were shattered. Its suspended ceiling collapsed, and the hospital had to close for several days. The Social Security Hospital, which was also nearby, had many of its windows broken as well. Then there were the damaged private homes, of course—that goes without saying.

The moment of a U.S.-Israeli strike on Bushehr Air Base, March 3, 2026. Source: Vahid Online

The attacks took place within the areas I mentioned that were military zones, which made up roughly three-fifths of the city. It wasn’t as though they were striking our private homes or those of others. But our house, for example, is exactly about 1,300 meters [1422 yards] from the air and naval bases. Because of that, whenever they struck, I would stand in the yard and could tell where they had hit. It was all very, very palpable for us.

Over those twenty-some days, they attacked Bushehr with bunker-buster bombs several times. The sound and the shock waves from those bombs were massive. Based on my own experience, one time I was inside the house. I heard the first explosion and immediately got up to go outside. I was about a meter [a yard] away from the front door when the second bomb hit. The blast wave was so powerful that the front door burst open and slammed into the wall. The kitchen window shattered, all the other doors banged against one another, and honestly, if I had reached the door just one second sooner, it would have slammed straight into my face.

I went outside and saw a shopkeeper sitting behind his counter. Every single pane of glass had come crashing down onto the floor. The poor man looked as though he had just climbed out of a grave. He stood there completely stunned, dazed, and speechless.

I realized that I had become almost alone in the city. Even though we had a house outside the city and a place where I could have stayed, I didn’t want to leave Bushehr. I felt the city needed a narrator, someone to bear witness, someone who had drawn the water directly from the source, so to speak. I wanted to see for myself what was happening. I wasn’t going to leave and then hear from someone else what had happened in Bushehr or what was happening there. I had to be there myself. I had to remain and see. And I did. I witnessed so many of those attacks firsthand. When they bombed the airport, for example, I was standing at Airport Square. There were many other places like that as well. In any case, I experienced those moments firsthand and in the environment.

But it wasn’t like the war could consume all the attention all the time. As a great man had once said, “War cannot command all of our attention.” So it was that after about a week, some people gradually started returning. Life went on, and I saw many things that were very interesting to me.

For example, I remember standing at Airport Square when one of the attacks happened. Some of the people nearby ran away because they thought they would hit the same place again. Then I saw a [Peugeot] 206. There was a young man inside holding a fishbowl. I asked him, “What’s that?” He said, “Sir, I’ve had this [fish] for three or four months. When I reached for something, right before leaving, this was the only thing I picked up.”

I saw another man leaving the city with his child. The only thing he was carrying was a birdcage with a pair of lovebirds inside. He wasn’t carrying anything else.

Another time I was at a fruit shop. A woman was picking out vegetables and such. She turned to the shopkeeper and asked, “Sir, when were these herbs harvested?” He said, “Ma’am, they’re today’s [herbs].” She replied, “No, sir. I’ve been buying vegetables for 37 years. Don’t tell me these are from today. They’re not from today.” She [was so confident and professional sounding] like she had been dismantling and reconstructing plane engines [all these years].

Then she turned to me and asked, “Do these look like today’s herbs to you?” I looked at her and said, “Ma’am, we’re at war. You’re looking for fresh picked herbs from today? Be thankful we have these at all. [Let’s just say,] they are not from today.”

Another time the city was under bombardment, and I requested a Snapp ride [Iranian Uber] to leave town. The bombing was still going on. A white [Peugeot] 206 accepted the ride and the driver called me. “Come quickly to the street corner,” he said. “Are you alone?” I said “yes.” When I got in, I noticed there were two flowerpots sitting on the front passenger seat. The driver was a young man. I asked him, “What’s with these?”

He said, “Just now, while they were bombing, the suspended ceiling in my shop collapsed from the blast. Glass shattered everywhere. I reached in, grabbed only my flowerpots, and now I’m leaving the city. Then your Snapp request came through, and I thought, ‘Well, here’s another poor soul. I might as well take him with me.’” I told him, “No, I actually have something I need to do [and then I will return].”

But what struck me was this: in the middle of all that chaos, what mattered to him were his flowerpots. The fact that in such conditions he was paying attention to his flowerpots. Those [things], those [moments], were signs of people clinging to life or clawing at it, refusing to let it go.

Just a few days ago [late April], I was out on the outskirts of the city when I saw a young man come out of one of those flower shops carrying a large flowerpot. I didn’t know him either. I said to him, “Long live life.” He replied, “That’s it.”

You could tell that even under these circumstances, he was still honoring life. I found that very interesting.

We have another friend. He’s one of those people who usually doesn’t go out much, but he stayed in Bushehr. He told me, “Yasin, next to our house […] there was a building, four or five stories high, under construction. They were putting up one of those steel-frame structures, the big H-beams, and stuff. Then the war started. Everyone left the site except one man. He stayed behind with one of those electric impact wrenches they use to tighten nuts and bolts, fastening the bolts on the steel frame.”

“Every morning at seven o’clock he climbed up [one of the beams and then] taaaat, tat, tat, rat, taaaat, tat, tat,…He’d start tightening the bolts. Whenever a plane approached, he would stop. The sound would stop. Just like a woodpecker that suddenly stops pecking. The aircraft would come, circle, strike, and leave. Then he would begin again. He kept doing this all day until sunset. He wasn’t afraid at all. He never even climbed down.”

My friend said, “He was like one of those watchmen at the top of the mast on an old sailing ship. We actually took comfort from the sound of his work. He lived next door to us. Whenever we heard him working, we’d say, ‘Everything must be safe.’ Whenever the sound stopped, we’d say, ‘There must be a plane coming.’”

He said that the man kept at it for an entire week. He paid no attention to anything else. He stayed up there tightening bolts while the airplanes continued doing what they were doing.

I asked another man, “Dear, how are you doing? The war started and all...” He said, “Well, I’ve got an old Gibson air conditioner. Whenever I come home I turn it on. It makes so much noise that I can’t hear a single shot or explosion. I sleep through the whole night. Unless they drop a bunker-buster, then the whole house shakes and I notice. Otherwise, it makes no difference to me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no war.” I laughed and said, “The world’s treating you well, Uncle.” [Iranians use the title “uncle” as an affectionate term to address typically older avuncular figures, even if they are not related to them.]

One day we were standing in the square, only about 500 meters from the [military] base, when they struck. They hit the base several times. Then an old man turned to me and said, “You know what’s going to be good after all of this?” I said, “What?” He said, “When this war is over, let’s lease that military base and plant wheat and barley there. It’ll produce an incredible harvest after all the tilling they’ve done.”

It was obvious he was a farmer. That was the angle he looked at the whole situation.

Another friend of mine owns a wedding photography studio. He said that a few days after the war began, one of his former clients—people whose engagement photos he had taken but who hadn’t gotten married yet—called him. They asked, “Mr. so-and-so, our photographs are still safe, aren’t they? [Are you making sure] bullets and shrapnels are not damaging them?” My friend told them, “for heaven’s sake, save your lives and leave the city. Forget about the photographs.”

It’s remarkable the kinds of things people think about in circumstances like these.

Another friend of ours was a physician here before leaving for Germany to continue his education. During all the chaos, he traveled from Germany to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Van, from Van to Tabriz, from Tabriz to Isfahan, and finally drove from Isfahan to Bushehr. We asked him, “Why would you come here in the middle of all this? There’s a war going on. You had a home and a life over there.” He said, “The war is incidental to Bushehr for me. I came because of Bushehr. The war is an annex. It’s something secondary. It can never be more important than Bushehr itself.” So, he came, and he stayed here.

Another man told me, “There was one day when I was truly frightened.” I asked, “Was it when they dropped the bunker-buster bombs?” He replied, “No.”

He recalled, “I was at home talking on the phone with a friend when I heard they were going to bomb the nuclear power plant. We said, ‘No, they won’t do that.’ Then I laid down and fell asleep. The phone rang. It was my friend. ‘Did you hear?’ he asked. ‘They’ve bombed the nuclear power plant.’ I said, ‘No way.’ He said, ‘yes, I swear to God, they have.’

The moment I hung up, I noticed a very strange smell inside the house. I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re finished. That’s the smell of uranium. What are we supposed to do now? Should we take iodine tablets? What should we do?’ I was completely panicked. I thought, ‘It’s over. I am infertile now. God help us. I’m going to get cancer.’

Suddenly, I realized my son had put eggs on the stove to boil. The water had boiled away, the eggs had burned, and the aluminum pot itself had started melting a little. That was the overall smell I was noticing. I had convinced myself it was uranium. I nearly died [from fear.]”

At the naval base and the air force bases in Bushehr, there were many houses. Some of them remained vacant. In that case, [officials] would assign them to employees of other government agencies. For example, suppose [if in need], the Construction Jihad [a government and volunteer organization founded in 1979 to conduct rural development] could send a letter to the Navy saying, “If you have two housing units available, please give them to us. Two of our employees don’t have homes.”

On the very first day of the war, they announced that everyone living inside those two large bases—the ones I mentioned, one about four by five kilometers and the other about three by four kilometers—had to evacuate immediately. Many people lived in those houses. At the start of the war, they said, “evacuate all of them.”

But, these people didn’t have homes elsewhere. If they had, they wouldn’t have stayed in the first place. So, what were they supposed to do? Naturally, they had to leave, go to villages, stay with relatives or friends, and so on. I really felt sorry for them. Poor people. Overnight they became displaced. They didn’t have homes of their own. Suddenly, they were told something like, “You have 15 minutes. Gather your things and leave.” What could they possibly take with them? Only the bare daily necessities.

One of them told me, “About a week [after we left]—or maybe on the tenth day—I decided to go back and check on our house.”

He said, “I went into the naval base and looked around. Every window in the houses had been shattered. Everything was covered in dust, debris, and so on. Bindweeds [ivy] had started growing through the broken windows into the houses. Cats were sitting on the sofas facing the television. In another apartment, I saw dogs lounging out on the carpet. Nature had reclaimed its place. Human beings had retreated, and nature had returned to take its place again. It was a very eerie atmosphere.”

How quickly that had all happened. [How quickly everything] had been forgotten.

One morning we were standing in line at the bakery when they started bombing again. They bombed at every hour of the day. For example, sometimes at 3:00 in the morning. In the morning, at night. That morning, as they struck again, an elderly woman said, “These godless people don’t even think that people might be asleep at this hour?” It was funny. It was as if they were expected to plan their attacks around our schedule.

What I noticed more than anything was that people were less afraid of the present than they were of the future. No matter what, some people were afraid in the moment. Of course. But sometimes, people fear the future that is still to arrive. I saw a lot of people who asked, “what will happen in the future?” And not “What happened with the bomb that just fell?” That was something I noticed again and again whenever I spoke with people.

For more similar accounts of everyday life during the war, please explore the other entries in my Pages from a War series. They all offer contextualized personal testimonies, historical context, and translations that seek to document how ordinary people experienced and understood the moment. I’ve included links to the previous installments below.

1. Stories from Tehran Under Fire

2. “‘They Won’t Hit the Same Place Twice’, But They Did”: A Civilian Account from Tehran

3. Popcorn, Rice Pudding, and Explosions: A Civilian Account from the War

4. Fragments of Everyday Life in Wartime Iran

5. Revenging Death by Living: A Civilian Account from the Iran War

6. One Hundred Days of War and Memory

7. War at the Water’s Edge

The ink barely had a chance to dry on the signed MoU before it came under strain. On June 26, the U.S. carried out military strikes against Iranian drone storage facilities and radar positions, in response to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attack on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. On Sunday, Iran also struck U.S. sites in Bahrain and Kuwait, and threatened to “completely halt” talks, if America continues its attacks.

These developments underscore the many uncertainties surrounding the MoU’s potential durability and practicality. The deal’s eventual implementation depends on resolving a wide range of technical, legal, economic, and political challenges that neither side can address overnight. Several provisions also require cooperation from neighboring Arab states, while Israel continues to act as a potential spoiler, particularly through its military operations in Lebanon. The guns may be a bit quieter these days, but the path toward a lasting peace remains to be long and winding.

Through it all, people in the region remain in limbo. At the outbreak of the war on February 28, closure of the Strait of Hormuz sealed off the only exit for approximately 2,000 vessels carrying an estimated 20,000 individuals. Around 11,000 stranded commercial sailors and oil workers remain to be rescued by the UN’s International Maritime Organization from the Persian Gulf. They are struggling with dwindling resources, severe exhaustion, and reports of mental breakdown as planned evacuations are put on pause due to the renewed strikes.

Inside Iran, a wounded nation is doing its best to process the trauma of the past months by rebuilding some semblance of ordinary life. For many who are seeking a brief escape, the national football team’s FIFA World Cup campaign offered a temporary reprieve. The holy month of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, has also arrived. Across the country, black banners hang from homes, mosques, and storefronts. Streets are draped in black, green, and red flags representing mourning, the Prophet’s family, and the blood of those martyred for justice. The atmosphere feels especially heavy this year, as grief over government repression, war, and religious ritual seamlessly entwine.

For readers who are unfamiliar with Muharram, the occasion commemorates the killing of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, during the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Revered as the Third Shia Imam, Hussein is remembered for choosing death over submission to a ruler widely regarded as unjust. Every year, mourning ceremonies, elegies, and processions retell that story. These rituals, however, have never solely been about the seventh century. The poetry recited by eulogists routinely addresses the contemporary anxieties, injustices, and aspirations. As I argued in an essay published last year, Muharram rituals often become an ongoing dialogue between state and society, with religion serving as the language through which political and social concerns are debated.

This year there are an array of concerns impossible to ignore. The January protests, the ensuing bloodshed, the foreign imposed war, and the death of the Supreme Leader have all found their way into the imagery and language of lamentations. In doing so, these ceremonies perform another vital function beyond mourning. They transform lived experience into collective memory, helping society process loss, preserve shared experiences, draw lessons from tragedy, and transmit those stories to the next generation through the country’s rich oral tradition.

Muharram mourning ceremony at a religious congregation (hey’at) in the port city of Bandar Ganaveh, in Iran’s southern Bushehr Province. The lamentations were dedicated, in part, to the protesters killed by security forces in January 2026.

The same memory making process is also unfolding beyond religious rituals. As I discussed in my previous post, the experiences of the past 100 days of war are producing a growing body of diaries, memoirs, oral testimonies, journalistic accounts, and personal reflections shared across digital platforms. Individually, each story captures only a fragment of life under the war. When they come together, they become the crucial parts of a collective construct that capture the nation’s memory of the moment.

One of the most compelling efforts to preserve these experiences comes from Radio Tragedy, a podcast created by film critic and author Karim Nikounazar. In my previous post, I translated two brief accounts from the series by writers wrestling with questions of identity, belonging, and survival during the war. In what follows, our journey continues to southern Iran, one of the regions that endured some of the conflict’s heaviest bombardments. The next three accounts come from Bandar Abbas and Kharg Island.

The first two recollections originate in Bandar Abbas, the country’s principal southern port, situated along the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point. Home to major Iranian naval installations, the city occupies one of the most strategically sensitive locations in the Persian Gulf. Here, global commerce, military power, and everyday life converge. Many residents of what locals simply call Bandar or “the Port” found themselves living on the front line of the conflict.

The following statement is from an anonymous woman in Bandar Abbas recalling her experiences during the opening days of the war. She begins by describing the fear and uncertainty that swept through her neighborhood as residents rushed to flee the city.

It was early in the war. I was sitting at home. The constant sound of explosions, bombs, and missiles had everyone terrified. I didn’t dare go near the window or step onto the balcony often, but every now and then I dared myself. I went to see where the smoke was rising from. I saw people of all shapes and kind of appearance. It was obvious how panicked they were. It seemed like everyone had grabbed the most valuable things they could take with them. They were leaving the Port [Bandar Abbas]. The sounds of explosions kept getting louder and louder, and I saw more and more people leaving on the street. It was the first days [of the war]. No one knew what was going on. Well, this was the closest people had ever come to experiencing war.

I went back inside the house, sat down, and tried to stay calm. But with every blast, I’d stand up again without even realizing it. After a while, the sounds got louder and more intense. I heard someone shouting loudly on the street, “Evacuate the neighborhood.” He kept repeating it over and over. It was the peak of stress. Without thinking, I got up. Like everyone else, I gathered the things that were necessary or precious to me and called my friend—the only person in that city I felt I could truly rely on.

My friend told me to make my way to where they were so we could leave the city together. I took my daughter’s hand, picked up my pet, grabbed a duffel bag that suddenly seemed to contain everything I had left in the world, and walked out of my home. It was a strange feeling. A feeling of longing. Sadness. I don’t know. It’s indescribable. To leave behind your home and your life in an instant and simply walk away is a very strange feeling.

I made it to my friend’s. We drove out of the city. Somewhere around 20 kilometers [12 miles] outside of the port [Bandar Abbas]. We stayed there together for a few days. With every sound of explosion that came from the city, we’d just stare at each other in silence, with sadness, fear, and stress.

Later, I learned that the person shouting “evacuate the neighborhood” in the street had made up a rumor. [Many people stayed and did not evacuate.] Whether it was because he was frightened by how close the explosions seemed, simply for fun, out of recklessness, or for some other reason, I don’t know.

This [whole] experience taught me a few things. It taught me that life is not worth taking too seriously. And that some people may not be related to you by blood, but they can still be your family.

Among the people who stayed in the city was Saeed Dadizadeh, who remained in Bandar Abbas with his family throughout the bombardments. He speaks of a common experience shared by many across the country. During the first days of the war, many ordinary Iranians struggled to make sense of the sounds around them. Every blast brought confusion and fear. With time, however, they learned to distinguish between incoming aerial strikes, the country’s air defense systems, and even the approximate distance of each explosion based on the shockwave that followed. For me, it was a striking reminder of how quickly civilians adapt to the harrowing conditions of war. What began for many of them as unfamiliar terror gradually became an instinctive, deeply unsettling form of everyday knowledge.

My name is Saeed Dadizadeh, and I’m speaking to you from Bandar Abbas. It has been 31 or 32 days [March 30 or 31] since the war began, and we’re still here in this city. In a city where, you could say, we hear at least seven or eight explosions, near and far, every day.

Let me first tell you a little about Bandar Abbas itself so you could have a picture in your mind. That way, as I continue my story, the image may become clearer to you. Bandar Abbas is bordered by an air force base and a naval base from the east and the west. To the south is the sea [Persian Gulf], and to the north is the Geno mountain. So, the city has grown within these limits.

On the morning of February 28, [2026], my mother called me. It was around 9:30 am. “Hello, are you good?” she asked. This was the first sentence she uttered. I said, “Yes, we’re alright. Why? What happened?” She said that “they’ve hit Tehran.” I said, “Mom, are you sure?” She replied, “Yes, they hit Tehran. I heard it myself.”

My mother lives in Tehran. I had actually been there until the day before. I’d spent a week visiting her before coming back. I told her, “Okay. Just take care of yourselves. Where’s Sonia?” She said, “Sonia’s at work. They’ve dismissed everyone now, and she’s on her way home. But I can’t reach her. There seems to be a problem with the phone lines.” I kept calling my sister, but her phone wouldn’t connect at all.

I got home. I’d gone out to buy some coffee powder. When I got back, I told everyone what had happened. I started following the news and realized that, yes, Tehran had been attacked. Then the internet went down. Around 10:00 or 10:20 that morning, the internet in Bandar Abbas was cut off. We stayed in touch with my mother by phone, constantly asking what was happening, what wasn’t happening, and so on. She kept saying, “Yes, there are a lot of explosions.”

Then, around 10:30 am, we felt a blast wave. At the time, we didn’t know [or understand how to tell the distance of an explosion]. I’m telling you this, after 31 days, we’ve learned to tell whether an explosion or the shockwave reaching us has come from nearby or from a distance. Looking back with the experience of these past 31 days, I can say those explosions were actually far away. Several blasts and shockwaves reached us, and that’s when we realized the Port [Bandar Abbas] was also being targeted.

In the beginning, during those first hours and first few days, all we heard were explosions. In the city, we had no idea where the strikes were landing or what exactly was being hit. We only heard the sounds, and felt the shockwaves that reached us.

The first and second days passed. You could say that for those first two days we practically had no sleep. This is because we had no experience like this. During the Twelve-Day War [June 13–June 24, 2025], the previous war, I think the air defenses in Bandar Abbas were activated only once or twice. That was when we realized that they are hitting Bandar, or the city had also become a target. But [back then] we didn’t hear any explosions. During the Twelve-Day War, we only heard the sound of explosion once. The sounds we heard in this war were completely different from that sound and that atmosphere.

It was around 10:30 am. We honestly had no idea what we were supposed to do, and we had no plans to leave the Port [Bandar Abbas]. We left the house to take care of one or two [chores], we had planned for in advance. The atmosphere in the city [had changed]. The gas station, which is directly across from our house, in the Shahr-e Namayesh neighborhood, was packed. Families, visibly anxious, were rushing to pick up their children. The schools had been closed. It truly wasn’t anything resembling normal life or anything we had seen before. It was a completely new situation. A situation filled with a lot of anxiety and worry.

Our third account comes from Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal. Located offshore in the Persian Gulf, its deep waters allow Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), capable of carrying roughly two million barrels, to load directly at its terminals. Approximately 90 percent of Iran’s petroleum exports pass through Kharg, making it one of the country’s most strategically important locations. On March 13, U.S. forces struck what they described as 90 military targets there. Against that backdrop, a resident’s testimony offers a rare glimpse into daily life on the island.

The following is by an anonymous man from Bandar Abbas who had traveled to Kharg Island to bring his father-in-law back home. Before they could leave, however, the war began, and he found himself stranded there throughout the bombardment. According to his recollection, the airport runway and several petrochemical facilities were struck. Even so, the rhythm of daily life continued with remarkable determination. He recalled:

Oil workers reported to their jobs every morning as usual. At the end of the day, they collected the meals provided by the National Iranian Oil Company, took them home, and ate with their families. The women of the household also carried on with their routines. They stayed awake into the early hours of the morning, talking, sharing stories, and keeping one another company before finally going to sleep. The next day they woke up, had lunch with their husbands, and resumed their ordinary lives.

Relatively few people remained on the island. Most residents had left during the opening days of the bombardment. Those who stayed behind, however, found ways to adapt to the constant uncertainty while preserving whatever routines they could. You may recall that the [passenger ship] Permisa was struck by U.S. forces on March 21 [the Persian New Year]. [As a part of its daily commute,] the local vessel usually departed Morvarid Pier on Kharg Island, bound for Bushehr.1

This ship was docked at the pier when it was struck [and no passengers were on board,] but it usually had the capacity of transporting 350 individuals, most of them oil company employees, laborers, and locals traveling between Kharg Island and Bushehr. The crossing typically took about an hour and a half before the ship docked at the mainland port.

But after that incident, transportation was only possible by small boats or wooden skiffs, and even then people traveled with great caution. On Kharg Island, after the American bombings, people assumed everything had been destroyed. But the reality is that the oil industry resumed operations very quickly. The island’s native residents, who probably number fewer than 50, stayed where they were. Every night they would sit beside the runway, smoke hookah, and gaze out at the sea. Do you know what their greatest concern was?

The gazelles. Kharg Island is home to a native population of gazelles. There are around 200 to 300 of them, and they are one of the island’s main tourist attractions. But the local people were worried that they would be harmed. Apparently, some of the gazelles had miscarried. They had suffered from the terror of the bombardment and no longer seemed to feel safe. It was the same with the neighborhood cats. With most of the island’s resident workers gone, they had become much thinner. Some had even been injured, losing legs or paws.

Kharg was bombed twice. Both times, the strikes hit the same locations, the facilities belonging to the National Iranian Oil Company. Yet despite those two attacks, life continued much as it always had. At least for the people of Kharg, who had grown up under the blazing sun and beside the salty sea and were accustomed to hardship, those strikes were not enough to break them.

Since the beginning of the war, alongside my own analysis of Iran’s political and social developments, I have tried to amplify the perspectives, observations, and recollections of ordinary Iranians living through this extraordinarily difficult period. Their voices often reveal dimensions of the conflict that rarely appear in official statements or news headlines.

If you enjoyed this essay and would like to read more accounts of everyday life during the war, I invite you to explore the other entries in my Pages from a War series. They offer contextualized personal testimonies, historical context, and translations that seek to document how ordinary people experienced and understood the moment. I’ve included links to the previous installments below.

1. Stories from Tehran Under Fire

2. “‘They Won’t Hit the Same Place Twice’, But They Did”: A Civilian Account from Tehran

3. Popcorn, Rice Pudding, and Explosions: A Civilian Account from the War

4. Fragments of Everyday Life in Wartime Iran

5. Revenging Death by Living: A Civilian Account from the Iran War

6. One Hundred Days of War and Memory

The lived experiences of the past 100 days continue to be documented through diaries and war accounts written by those inside the country. Every Iranian who has experienced the past few months carries with them a distinct perspective, each with its own set of emotions and realities. Together, they form the collective memory of the nation. This national recollection will shape future behaviors and, indeed, even the country’s foreign policy and broader outlook. So, given its importance, how does one even begin to capture the complex set of emotions shaped by each individual’s socioeconomic, familial, and geographic circumstances, along with a multitude of other factors?

This is precisely the aim of one of the latest episodes of Radio Tragedy, a podcast produced in Iran that has published monthly episodes since 2020. Each episode typically explores the tragic life of a lesser-known historical figure—individuals who have played a crucial role in shaping the country’s historical developments, but have largely been forgotten. The podcast employs a long-form narrative style grounded in factual events, informed by the work of investigative journalists. Film critic and author Karim Nikounazar is the founder of the podcast.

In one of its recent episodes, published on April 20 as a part of a series on the war, the podcast takes listeners on an auditory journey across the country and seeks to capture the personal stories, anecdotes, and memories of those who lived through the conflict. The result is a rich collection of firsthand accounts from people who witnessed the destructive effects of war, but also observed the resilience of their communities and how they emerged in its aftermath. These testimonies were drawn from interviews with authors, poets, journalists, and ordinary people from across Iran who either resided in those cities or traveled throughout the country during the war. As explained by the narrator, the episode’s aim is not to present a narrative of victory or defeat, but simply to tell the “story of the days we have lived through.”

I listened to the episode intently and felt it would be a shame for these narratives not to be made available to an English-speaking audience. For those who understand Persian, I highly recommend listening to the full three-hour long episode since no translation can fully convey the authenticity of people telling their own stories in their own voices. In this case, the narratives are also enriched by various beautiful local accents and dialects, which on their own represent the extensive cultural diversity of the nation. For those who are not proficient in Persian, I will present translated excerpts from the podcast over the next several posts on The Guarded Domains, highlighting the many dimensions of ordinary life in a country amid war. The speakers reflect in great detail on what took place from their personal perspectives, how a nation (or individuals within it) tried to process its emotions, and how despite everything, life managed to carry on.

Let’s begin with a short reflection that appears early in the episode. Written by Mostafa Mastour, the note grapples with a mix of complex emotions as the bombs fell. Mastour was born in Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s southern Khuzestan province, one of the major battlegrounds during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). He has published dozens of short stories, plays, and poems. He can also be credited for translating several short stories and poems by the American author Raymond Clevie Carver into Persian. In this reflection, Mastour wrestles with the reality and power of “evil” during an imposed war and considers how a person can preserve their soul under conditions in which the boundaries between right and wrong become increasingly blurred.

We all become sad in life. Sometimes we become angry. Sometimes we are filled with the feeling of hate. At times, we may approach the brink of despair or even experience a sense of helplessness and resignation. Sometimes we are overcome by profound doubts, or we feel that our future is in jeopardy. But, there are moments when these emotions combine to create a new and more complex situation. Just as certain chemical combinations can produce dangerous and deadly substances, the fusion of sadness and hate can have a far more destructive effect on us than either emotion could produce on its own.

Likewise, the merging of despair and anger generates a force far more damaging than the separate effects of each. When we find ourselves in new circumstances, we experience new emotions. Emotions that we often don’t have the words to describe. When the volume of suffering, sorrow, despair, anger, helplessness, and hatred exceeds the capacity of our minds, spirits, and emotions, we find ourselves in such a difficult and crushing situation that we gain new and frightening insights. We become aware of the fragile and shaky position of human beings in a world where the power of evil can appear so great that it terrifyingly limits, or even paralyzes, our abilities to pursue what is good. What can be done?

It is a difficult question. But perhaps the closest answer is to recognize that life does not die and gains strength only when we desire it for everyone, not merely for ourselves. Let us not be afraid of the cacophony of evil and not lose our faith in the righteousness of the path of goodness and virtue. Let us come closer to one another, love one another more deeply, and spread goodness to the extent of our abilities. For perhaps the truest meaning of remaining in a good state is striving to help others to also remain in the same state. It is a difficult task. But what success can ever be achieved without difficulty?

The second piece was written by Mehdi Rabbi, a short-story writer and a creative writing professor originally from the southern city of Ahvaz. As I have highlighted in previous posts, the themes and connections drawn between the generation that experienced the Iran-Iraq War and those who either remember it or have inherited its memory are increasingly appearing in diaries, journals, memoirs, and reflections written about the recent war. Rabbi’s recollection is not an exception. Since Rabbi draws several parallels between Tehran and Abadan, and his past and present relationship to both cities, some historical context may be useful.

During the Iran-Iraq War, southern cities such as Abadan and Khorramshahr suffered some of the highest levels of death and destruction. Abadan was besieged by the Iraqi Army from November 1980 until September 1981 while enduring near-daily bombardment. In late September, 1981, Iran launched a major military operation that ultimately succeeded in breaking the siege. It is this event that the author briefly recalls as the “fall of Abadan.”

Rabbi also recalls Khorramshahr, which was captured by Iraqi forces during the early stages of the war in October 1980. It was not liberated until May 1982, a victory that marked one of the major turning points of the conflict for Iran. The “great migration” mentioned in the author’s note refers to the mass flight of civilians as Iraqi forces advanced.

At the time, volunteers, local residents, and a relatively small number of military personnel who were already present in the area fought for as long as they could to provide as many civilians as possible with a chance to escape. One of the most iconic photographs from that period is simply known as The Last Defenders of Khorramshahr. It depicts five Iranian fighters crossing a bridge back into the city as it stood on the brink of capture. They were hoping to delay the Iraqi advances as long as possible. They never returned, and they remain anonymous to this day.

Rabbi, our second speaker, holds a doctorate in the Philosophy of Art. He is also a university instructor of creative writing in Tehran and the author of numerous books, short stories, and articles. Throughout his note, he moves between past and present, drawing parallels between Tehran and Abadan while reflecting on displacement, loss, memory, and belonging. He also constructs a powerful juxtaposition between his attempts at creating internal peace and lightness and the heaviness of the world crumbling around him.

It was October 2025 when I canceled all my classes. I had made the decision about a year earlier. I had already handed over my university courses to others, and had told my workshop students that I was stepping away from teaching. “Hurry up, friends, and wrap up your stories,” I told them. I wanted to leave Tehran and move north, somewhere near [the city of] Rasht. I wanted to withdraw. The world had become too noisy, too crowded for me. I had written a reminder on my mirror at home: “Make it lighter, cleaner, and more beautiful.” I wanted a small house with a garden. I wanted to walk barefoot in its yard and garden, with a cute black German Shepherd puppy running around after me. I had intuitively understood that everything was enough. One must pack and leave this abyss.

After the Twelve-Day War [June 13–June 24, 2025], this instinctive perception had become a certainty in my heart. I kept telling myself, “Let’s go, pal. Let’s see what happens.” I felt like I understood the concept of the circle and repetition well enough. I wanted to drain the poison of professorship’s omniscient from my blood. I wanted to become that playful, ignorant southern boy again who only wanted to play with everything and everyone. I didn’t want to look at the outside world anymore. I wanted to crawl inside myself and tell myself, “Did you see how there was nothing happening out there.”

I had to leave Tehran with courage. For us southerners, who are more wandering than the Jewish people, migrating was not all that difficult. So, I decided to begin downsizing and lightening my life—my bookshelves, storage unit, clothes, other belongings, and even the car’s trunk. I kept lightening and Tehran kept getting heavier.

As I lightened the bookshelves, the city air became so polluted that it was impossible to breathe. When I lightened the house, rain stopped falling from the sky. You could see the layers of dust on the leaves of the city’s trees. When I lightened the storage and the car, the price of everything suddenly rose dramatically. Inflation had become so heavy that you could hear the sounds of our bones breaking. I kept lightening and life kept getting heavier.

It was January [2026]. I was the lightest, but the heaviest days had come and piled on like rubble. The rubble was heavy, collective, astonishing, and crushing. The lightening project had also failed. It was impossible to get out from under the weight. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. Lightening was more complicated than I could handle. February was coming to a close and I was still in Tehran. Heavier than ever. Rasht was very far away. It had moved further away. The heaviness had reached Rasht too. It even seemed liked Rasht had become heavier than Tehran after January. So, where should I go?

Late February arrived, [war] planes arrived, and Tehran was becoming lonely again. It was getting lighter again. Not like the Twelve-Day War. But in a different way. When Tehran becomes empty, it becomes meek and vulnerable. Like Abadan before the fall [November 1980]. Like Khorramshahr before the great migration [October 1980]. Tehran should never empty. By the third day of the war, planes had destroyed and weighed down the area above, below, left, and right of my house within a radius of about 500 meters [547 yards]. On the third day of the war [January 2, 2026], all of my neighbors went north, went to Gilan, went to Rasht. The Bagh Saba neighborhood [western Tehran] was at its most deserted. [The same went for] Police, Turkmenistan, Shariati, and Kaj streets. I could not abandon it. I cannot abandon it. Especially now that it has become vulnerable. Now that it looks like Abadan. Now that under the rubble of December, January, and February, it has become heavier and lighter than ever. I cannot go to Rasht. When should I go to Rasht? Will I ever go to Rasht?

Many people migrated during these days. This time, the people of some cities were less kind. They were kind, but sometimes they thought, this may be an opportunity to profit. “Determining people’s rights and true intentions is not our business,” they supposed. But the truth is that Iranians were caught off guard [initially] and [eventually] kindness that did take place was done for our own benefit and others. Just like the grocery store owner who said, “Buy now, pay after the war.”

You know, in Tehran many people lost their homes. Tehran was hit 624 times, and 40,300 of its residential units were destroyed.1 Some of the homeless left the city, and some took refuge in places provided by the municipal government. But these hotels and housing accommodations were similar to the ones given to the southerners, during the Eight-Year War [Iran-Iraq War]. The same hotels under the Seyed Khandan Bridge that were depicted in part in Kianoush Ayari’s film The Abadanis.

Of course, those hotels no longer exist. But, imagine that in a single instant everything in your life—your possessions, your identity documents, your memories, your belongings, all of it—has been blown away. You’ve become a resident of a place that, although it is not bad, gives you the feeling that you are nothing. A life without any personal belongings, without any precise identity, without knowing what the future will be. This was exactly the life that the people in that hotel had. This was the story of the hotel in Tehran, where people, exhausted by the noise, by being trapped in its rooms, by the absence of any horizon for their lives, were struggling to survive.

40,300 residential units is no joke. Dresden in Germany, which [after the U.S. and Royal Air Force bombings] became known as “the burned city,” only lost 40,000 of its buildings.2 But, here in Tehran, the American and Israeli bombings left this much destruction behind. Yet despite all this, no one became displaced. No one became a destitute wanderer. But, you should think about every single of those people. All those whose entire lives once turned into smoke and disappeared into the air.

These translations are part of a broader effort to document and share how Iranians are experiencing, interpreting, and remembering this moment. As with the previous entries in this series, which I have labeled as Pages from a War, my goal is not to offer definitive answers, but to make these voices accessible to a wider audience. I hope readers will engage with them, reflect on them, and help ensure they reach as many people as possible. For additional perspectives from inside the country, I highly recommend my colleague Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack, These Are the True Things, as well. She continues to showcase a wide spectrum of perspectives and analyses published inside Iran.

“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America. So, we go back to the U.S. having not come to an agreement. They have chosen not to accept our terms,” he stated, offering little additional clarity.

It is practically impossible to decipher what transpired behind closed doors or to anticipate what may unfold in the immediate future from Vance’s comments alone. Both countries remain to be in early stages of a fragile two-week ceasefire, so this may well be a negotiation tactic among several other possibilities. The process itself was not transparent, but one can reasonably imagine that within secured rooms, each side asserted its positions through intense exchanges, drew redlines, issued ultimatums, and, perhaps, even explored potential concessions.

Beyond those closed doors, however, across Iran and the broader region, people bruised and battered by war waited anxiously for the outcome. For most citizens, the immediate success or failure of these talks will not be determined by a handful of cryptic official statements but measured in simpler, more tangible terms—whether calm returns to their streets in the coming days, or whether they are forced to endure another cycle of violence.

Iran has thus far endured tremendous human and material costs. According to Human Rights Activists News Agency, an independent watchdog organization based in Washington DC, since the start of the war 3,636 individuals have been killed in the country, out of whom 1,701 were civilians, including 254 children. Iran’s Red Crescent has reported of 20,000 injuries as a result of U.S. and Israeli attacks and 46,000 damaged residential and commercial units in the capital alone. The New York Times has verified damage to at least 22 schools and 17 health care facilities, figures that represent only a small fraction of the broader destruction.

It is difficult to fully capture the scale of what has been lost, yet it is necessary to attempt to do so if we are even to begin understanding the extent of the devastation, which will take years, if not decades, to recover from. Over the past 40 days, both domestic and international sources have documented attacks on universities, ambulances, energy infrastructures, petrochemical facilities, sports venues, ports, shipping infrastructures, state television stations, airports, bridges, railways, cultural heritage sites, and religious centers, including mosques and a Jewish synagogue.

As always, what gets lost behind statistics are the ordinary experiences and the intimate accounts of those who have endured the brutality of this war of choice each day. Accounts from inside the country are marked by recurring themes: sleepless nights filled with dread, severe anxiety, displacement, the loss of loved ones, a pervasive sense of insecurity, rattling windows, deafening explosions, internet blackouts, closed schools, disrupted businesses, and a growing sense of disillusionment. Many also speak of the quiet, exhausting effort to hold on to some sense of normalcy as their lives unravel around them, a steady determination to continue living in the face of death.

Azadeh Sadeghi’s latest war entry captures this relentless will to carry on, even as bombs fall around her and her family. For those who read my Substack regularly, you may recall her name. She is a young documentary filmmaker who was forced to relocate with her family from Tehran to Isfahan to temporarily live with her aunts due to the missile bombardment of her neighborhood. She continues to chronicle her experiences of displacement and survival. Her writings are featured in Kanoon-e Zanan-e Irani (Iranian Women’s Association), an online platform dedicated to amplifying the voices and demands of both intellectual and ordinary women. I invite you to read Azadeh’s first and second accounts before turning into her third note, presented below.

Her latest narrative engages with the notion of everyday resistance through the small acts of love carried out by her aunts, her mom, and herself. Simple, but ultimately powerful gestures such as laughing with loved ones, cooking, sipping tea, spring cleaning, preparing for the Persian New Year, and occupying oneself with ordinary tasks such as sewing. It is also about appreciating loved ones and embracing fleeting moments together, even as the uncertainty prevails.

As additional context for the uninitiated, many of the customs and traditions mentioned by Azadeh are related to the Persian New Year, or Nowruz. This is because her note was written just a few days before the occasion, which takes place each year on March 20 or 21, depending on the exact moment of the spring equinox. Azadeh’s aunt insists on cleaning the house because Khaneh-Tekani (literally “shaking the house”), or spring cleaning, is an Iranian tradition that involves washing carpets, deep cleaning the attic, cleaning windows, and sometimes even painting and scrubbing down the walls to welcome the spring in a fresh environment.

She also refers to the Haft-Sin table, which is the central component of Nowruz. It consists of a spread, either on the ground or on a table, of seven items beginning with the letter “sin” (S) in the Persian alphabet. The arrangement typically includes sabzeh (sprouted greens), senjed (dried oleaster fruit), seer (garlic), seeb (apple), somagh (sumac), serkeh (vinegar), and samanu (sweet wheat pudding). It is often accompanied by other symbolic items such as coins, hyacinth flowers, a mirror, candles, painted eggs, goldfish, a clock, and a “book of wisdom,” commonly the Qur’an for Muslims, or works by prominent Iranian poets such as Hafez and Ferdowsi. Each item carries symbolic meaning, representing themes such as love, health, wealth, growth, patience, and renewal, among other interpretations.

The piece concludes with the recitation of a common Nowruz prayer (Doa-ye Tahvil-e Saal), delivered at the exact moment of the vernal equinox to welcome the new year. The prayer invokes the transformation of hearts and conditions and expresses a hope for renewal and the best possible state of being. Families often gather around the Haft-Sin table to recite it together.

Azadeh’s third war account was published on March 20, 2026 and begins by narrating the mood in her temporary home in Isfahan hours before the New Year.

Today is Friday, March 20, 2026. Twenty days have passed since the war began. In a few hours, the [Persian] New Year will begin. Everyone is asleep. The sound of my father snoring comes from Aunt Batoul’s room, but don’t think they are in deep sleep. No! Just a few minutes ago, when a massive explosion shook Isfahan, followed by the roar of a fighter jet circling overhead, they all jolted awake, trembling like leaves.

Aunt Batoul was cleaning the windows when suddenly BOOM and she fell off the couch. I don’t even remember how my sister Azam and I grabbed Aunt Batoul and dragged her toward the part of the house we call “the shelter.” Our shelter is between two bedrooms and next to the bathroom. It’s a place where we think might give us a better survival chance if the building collapses.

While Aunt Batoul was cleaning the windows, I told her, “Aunt, what’s the point of cleaning windows when they’re just going to shatter?” She replied, “Oh come on! God willing, they won’t break. Don’t forebode a bad thing…”

This year’s Khaneh-Tekani [spring cleaning] ended up being more than dusting, wiping windows, and a few small chores. Aunt Zahra tackled the kitchen and polished the stove and the hood until they shined. Azam and I cleaned lentils, beans, and rice so we’d have food prepared and in stock for the coming weeks. Aunt Zari sat down and cracked almonds. Meanwhile, my father was reading the news for us.

But, yesterday was a hard day. A day when displacement revealed its true face to all of us who are now living together in one house.

When mom woke up yesterday, she wasn’t well. She was anxious, pacing the house, talking to herself. Aunt Batoul brewed fresh tea, and as we sat to drink it, mom suddenly said, “I’m tired! I want to go home [back] to Tehran. I swear I’m comfortable here, but I want to go back to my own home.”

Something in me snapped and I got really heated. It felt like a needle had pierced me. I cut her off angrily, “Where do you want to go?! You want to go back to a house that could be bombed at any moment with a collapsed roof on your head? Go! Get up and go! Just take a blanket too because our home doesn’t have windows anymore and you’ll freeze. If something happens to you, don’t expect me to come! Not my problem!!!!”

Truthfully, I spoke these words out of worry. My concern, however, was colored by irritation and reprimand without understanding her state or [appreciating the degree of] psychological toll that displacement must be taking on her at this age. I kept telling myself, “how could mom talk about returning to a home that may end up killing her? Why wasn’t she thinking of us? Why couldn’t she endure a little longer? Aunt Batoul immediately [warned me and] said, “Ehhh, Azadeh, dear!”

Aunt Zari said, “Ashraf, where do you want to go? Your house isn’t safe at all! By God, I know it’s hard not being in your own home, but this is just like your own home. You’re not a guest, you’re [just like] an owner.”

My father said, “I didn’t want to tell you and make you feel worse, but last night one of our neighbors went [back] to check on his house. He had just opened the door when a [missile] right then struck near the house. A piece of shrapnel hit his chandelier. He collapsed from fear. Luckily, another neighbor was there and helped him. So, [knowing] this account, [the neighborhood is still not safe] and we can’t go back yet that…”

The poor neighbor. Actually, I am sorry. I [should say] the poor, innocent missile! According to our pro-war compatriots, it must have been his own fault. He be damned for deciding to be present in a wrong place where the clean and precise missiles had planned to perform their task. And if it was his fate to be torn to pieces by shrapnel, so be it. It’s a war and war has casualties.

Anyway, after dad told us the story of the ill-fated neighbor, I became even more agitated, and as if I wanted to take all my frustration out on my mom, I [told her], “You are always impatient! Go…run…go…”

Mom started crying. She sobbed and blew her nose: “Zahra, being a guest is for three days, four days…It’s not clear when this war will end! What if it lasted another month or two? We can’t keep imposing on you. I swear I’m comfortable with you, but at my own home, I can get up and cook, sew, work, and with these things my stress will be reduced. Here, we are a burden and it’s hard. By God, don’t get upset with me.”

Aunt Batoul said, “Ashraf, I swear to God, I won’t cook anymore tomorrow, so you can cook if it makes you feel better…stay as long as you want…until whenever…the situation is different. It’s true that it’s not very safe here either, but it’s better than your own home. If you go back, we will worry endlessly. Think of us too.”

Aunt Zari said, “Ashraf, I have a rundown shack. It’s not safer than here. It shakes, both the house and its windows. But, you could go and stay there. For however long. I’ll come stay here with Zahra and Batoul.”

I wanted to hold my damned tongue, hug my mother, and say, “May I die for you. I understand you’re worried about your home and life that you and dad have worked and sacrificed for all these years. But by God, mom, that house is not safe. For now, this is the situation and we should be able to manage and endure everything and continue. Think of those who have no place to stay. What about them? Thank God that we have this. We will make things better together.” But, alas, I didn’t say that and instead, snapped in anger again, and while grinding my teeth, said: “No, let her be, auntie! Let her go! Let her go to see if she can last two days there!”

Aunt Zahra grinded her teeth, [shot me a sharp look], and told mom, “Ashraf, don’t you remember when war broke out in Abadan [1980–1988] and we all came to Isfahan? We lived in [our] aunt’s house for a year until our own home got ready. So many people. Close to 18 individuals on top of aunt’s own family lived in one house. There was no other choice. It was war and we had no home.”

My parents are cousins. They are the son and daughter of Haj Yadollah and Nosrat Khanoom, and Haj Seyfollah and Khadeijeh Sultan. The families once had lives and businesses in Abadan before the Iran-Iraq War [1980–1988]. When the war came, they were forced to leave everything behind and all migrated to Isfahan, where they had relatives. All these years, I had heard stories from my family and close relatives about their displacement and life as war refugees. Aunt Batoul always said, “It took time until we rebuilt our lives here. For example, [the locals] told us, ‘You war refugees buy too much bread!’ They would tell us this when we were in the bread line. Or, in the class they’d say, ‘You’ve come and taken up our space.’ They told us many things, dear.”

If you are reading this note and you are from Isfahan and you got upset by these words, please don’t take offense or let it trouble you. My intention is not to point a finger at the people of any city, but simply to recount the suffering of individuals who now find themselves caught once again in a cycle of repeated hardship.

In short, after about an hour of talking about concerns, Aunt Zohreh suggested to my mom to start sewing here to keep herself occupied. My mom, as if a spark of hope had suddenly lit up in her eyes, said, “On the condition that I get to sew clothes for you and Batoul.”

The mood in the house shifted. Aunt Zohreh brought out her sewing machine, supplies, and fabrics from her closet. She set up a table for mom, and mom began drafting patterns, cutting fabric, and sewing.

My aunts worked wonders. They surrounded her and gave her encouragement to endure and to continue. But what about me? I felt disappointed in myself. I had always believed that in difficult moments I could stand beside my mom with empathy and understanding, but instead of understanding her, hearing her, or trying to find a solution, I only got angry and spoke to her harshly.

A little later, my uncle and Aunt Tayebeh dropped by unannounced. They had come to see us. As soon as they sat down, Aunt Tayebeh began telling us that the day before, while she had gone out to run an errand, she heard an explosion, and suddenly something hot and solid struck her head. She lost consciousness for a few minutes, and when she came to, she realized that, yes, a piece of shrapnel from a drone, one that had exploded a few streets away and damaged several buildings, had hit her. God was with her since the fragment was very small and hadn’t penetrated her head. She was treated on her feet [and on the spot]. She recounted all of this to us with laughter, but we all knew that tremendous anxiety laid beneath that laughter, both for her and us. As a friend once said, we speak of our pain and suffering with laughter and this is, it seems, a kind of defense mechanism that helps us endure. Or as the well-known saying goes: “My bitter laughter is more painful than my sorrowful tears…”

***

An hour or two later, we all went out together to find a fabric store and buy some cloth. On one of the streets, vendors had set up, selling items for the Haft-Sin table: sabzeh, flowers, samanu, senjed, and goldfish. Life, under the shadow of war, pressed forward with even greater force.

There was also a man selling giveh [traditional Iranian handmade shoes]. I bought a pair for Peyman, my husband. It has been 20 days since I last saw his beautiful face. I only hear his anxious, worried voice for a few minutes each day over the phone.

“Peyman, your shoe size in Iranian sizing is 40, right?”

Peyman: “I can hear street noise! You went outside in these conditions?!”

Me: “Don’t worry, dear! I swear it’s been calm for a few hours, nothing’s happening for now. We got tired of being inside, came out for a bit of shopping. We’ll head back soon. Please don’t worry, don’t stress.”

Peyman: “Ehh…Azdi (Azadeh), what should I do with you! Hurry back home! I don’t want giveh…just go home.”

Me: “Alright, my dear. I’ll call you when I get back home. Don’t stress, dear.”

I had just hung up when suddenly the sound of a missile in the sky startled all of us, leaving everyone on edge.

“Did they hit?!”
“Where did they hit?”
“Was it nearby? Here?”

But, they hadn’t hit anything. In the sky, we saw a missile launched from Iran, heading toward the aggressors. A young man pointed to the sky and said, “Oh… it’s ours!…it’s going…” Another added, in a sweet Isfahani accent, “It’s from Iran. It’s heading off to blow them up.”

In that moment, I let out a sigh of relief. [I was glad that] I had ended the call earlier, so Peyman hadn’t heard the missile, which would’ve caused his anxiety to multiply. I said to myself, “A little souvenir from the middle of war. If only to deliver this giveh to you, I’ll stay alive.” And I swiped my card to pay the modest amount of 1.2 million tomans [$8.00].

After that, we bought a few things for the house from the street vendors, and for the Haft-Sin table we only got a single sabzeh. Aunt Batoul said, “This year, let’s just set a mirror, the Quran, [book of] Hafez, one sabzeh, and two black candles. So many people have been killed, so many children killed in the Minab school.1 Families are in mourning. We don’t have the heart to lay out a colorful table. This way, we keep life going, and at the same time remember those killed.”

We all accepted Aunt Batoul’s suggestion. Perhaps this is the best balance we can find between the contradictory emotions we are experiencing these days. Maybe I’ve grown lazy about brushing my teeth, combing my hair, or even plucking the mustache hairs above my lip, but I grasp at each moment of life as much as possible, albeit with great anxiety and worry. These days, more than ever, I think of living as a form of resistance. Like, when I drink tea, I slurp it as if it might be the last tea I’ll drink, so I must enjoy it with all my being and let my body absorb all the flavor. When I laugh, I try to laugh in the moment and from the bottom of my heart. When I hug my mom, I try to press my heart against hers and feel her with all my being. When I call Peyman [my husband], I tell him more than ever, “I love you, my dear. I miss you.”

These days, as much as it is possible and with whatever strength I have, I take my revenge on death by living. In a few hours, I’ll put on the one nice dress I hastily packed in my suitcase. [For the first time] in perhaps 20 days, I will apply face cream. I will sit with my family around the Haft-Sin table. I’ll wish that the [upcoming] Year of the Horse will be a better year than the Year of the Snake, which Aunt Zahra already called the “ill-fated, good-for-nothing” [past] year.

Even though we expect that the “ill-omened” fighter jet will once again fly over us and fill our hearts with fear at the moment of the New Year, we have agreed to hold each other’s hands together tighter this time while reciting, “O reformer of hearts and minds, O Director of night and day, O Transformer of conditions, Transform our conditions to the best of conditions…”

For additional perspectives from inside the country, I highly recommend my colleague Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack, These Are the True Things, which features, among other pieces, a translation of a recent letter written by Zahra Sabbagh from Tehran. She vividly captures her anxiety following Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum threatening to target the country’s power plants, water supplies, and bridges if Iran insists on keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Inside Iran, citizens continue to endure the relentless barrage of missiles and bombs, doing what they can to cope with a shattered daily reality. To better understand this lived experience, I highly recommend a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, which offers an intimate account from a resident of Tehran. The narrator describes a people caught between oppressive rulers and brutal invaders, and vividly depicts the war routine of residents gathering on rooftops each morning to make sense of the chaos. They scan the horizon, tracing the source of each sound, identifying what has been struck, and mapping the latest destruction across their beloved city. In this account, Tehran’s rooftops emerge as spaces of witness, quiet defiance, and fragile hope, where imagination and fleeting human connection persist amid the bombs.

In this vein, I also want to offer a translation of a field report published on March 23 by Shargh, one of Iran’s most prominent reformist newspapers. Founded in 2003, the daily has long covered key sociopolitical, economic, and cultural developments in the county, and remains to be one of the most reliable sources on internal opposition politics, human rights, and civil society activity, including mass protests.

The Shargh field report, written by Zahra Alipour, captures a “fragment of the everyday lives” of civilians across Iran enduring daily bombardment by American and Israeli forces. To safeguard those featured, Alipour uses initials or pseudonyms for all interviewees. For additional context, it is helpful to understand Iran’s compulsory military service system, which I also discussed in a previous post. All men at age 18 must complete two years of service, beginning with two months of basic training followed by roughly 22 months in various assigned roles. These placements are typically determined by an individual’s education, skills, and connections. In the report, one figure is described as a “gardener” who is also a soldier. While this may seem contradictory, it likely refers to a conscript assigned to municipal duties, contributing to urban beautification projects such as maintaining public parks and planting flowers.

The following is my translation of the piece.

It sounds like the sharp passage of wind through a massive column of air: fighter jets, like black birds of death, with a continuous roar, make the windows of residential homes tremble. It feels like “they are flying at low altitude.” In those moments, when the flights and the sounds rise in the sky, people in [my] home hold their breaths. They do not know if in the next instant a jet will descend on their heads and take their last breaths, or whether the explosion will be far away? If they survive, after each blast, they pick up their phones and check on their friends to see if they are alive or not. Everything exists in a duality: at any moment you may lose the dearest people in your life, or you yourself may no longer be there.

You might be like “M,” who, after finishing a tiring day of work, was on the way home, but never arrived because of an explosion at a police station. You might be like Fatemeh, a mother doing her family’s end of the year shopping for Nowruz [Persian New Year], sitting in a car at a red light, who was killed in an attack on a checkpoint—her bags of herbs for khoresh [stew] still with her. Or perhaps like a little girl who witnessed the deaths and dismemberment of her classmates, you’d now have to spend your days with physical and psychological pain. Or you could be like a soldier who had promised his mother he would return home before the garden greens are tall again, but was killed in an attack on his barracks.

The number of those killed and injured in the war has not yet been officially announced. This is a fragment of the everyday lives of Iranians in different cities across the country over the past two weeks, facing daily encounters with American and Israeli fighter jets. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced.

[Northern Province of] Mazandaran [on the Caspian Sea coast]: He Said He Would Return

It is the 10^th day of the war [March 9]. City banners show that it is the funeral ceremony for two young men who had recently begun their military service. In the northern tradition, a full-length image of one of the boys is mounted on scaffolding at the entrance of the village. He was about 21 years old and had gone to Tehran for [his mandatory military] service. His cousin says that last week, when he was returning to his barracks, it was his birthday. They had planned his engagement ceremony for the Nowruz holidays. Amir Mohammad’s face, like many boys in the village, resembles that of a wrestler. He had promised his mother that he would return home to help harvest and sell [their] herbs at the market. Now, his body will arrive to Mazandaran in six hours, but his mother still does not know that she must bury her son forever—and that he will never see the growing herbs again.

Resalat Square, Tehran: An Alley Full of Lifeless Bodies

On March 9, 2026, a large basij [IRGC’s paramilitary volunteer militia] base in Tehran’s Resalat Square was struck by missiles. Slightly above the square, in an alley on one of the connecting streets, densely populated residential homes near the base were destroyed. Even by [March 12], three days after the strike, heavy traffic of rescue and firefighting forces continued. One resident said, “that morning, people were preparing to leave the area. One family waited for their daughter to return from work, so they could all leave together. But, the explosions happened at 2:30 pm, before the girl arrived. The entire family was killed.” Some residents stated about 40 people died in that neighborhood in the early days [of the war], though there are no exact figures. “M” said, “I know of a family from extended connections who lost 14 members and until Thursday [March 12], only two bodies had been found.” Another resident from the area said that after the explosion, “the alley was full of people’s severed limbs.”

Isfahan: We Can’t Return to Our Homes

Various areas of Isfahan have been repeatedly targeted over the past two weeks. A [city] gardener near Naqsh-e Jahan Square [a 17th-century UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the world’s largest city squares] says he constantly hears the sound of fighter jets. Ahmad, who is nearing the end of his military service, said, “I’ve seen missiles hit the city. These nights they hit more often, and closer.” As he shoved the geraniums in dirt, he added, “I saw people being put into ambulances on the street behind us. I didn’t go closer, but they say many were killed.” When asked, whether he fears working near the square under threat of bombardment, he replied, “So many people have already been killed. If they strike Naqsh-e Jahan too, so be it, may my body not remain.” [This is a reference to a patriotic verse by the tenth-century poet Ferdowsi, which states if there is no Iran, may my body not remain.]

I [walk] inside the city. Mohammad, a mid-level manager at a [confectionery] factory that bakes poolaki and gaz, told me that a worker’s son who was recently hired in place of his father, was severely injured during a bombing while shopping at their neighborhood’s supermarket. He said, “As soon as the bombardment began, all workers became terrified and the production stopped midway. As you know, if egg whites used for gaz are not refrigerated immediately, they spoil. Just in this one aspect, in the very first moment, we lost 200 million toman [approximately $1,300]. And beyond that, all of our poolakies [thin brittle disk like candies] broke, and right before the New Year, our debts remained unpaid.”

A pastry seller near a recently bombed street adjacent to the Governorate of Isfahan street, recalls the day when everyone laid flat on the ground and all the shop windows on the stretch shattered. A woman who had taken refuge in a hostel recalled, “After the bombing of a military building, our home was also destroyed. We can’t go back. We’re afraid.”

Bandar Sirik [a port city on the Persian Gulf coast]: From Fallen Soldiers to Farewells with Teachers

Fatemeh, is a high school student in her final year. She was at school on the first day of the war when she heard the sound of bombings. “We were all in deep fear and thought we might be killed at any moment. Everyone was saying goodbye to their favorite teachers and friends.” She said that the “barracks next to [her] school was damaged and its soldiers were killed. Since then, with every sound of bombardment, we [ask ourselves] what if this time the missile falls on our house? What if our friends and classmates are killed?” This year, she was supposed to prepare for the konkoor [the national university entrance exam], but she cannot concentrate even for a moment. “I think I have become extremely sensitive to everything now. Every moment I think I might be killed.”

Another girl said she had seen one of the short-statured soldiers who were killed in the bombing the day before near the school. She added that his name was not clearly written on his uniform. He had smiled at the high school girls and [jokingly] asked them, “[Is it true?] They say there’s a war?” Fatemeh and her friends had responded to him in laughter and walked by. Now Fatemeh thinks and wishes they had talked to the young soldier […] longer. She wishes she could have told him to go back to his hometown and not stay here. She wishes it was possible to go back to the previous day and tell him that “yes, there is a war. A real war that promises to leave us all grieving.”

[Southern Port City of] Bandar Abbas: They Sent the Children Away to Survive

Sina, a 20-year-old, lives near an industrial complex in Bandar Abbas [on the Persian Gulf coastline]. “Every time there are strikes, the sound of bombings and the rattling of windows gets really loud. The fear among the people of the neighborhood and children is so overwhelming that once, a little [strange] girl out of panic and heart palpitations, ran to my arms for refuge.”

Sina’s father had told him that he should not stay in the city and leave the port. Perhaps Sina was his father’s only hope since he set him off alone toward Tehran. Sina recalled that after saying goodbye to his mom and dad, his home, and the city of his birth, fear had taken over his whole being. He began his 72-hour journey [to the capital city]. “I didn’t want to leave. My home is there.”

He continued, “After a lot of trouble I got from Bandar Abbas to Shiraz. As I was buying [a cup of] tea from a concession stand in the terminal, the entire terminal was bombarded. That’s why I continued [my journey toward Tehran in a [private] car, the price of which was a few times higher.” One of Sina’s friends had a similar experience. [Sina] said his friend wanted to go to Tehran from the Qeshm Island. He had to change boats seven times to reach the port. Sina and his friend went through a lot of trouble until they arrived to Tehran. Sina says that many parents send their children away from Bandar to more central cities so at least one of the children could survive.

Minab [where U.S. strikes killed over 100 school children]: Between Two Bombings

The cousin of a girl who survived the Minab school [strikes] was a university student in Bandar [Abbas]. He recalled that he was in the process of finishing university work when he heard about the strike on the school. His cousin is nine years old and was a student there. “When I arrived at the hospital, my cousin and a number of other students from the school had injuries like fractures and were in splints. But, after the second strike, ambulances [were] only arriving with the bodies of dead children. Arman, who was present at the hospital during almost the entire period when the students were arriving, stated that he spoke with an ambulance driver. The driver told him that until today, he had never seen anything like this—children with bodies torn apart. Sina’s cousin survived with a wound to her back on the left side. She can recall those moments. As one of the few survivors of the incident, she had been in the schoolyard during her gym period, which is why she [survived] and sustained fewer injuries compared to others.

For additional reporting and perspectives from inside the country, I highly recommend my colleague Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack, These Are the True Things, which features, among other pieces, a powerful post from February by Shargh’s editor-in-chief, Shahrzad Hemati, who directly confronts anti-democratic forces both within Iran and across the diaspora.

The article shows how calls for unconditional surrender have often hardened resistance, prolonged conflict, and ultimately given way to political compromise rather than decisive rupture. Even in archetypal cases of total victory, such as Germany and Japan, the end of war depended on continuity, negotiation, and the preservation of key institutions in the aftermath. The persistence of this rhetoric, I suggest, reflects less a realistic strategy than a political language meant to sustain public morale and justify the costs of war—one that risks obscuring the limits of military force in shaping political outcomes.

The Foreign Policy team kindly provided a gift link that allows you to read the piece on their website for free after registering. They also shared a full PDF of the article, which I’ve included below.

Unconditional Surrender Is Always An Illusion

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Earlier this week, reports emerged of indirect talks between the United States and Iran, mediated by Pakistan. Any glimmer of a negotiated off-ramp or de-escalation should be welcomed with cautious hope and encouragement. Yet what has been publicly revealed so far suggests a series of maximalist demands from President Trump, met with equally uncompromising responses from Iranian officials. One can only hope that behind closed doors, moderation and pragmatism hold sway, even if public rhetoric remains dominated by bravado.

Meanwhile, the bombs continue to fall relentlessly across the region, and the human and material costs keep mounting. The independent DC-based organization Human Rights Activists News Agency reports that 1,527 civilians have been killed by U.S. and Israeli attacks, including 228 children. And according to the latest figures by Iran’s Red Crescent, 93,233 civilian structures have been damaged, including 71,547 residential units, as well as 295 medical facilities, 600 schools, and 120 cultural and historic sites.

Israel’s unrelenting assault on Lebanon has pushed its population to the brink. More than one million Lebanese (almost a quarter of the country’s population) have been displaced, and 1,094 have lost their lives. Iranian missiles have taken the lives of 19 civilians in Israel and 13 U.S. military members have died. Across the wider region, including Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, a total of 120 civilian deaths have been reported.

The ongoing war has also had devastating environmental consequences. According to the first analysis of the climate cost of the war, five metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions have been recorded during the first 14 days of the conflict. The war is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined. Following the destruction of Iranian oil depots by Israel on March 7–8, residents in Tehran experienced a toxic black cloud over the city caused by oily fires that burned for days. Many have reported of headaches, eye and skin irritations, and difficulty breathing. Experts have warned about long-term risks that could include cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, DNA damage, and cancer.

Together, the immediate human toll, sociopolitical damage, and ecological effects tell the story of a crisis whose consequences will reverberate far beyond the present moment. This war will cast a long shadow over generations to come. There will be no such thing as immediate healing, even after a ceasefire. A collective regional and global response will be needed, one that confronts the deep wounds left behind and lays the groundwork for true recovery and lasting peace. Of course, that is a monumental task, far easier said than done.

For now, to capture the everyday reality of war conditions inside Iran, I am working with a group of scholars and academics, through a collaborative effort to gather and engage with perspectives, analyses, and firsthand civilian accounts published inside the country since the early days of the conflict. In my previous post, I shared the story of Azadeh Sadeghi, a young filmmaker who was forced to relocate with her family from Tehran to Isfahan due to relentless missile strikes on their neighborhood. Azadeh continues to chronicle her daily experiences, which are published by Kanoon-e Zanan-e Irani (Iranian Women’s Association), an online platform dedicated to amplifying the voices and demands of both intellectual and ordinary women. I invite you to read Azadeh’s first account before diving into the second part, which I am offering below.

Azadeh’s second note delves into her traumatic experiences at her new temporary home in Isfahan, where she and her family have sought refuge with their aunts. The narrative captures the restless nights, the gnawing worries for loved ones who must leave the safety of home each day for work, and the restless unease of a displacement.

The personal narrative also addresses a critical issue plaguing Iranians both inside the country and within the diaspora—the widening political divide between those who continue to support the war as a means to overthrow the regime and achieve a brighter future, and those who see only irreparable death and destruction in its continuation. This fragmentation exposes the painful complexity of a society torn between hope, fear, conflicting aspirational visions, and diverging means to achieve a better tomorrow.

As an additional point of context, Azadeh briefly references Naser Khosrow’s Safarnama, or Book of Travels. For those who may not be familiar, this eleventh-century travelogue recounts a seven-year journey (1046–1052) by its author from the city of Merv (present-day Turkmenistan) to Mecca and back, offering meticulous observations of cities and daily life throughout the Islamic world, including Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Regarded as a rare eyewitness historical source, the diary provides a remarkably accurate portrait of the Middle East at the time and stands as a cornerstone of Persian literature.

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Azadeh’s second war account was published on March 17, 2026. It begins by capturing her and her family’s longing and concerns for the home and neighbors they left behind in Tehran.

As I am writing this note, 13 days have gone by from the start of the war [March 13]. If you have read the previous account, you know that on the second day of the war we were forced to leave our home in Tehran and took refuge in Isfahan, at Aunt Batoul and Aunt Zahra’s house.

“What does our home look like now? What happened to my room? Oh, my books must be ruined! Books are so expensive now. How am I supposed to buy books again?”

Azam (my sister) keeps saying these things to herself these days. She’s sick with worry about the house. Her life is tied to her books. She studied dramatic literature, and a few months ago her first short story was published. She had been working on her master’s thesis, had taken on a few language students, and everything was gradually falling into place when suddenly the war began and life came to a halt. I’ve never seen Azam this restless before. She has no peace and cannot settle at all. There isn’t a moment when I can see calm on her face.

Every day we hear some news from home. From what we’ve learned, all the neighbors have evacuated [our] condo building. I’m also glad that Mrs. Mansourian (one of the neighbors) finally managed to go and stay at a relative’s house, even if only for a few days.

Of course, some days we hear worse news. Like the report that a [missile] blast wave split a neighbor’s car, parked in the parking garage, cleanly into two equal halves. [The same blast wave] also shattered our storage unit’s glass, which was nearby the same car. So, even our storage space, which is in the parking area wasn’t spared from the blast and shrapnel. And, it must be said [sarcastically]: What precise and “clean” targeting. Bravo! Bravo! Our poor storage unit was apparently a target. Our home [a target]. Poor us! Bravo!

Wow…just now, as I’m writing this note in a corner of my aunts’ house, I heard a massive explosion. My legs started shaking again. My heart is racing and I’m afraid…but I keep writing and hope this won’t be the last time that I can. It is six in the morning here…BOOM…another one…oh no…this one was closer…

No one here sleeps at night. In fact, sleep as we knew before the night of February 28 [the day the war began] no longer exists. We sleep for two hours. We are startled awake with every sound and sleep again for another two hours…and this unpleasant process repeats…I long for a proper night’s sleep. Sigh! I wish it was possible to sleep peacefully, even for a few hours without worry.

These days, the only thing that gives me a little calm and strength to go on is seeing my aunts after nearly seven years.

Oh no…another one hit… the sound of an explosion, even stronger this time…I’m scared…

***

Okay, a minute has passed, and now I can hear the sound of air defense systems.

Again, the sound of air defense…

Again…

The sound of air defense strangely brings me some comfort…

Sorry! This is what our “memoir writing” looks like. When you write from the heart of war, under bombardment, you can’t expect something like Naser Khosrow’s Book of Travels.

Alright, where was I? Ah yes, I was [trying to say] that the last time I came to Iran was two and a half years ago, but even then, I couldn’t make it to Isfahan to see my aunts. And now, in these days of displacement, we’ve finally been reunited.

But these days everyone keeps asking me, “Why did you come back?!”

Well, you’re not a stranger anymore. I’m sharing all the details of my life, so why not this too? I wasn’t in Iran during the 12-Day War. In those 12 days, I lost six kilos [13 pounds], and my days and nights were filled with anxiety and absolute darkness. Almost everything in my life was disrupted. It was the darkest period I’ve ever experienced. I watched my family, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, and my country from afar, and I could not do anything. For the first time in my life, I faced the stark, naked reality of war and the possibility of losing loved ones and compatriots, and the destruction of my country.

Perhaps the only useful thing I did was participate in anti-war protests with some friends. Of course, some “brave and heroic compatriots” didn’t hold back from greeting us with insults and threats. Those same compatriots who, for years abroad, have been “fighting their revolutionary struggle” by discrediting activists inside the country, distorting history, belittling movements’ achievements, exploiting the dead and protests, erasing people’s agency, selling wishes and fantasies about the stages and processes of revolutions, staging performative hunger strikes in front of embassies, and so on. What a “struggle!” Bravo! Bravo!

Things escalated so much that one of my friends even received a public threat on Instagram, targeting both [my friend] and their son. [They wrote,] “You bastard…you ate [shit…f@*!$% up]…when you went to an anti-war protest! You and your son will…”

My friend reported it to the police, and on their advice, changed the locks on their home.

Yes, all of this was because we just said “no” to war. What “freedom of speech” for those who claim to defend it!

Anyway, let’s move on. This time, when the whispers of war started again, I thought it over and realized I just couldn’t endure the same [kind of experience] anymore. This time, I would go to Iran to be with my family. If I were to die, I wanted to die beside my family, in my own country, come what may!

I told myself, to hell with work. I canceled or postponed whatever I could. Although, to be honest, I’ve always been an optimistic person, and I never truly believed another war would happen and I had deep hope in negotiations. I saw it as the only way to rescue the country. And I also thought to myself, surely international law and diplomacy are not so deep in the sewer that an attack would happen again in the middle of negotiations. But, on Saturday, February 28 at 10:00 am, I realized that I should flush away any trust in international relations and law since it has become so wild. Sorry. This is wartime, and I have no nerves left. In your magnanimity, please overlook my bluntness.

And that’s how [and why] I came back.

***

Last night, Aunt Zahra came for a visit. When I hugged her, she said, “My dear, I wish I could have seen you under better circumstances.” I held her so tightly, as if I could make up for years of missing her, until I broke into tears. She had brought corn with her to make us popcorn. She was trying to lift our spirits. She put the pan on the stove, and one by one, we heard the “pop pop” of the kernels bursting. After that, she made her special sholezard [rice pudding] for us, with the finest saffron and plenty of slivered almonds.

Aunt Zahra, like my other aunts, is a self-made and independent woman, and for her time, quite a trailblazer. I have six aunts in total. They were all still young when my grandfather passed away, and each of them rolled up their sleeve and found work to build a life. But not without hardship. They endured endless gossip and judgment from the kind of people that say, “What business does a girl have working and being independent?!”

Still, despite all the challenges, they singlehandedly stood their ground against misjudgments and their community’s traditional fabric. Through persistence, each of them built their own life and became a role model for the younger generations in our family.

Aunt Zahra works as a telecommunications specialist during the day, and in the evenings she’s a sculptor and an instructor. Her classes are currently cancelled because of the war, but she still goes to work every day. She said, “I’ll make you a unicorn, Azadeh. Since the [upcoming Persian] New Year is the year of the horse.” I said, “Thank you, my dear, I don’t want to trouble you, but I’d love to have something from you as a keepsake. By the way, what year is the current one again?”

[My other] aunt Zohreh said, “The Year of the Snake. Good-for-nothing snake! They say a ‘wise snake!’ What rubbish!”

We all burst out laughing. However, our laughter didn’t last long since Aunt Zahra began telling us about what had happened to her that morning on her way to work:

“Like every day, this morning I had to walk about seven or eight minutes to the bus stop. Suddenly, there was a terrifying explosion. Without anyone saying a word, we all instinctively took shelter along a street wall. Cars passing by also swerved aside unconsciously. Everyone was frozen in fear. Then another sound of explosion came. I suddenly looked around and saw everyone pressed against the wall. There was a mother and child in front of me. I saw that the mother, even though her hands were shaking, was holding her child tightly. It all probably lasted just a few seconds, but to me it felt like hours. Then we saw a massive cloud of black smoke, which later turned gray, filling the sky and the surroundings. We were about to leave when others said, ‘No, stay, stay.’ A man said, ‘These [missiles may] have a delayed blast. They might release shrapnel, stay where you are.’

So, we stayed. We stood there for about four or five minutes, then left. It was the first time I had heard an explosion from that close. I always thought I was strong, but my whole body went weak and I was shaking. When I got near work, I saw shattered glass all over the ground and wondered why no one had swept it up. As soon as I arrived, my colleague told me the street next to our office had been hit and all the windows of the surrounding buildings had shattered. They told us to go home. That it was dangerous today. I went to the next street and saw the destroyed building. It looked just like [the Iran-Iraq] wartime [1980–1988]. The building had burned from the inside. Later, I found out that a piece of shrapnel from [the same] drone [that destroyed the building also] hit a car with a family of three inside. They were killed instantly. The car had collapsed and burned. [The car’s] thickness was reduced to just four or five centimeters [1 to 2 inches]. It was truly horrifying and heartbreaking.”

Since Aunt Zahra told us about this incident, I can’t stop thinking about that unfortunate family of three. Maybe they were just going out to buy something for their home, when suddenly a piece of shrapnel, out of nowhere, burned away their lives and dreams.

And now, a new worry has been added to all the others. Aunt Zahra goes to work every day. They don’t shut down and also don’t give time off. Each day, she has to pass along a route where an explosion has already happened. And it’s not just us. So many employees in offices, companies, shops, municipalities, hospitals, and more, still go to work every day. And like us, their families feel as if a piece of their soul is torn away each day, just waiting and hoping their loved one will return home safely.

Oh no…another noise came again. This time it’s the sound of a fighter jet. It’s circling right above us, and my heart drops. I’m scared. When a jet appears, it doesn’t leave anytime soon, and the thought that at any moment, it might drop a bomb on our house, or a neighbor’s, or somewhere else keeps spinning in your mind. It fills your heart with a kind of terror that feels like it’s about to burst out of your throat. What a hard day it is today…

Let me say this as a closing note. I know this piece is full of sarcasm and barbed remarks. But honestly, when you die and come back to life a thousand times a day from fear, you can’t speak to those sitting miles beyond the borders, celebrating our misery, bloodshed, and destruction, in any language other than sarcasm and bitterness. Ah, forgive me…did I upset your delicate sensibilities?! Bravo, bravo…Your kindness and generosity are appreciated.

For more perspectives from inside the country, read my colleague Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack, These Are the True Things, including a recent post on a ubiquitous thread connecting many accounts from Iran these days—shattered glass. Both its physical reality and symbolic weight run through numerous narratives of the war, including Azadeh’s account.

Along with other officials, Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has made it clear that Tehran will not be backing down “one iota” from its right to defend the nation. He has elaborated that the Islamic Republic is pursuing “an eye for an eye” strategy and will not accept a ceasefire until the aggressors “learn a lesson” and never again contemplate attacking Iran. Judging from such statements, Tehran appears to be attempting to break the familiar cycle of conflict that has characterized many of Israel’s wars: escalation, temporary calm, negotiations, fragile ceasefires, and then renewed violence.

The former Supreme Leader, assassinated by U.S.-Israeli forces, has been replaced with his son Mojtaba Khamenei, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has backed the appointment, signaling the continuation of the regime’s hard-line and security-driven policies. The IRGC has already demonstrated its ability to spread the war across the region and appears willing to expand its targets. In a recent statement, it threatened to strike economic and banking interests tied to the U.S. and Israel in the region, in retaliation for an attack on a bank affiliated with Iran’s military. Israel has also intensified strikes against Hezbollah infrastructures in Beirut, which has caused mass population displacement. According to UNICEF, nearly 700,000 people including around 200,000 children have been forced to leave their homes in Lebanon alone.

Military and civilian casualty numbers continue to rise across all countries involved, though the scale of human loss is overwhelmingly higher in Iran amid the current war. As of March 11, 1,276 people, including 200 children have been killed in Iran; only 197 have been military fatalities. Four hundred deaths have been recorded in Lebanon, 11 in Israel, and seven American soldiers have also been reported killed.

Conditions on the ground in Iran have also deteriorated dramatically. The country’s Red Crescent reports that 21,720 civilian buildings have been damaged so far, including hospitals, schools, medical facilities, homes, and businesses. The war is no longer something only seen on television screens, examined by analysts, or discussed in government briefings. It has seeped into people’s kitchens, bedrooms, and work spaces.

To capture the everyday experience of war conditions in Iran, I offer below my translation of a civilian account, as told by Azadeh Sadeghi, a young filmmaker who was forced to relocate with her family from Tehran to Isfahan due to constant missile strikes on her neighborhood.

Azadeh’s account was originally published on March 8, 2026 by Kanoon-e Zanan-e Irani (Iranian Women’s Association), an online publication dedicated to highlighting the demands and experiences of both intellectual and ordinary women. Through analyses, interviews, and reports, the platform seeks to document the hopes, frustrations, and daily lives of Iranian women—from prominent writers and activists to those who, in the words of the publication itself, “live in the shadows.”

The platform’s editor-in-chief is the prominent Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist Jila Baniyaghoob, known for her intrepid reporting on the oppression of women by Iran’s governing structures as well as the plight of women refugees across the Middle East. During the protests that followed Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, Baniyaghoob and her husband, reformist journalist Bahman Ahmadi Amouee, were arrested in their home as part of a sweeping crackdown on the media at the time. I translated Azadeh Sadeghi’s account with their permission, so please feel free to cite or incorporate it into your own writing with proper credit.

Azadeh’s narrative vividly describes the first week of war, offering the reader an intimate glimpse into family dynamics, the bonds between neighbors, and the anxieties of ordinary women as missiles fall on the streets of her beloved neighborhood. It also speaks to something deeper, touching on the invisible thread binding two generations of Iranians separated by decades, but united by the experience of war. The older generation lives with the vivid memories of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988)—the sudden dislocations and the homes abandoned overnight, sometimes never seen again. Now a younger generation finds itself confronting similar uncertainties, forced to leave their homes without knowing when or how they may return.

As additional context, during conversations with her aunt Batoul, Batoul responds by calling the author “auntie.” This is a common linguistic practice that signifies deep affection and endearment. In many families, fathers respond to their children’s questions by calling them “dad,” and mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other elders may do the same with their respective titles. While there can be other interpretations, the practice often highlights that the child is so near and dear that they are, in a sense, an extension of the elder themselves.

Azadeh begins writing her account on March 5, six days into the war, attempting to capture the chaos, fear, ambiguity, and insecurity that have defined the days since the first bombs fell on her neighborhood.

I am writing this note six days after the war began [February 28], and my family and I have officially become war refugees.

On Monday [March 2], around 9:30 in the morning, I was lying on my mom’s bed beside her when suddenly a massive explosion and the violent shaking of the windows jolted us awake. We ran toward the hallway. We hugged each other tightly in fear and screamed: “War has come! War has come! A’zam! [the author’s sister] Dad! The war has come.” The neighbors rushed outside in panic, and the sound of screams echoed through the apartment complex.

For hours afterward, my knees kept shaking. I felt hollow inside. I had never experienced fear so naked and raw, and so close. I had never been this afraid in my life. This was my first encounter with war.

Each of us, anxious, paced in different corners of the house while checking news and making calls one after another.

“Has war really started?!”
“Where did they hit?!”
“Are you okay?”
“Have you heard from anyone else?”
“What will happen now?”

***

My mother, out of sheer anxiety, started cleaning the windows and cooking. My father’s blood pressure went up and he slept for a while. A’zam and I frantically searched for news. Our ears had become hypersensitive to sound. Every sound. From that moment until now, every noise makes us jump a thousand meters into the air.

Several hours passed and things seemed to have calmed down. To the extent that I even started to think that maybe the morning had been a dream, a terrible nightmare that was now over. Then my mom said: “This is the calm before the storm, dear. Get some sleep, because tonight until the dawn, we won’t be able to sleep with the sound of explosions and fear. It was like this during the 12-Day War too.”

She was right. Around eight or nine at night, the explosions started again, nonstop. We were in a state of terrifying anxiety, as if we were ready for the worst to happen at any moment, [so we could] find shelter somewhere in the house. That night we laid our mattresses next to each other in the living room, but didn’t [even] blink.

The next day we had officially entered the second day of war. We only had access to the national internet. Satellite signals were all cut off, and the lack of information was killing us. Around eight o’clock at night, we were sitting together drinking tea with dates, trying to pretend [like experts] to analyze the situation, when suddenly we heard the sound of two explosions very close to our house. The whole house shook as if it were about to collapse. We screamed and immediately ran to a corner of the house for shelter. My father fell and we shouted: “Dad… Dad!…Come here!”

Again, [we heard] the sound of [another] explosion, the house trembled, windows and the chandelier shook…

It was a missile. I don’t know how many minutes it lasted, but for us, every second felt like hours. It wouldn’t end…

Boom…

The four pillars of the house shaking, the sound of breaking glass…

Boom…

Screams from the apartment complex and the loud cries of a child…

Boom…

Me: “God, please protect us…”
Mom: “Recite the ‘Azim al-Bala Dua [The Great Calamity Prayer].”
Me: “I don’t remember it. I’m scared.”
A’zam: “Azi! Calm down.”
Mom hugged me: “My dear, whatever happens, we’re together…”

***

The explosions finally stopped. Now the sound of neighbors pouring out of their homes [began], hurried footsteps, running, panic, and the sound of ambulances…A few people went to the end of the street to help a neighbor who had gone out, as he did every night, to put out his trash bag. But, his lifeless body was now lying on the ground with garbage spilled across the pavement. We learned that several missiles had struck two streets away from our house, and shrapnel from one of them had taken his life.

The smell of gunpowder had filled the entire apartment complex. The courtyard was covered in dust and debris. The windows of all the west-facing units in the apartment building were shattered, including my mom’s bedroom window. Where we got lucky was that the bedroom door had been closed, so the glass hadn’t been thrown at us.

A few minutes passed. We were still in shock. Who would have imagined missiles landing just steps from our home? Wasn’t death supposed to only be for the neighbor? Hadn’t they said the missiles would strike their targets very cleanly, quietly, and very accurately? Where was our house on that target? Our neighbor who died from the shrapnel—by what precision strike was he targeted?

Mom’s blood sugar had gone up, dad’s face was red, but he insisted, “No, my blood pressure isn’t high, I am fine. They won’t strike here again. It was a minor fall. My leg hurts only a little.”

My Aunt Batoul called and hurriedly asked, “We read on the news that they hit near you, are you OK?”

Me: “It was so scary, auntie. I really thought it was over and we were all going to die!” And I burst into tears…
Aunt Batoul: “May I be the one to die for you! Oh, auntie! Come here. Come to Isfahan, to our house. It’s better if we’re together. They are hitting here too, but at least the noise is less where our house is, auntie. At least, the house hasn’t shaken since yesterday.”

After the intense explosions around our house, we set out on the road as quickly as we could. We were afraid of the danger on the road too—what if a missile struck while we were on the road? But our neighborhood was no longer a place to stay. We had to choose. Either remain in a house that was no longer truly safe, or take to the road and face a fate, the ending of which we did not know.

Around eight in the morning we arrived at aunts Batoul and Zohreh’s house in southern Isfahan. I hadn’t seen my aunts in six years. I hugged Aunt Batoul and said: “Thank you for giving us, the war-stricken, a place to stay.”

She replied: “What are you saying, dear? History is repeating itself, auntie. We were war refugees once too…”

She was right. They had been among the last people to leave their life and home in Abadan when Iraq bombed the city [the Siege of Abadan lasted from November 1980 to September 1981]. Fleeing so hastily, they even left their identity documents behind. Now, more than thirty years later, history was repeating itself for their nieces.

The aunts’ house is a small but pleasant home with two bedrooms. Over these past few days, we have tried to be a little kinder to one another. Aunt Batoul does most of the cooking, and the rest of us help with cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and other chores. But Aunt Zohreh still goes to the shop from morning to noon. She is a well-known stationery seller in the neighborhood. All the customers know her for her good manners and the way she treats them. These days, though, her heart and mind are not in it. The shop owner has told her, “Mrs. Sadeghi, whenever you feel scared, or if you heard an explosion nearby, just close the door and run home.” So, my aunt sits at the back of the shop, or as she puts it “at the ready,” to leave at a moment’s notice. But, until she returns home, our hearts jump into our throats a thousand times. The shop is only a few streets away, but these days the sound of bombs and explosions can be heard from all over Isfahan.

***

Yesterday [March 4], I heard the sound of American fighter jets for the first time. It was six in the morning. We had finally had a few quiet hours and I was about to fall asleep when a huge explosion made us jump a few meters. Our hearts sank, just like the night they hit two streets away from our home in Tehran. I had thought I would never experience that terrifying moment again, but no, it seems wherever we go, it follows us. The damn fighter jet circled overhead and seemingly over the homes for 10 minutes. My knees started shaking again. “My knees are shaking, I am too timid.”

“No, dear. My knees are also shaking. It’s natural,” Aunt Batoul said.

I felt a little reassured. During that entire 10 minutes, which felt like an hour, I kept telling myself, “What if it hits our house? What if it hits the neighbor’s house and the blast wave takes us with it too?” Then I would feel ashamed for thinking that it should hit somewhere else. But, “wherever it hits, no one would know what the blast wave will do to the houses around them…”

Last night, Mehdi (one of the neighbors) called my father and said that ever since we left the apartment complex [in Tehran], our neighborhood has been under missile fire every night—each night worse than the one before. And I remembered what my father said that horrifying night, “They don’t hit the same place twice!” But they did.

The night before last, I don’t know if it was one missile or several bombs, but they hit right on the alley next to ours in Tehran and a neighbor’s car was hit by shrapnel and completely crumpled. The windows of all the houses for several blocks around, including ours, were shattered, and the apartment building itself was slightly damaged by the intensity of the explosions. Mehdi said that if you walk the alleyway leading to the house, it feels like walking through rubble. Everywhere is full of broken glass, trash, and dust from the blasts. It seems like it no longer resembles the beautiful alley we once knew.

Mehdi said that most of the neighborhood’s residents have evacuated, but there are still three or four neighbors left in our apartment complex because they have nowhere else to go. My heart aches for Mrs. Mansourian (one of the neighbors), who has to take care of her disabled mother-in-law. She’s been there all these past few days and has no choice but to stay. We called her, and my mom, pleading, said, “Come to Isfahan, to our relatives’ house, please. There’s room, don’t worry. At least we can stay together…”

I don’t know how our few remaining neighbors have survived all this time amid the constant shaking, the noise, and the fear of explosions. It makes my stomach churn just imagining it. I hope Mrs. Mansourian somehow manages to pick up her mother-in-law and come stay with us, or at least go somewhere else. Then I tell myself, “But where?! We’re experiencing almost the same thing in another city. Where is an actual safe place? Is there even any safe place left?!”

The night we left the house, I thought we’d return very soon. I wanted from the bottom of my heart for my father’s words to be true when he said, “They don’t hit the same place twice.” I never thought we’d return to a half-destroyed house.

This translation is part of a collaborative effort by several Iran scholars and observers seeking to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives from inside the country—voices that are often drowned out by the thunder of geopolitics and seldom platformed on mainstream media.

For more perspectives from inside the country, read my colleague Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack These Are the True Things, including her latest post featuring a short essay by a feminist philosopher on the meaning of “ordinary life” amid war.

There is little to no sign of political softening on the Iranian side, with officials claiming that the war will continue and the government has no intention of negotiating. While the U.S. appears to have planned or hoped for a quick and decisive victory, Iran’s military apparatus has long derived its comparative advantage on the battlefield from drawn-out and asymmetrical warfare. These competing approaches make a rapid resolution to the war unlikely. In the meantime, the cannons of war keep rumbling and the civilian toll continues to rise. Since the outbreak of the conflict on February 28, the total number of reported civilian deaths has reached 1,172, including 194 children, most of them under the age of 10.

People in Tehran are talking about insomnia, panic, and exhaustion due to endless waves of strikes that have left many fearing for their lives. Particularly harrowing accounts from March 5 and March 6 suggest exceptionally terrible nights, which one eyewitness described as “hell on earth.” Numerous journalists and ordinary citizens who have managed to briefly connect to the internet amid the blackout—either through VPNs or Starlink—have described relentless thunderous explosions, buildings shaking, ubiquitous plumes of smoke, damaged infrastructures, and the destruction of military targets as well as civilian airports, oil depots, water distillation facilities, homes, and businesses.

Video: A clip circulating on social media shows a major explosion in Tehran around 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 7. Online reports claim the strike targeted a site believed to be linked to the IRGC Aerospace Command in the Kuhak District. Source: Vahid Online

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Through all of this destruction and expanding regional insecurity, life in Washington, DC remains unchanged. Couples stroll, enjoying the mild weather of early spring. Children walk home from school, pedestrians escort their dogs to the park, and customers frequent bars and restaurants. The contrast between the harrowing accounts and images on my mind and my life in Washington is bewildering, disturbing, and at times numbing. It leaves me with a strange and distant feeling between the lived experiences of those inside Iran and the seemingly unaffected rhythm of everyday life in the capital of the nation shaping those horrors. America has once again unleashed its mighty sword thoughtlessly and with cavalier indifference while its own population remains largely untouched by the costs of war.

Observing the unchanging pace of life outside my door, I cannot help but ask myself if my neighbors even know if there is a war going on. Do they care? In their imagination, is Iran just another weird, foreign, and problematic land abroad, perpetually at war? Perhaps the news of war simply got lost in the barrage of timelines they scroll through every day? Or maybe they are simply better at compartmentalizing life than I am. There are no clear and concise answers. A truly exhaustive reply may be as difficult to come by as trying to gauge the perceptions, concerns, and private preoccupations of every individual simply hoping to get through life’s daily trials.

What I am more certain of, however, is that the distance between watching a war and living through one is immeasurable—even for the most attentive observers. So, in this post, I offer my translation of two accounts written by individuals inside Iran. As a cautionary note, I am not suggesting that these quantitatively modest accounts capture the many complex and layered worries, opinions, and visions of a nation of 90 million people. All I hope to do is provide a narrow glimpse into how some individuals inside the country are experiencing and reflecting on the war as it unfolds around them.

This effort also aligns with a broader initiative by a collective of academic scholars and observers of Iran to highlight and engage with a wider range of perspectives and analysis published from within the country. There is no need to ask permission. If you find the material useful, please feel free to incorporate it into your own work or share it more widely, as long as proper sourcing and credit are provided.

The first account is by an Iranian journalist Mohammad Bagherzadeh, who writes for the reformist newspaper Shargh. He is also a member of the International Federation of Journalists. In vivid and unsettling detail, he describes the intensity of the March 5 strikes and how he, his friend, and residents of a neighborhood in Tehran experienced what felt like a near-death encounter.

There is an important context to keep in mind before reading his post. When he refers to “soldiers,” he is speaking about young Iranian men who are required to join the military at the age of eighteen. Iran maintains a mandatory conscription system commonly referred to as sarbazi, which requires all men to serve for approximately two years. Their training begins with typical boot camp and basic combat instruction for roughly two months, after which they are assigned to various forms of service depending on their education, skills, and connections. Some become guards stationed outside banks, others work in public hospitals, and some may end up in low-level administrative roles within government offices if their skills, and a bit of luck, allow it.

As Bagherzadeh describes, during the 12-Day War and the current fighting some of these individuals may have abandoned their posts out of fear. However, doing so carries legal consequences. Under normal circumstances most conscripts are not assigned to combat roles, but the uncertainties of wartime blur many of these boundaries.

On March 6, after six days of being cut off from the internet, Mohammad Bagherzadeh managed to purchase a VPN that worked. He wrote the following on X:

The closest I’ve come to death was tonight. Around five in the morning, we had just fallen asleep when something that sounded like a fighter jet roared overheard. We were used to hearing that sound even before the war, so it wasn’t particularly unusual. But after a few minutes, suddenly the building shook, the balcony door slammed [open] into the wall and then BOOOOOM.

Everything was shaking and then again BOOOM. We were frozen.

I put a pillow over my head and we crouched in a corner, away from the chandelier and the mirror. The building was shaking violently, we could hear the sound of structures collapsing and glass shattering, and then again BOOOM. We had nowhere to go, no way forward and no way back. We kept thinking “this one must be the last,” and then an even more terrifying sound would follow.

In the middle of all those missiles, my friend said, “What if the next one hits us?” And what difference would it have made when the building was already collapsing? I don’t know after how many missiles the rhythm of the blasts stopped. A little later we heard another explosion, but this time a bit farther away. When it finally went quiet, all of us, stunned, barefoot, and terrified, rushed toward the stairwell. We were all trembling like leaves.

The dead-end alley was filled with terrified people, but the building next to ours was still intact. From a few hundred meters away, smoke and flames were rising. At the entrance to the first alley, several men in military uniforms (probably all soldiers) were panting. I remembered that two nights ago my friend who is a soldier had been trying to convince his mother why he had to stay in Tehran. He was saying that his “[legal case from abandoning duty] during the 12-Day War was still pending, and they’ve even blocked my SIM card. If I run away this time, they’ll execute me. And besides, the swollen eyes of the [other] soldiers are still on my mind. It would be heartless for me not to go, because the burden would fall on their shoulders.” The next night, though, after several barracks were struck, he was convinced and went north.

I spent the whole [June 2025] 12-Day War in Tehran. I still haven’t forgotten the terror of the last night [of that war], but last night [March 5, 2026] was completely something else compared to that war in its entirety. These days, a feeling of dread and fear is injected [to you] from every street. Even from the faces of those who have cordoned off the streets in the name of authority.

In complete silence and in this darkness, [foreign] evacuation notices are stress inducing stories. One person says [Iran] International reported this, another talks about Trump and Netanyahu Tweets calling for the evacuation of some districts. But, on state radio and television and domestic websites, there is no news at all. For many of us, if this war doesn’t bring death, it will leave us with trauma and a terrified psyche.

After six days of being cut off from the news, through a lot of trouble, I’ve now managed to buy a VPN, and I don’t even know how long it will keep working. I don’t even know which narrative [to pick] to write about these days. And I don’t know what will become of our lives or of Iran’s future. But, I hope this will be the last time these people and Iran ever experience war. I wish the shared pact among all of us would be to remove the option of war from every plan.

On March 4, 2026, Hossein Hamdieh wrote the following vignette on X. Hossein holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King’s College London. He is currently based in Tehran, where he works as a social researcher. Through his observations at a park overlooking the city, he attempted to capture the emotional atmosphere of residents in the Iranian capital—an urban metropolis of nearly 10 million people.

Tehran is becoming Beirut. A place where war becomes part of the fabric of everyday life where people go to work, shop, and stroll while explosive fire erupts somewhere in the background of the scene.

I took this photo at Parvaz Park yesterday, Monday [March 2, 2026]. People from Tehran had gathered there to look down from a high vantage point and see the destruction of the city. Fear was floating in the air, and people held their loved ones and friends, able to do nothing but “watch.” For those of you who are not here, whatever you imagine about how bad things are, multiply it by a thousand. The situation is bad. Truly bad. Dire. Hellish and full of uncertainty.

But life inevitably goes on. We may be the only people who can gather together and even turn tragedy into an opportunity to socialize or make jokes out of disaster. I went around the park and chatted with people. At the end they said to each other, “Stay alive.” And this might be the most concrete way to describe the reality we are living in Tehran. Don’t die. Stay alive.

What will happen? I don’t know. I have a foolish optimism that makes me think that Iran will get through this situation, lick its wounds, and continue. Just as it has always done throughout the history of this land. But what is certain is that it will be very hard for us to become the people we once were. The things we have seen. The things we have seen.

Today this city was extraordinary. Spring is coming. The air is pleasant, and Tehran, with its sorrowful beauty, is drenched in blood. We are trying to “live” despite all those inside and outside these borders who wish death upon us. I hope that even if I do not make it out of this hell, Tehran will stay alive. With its people. Because “the presence of humans is prosperity.”

For more accounts and analysis from a diverse set of individuals inside the country, please see a recent post by Naghmeh Sohrabi and follow her work for both her excellent past writing and what will surely be equally valuable future contributions.

Highlighting the immediate civilian cost of war, in one of the opening salvos, an American or Israeli missile hit an elementary school, killing 165 girls most of whom were aged seven to 12. According to an NPR investigation, the school may have been struck due to an “outdated targeting information.” As of the publication of this article, Human Rights Activists News Agency, an independent watchdog group based in Washington DC, puts civilian deaths at 1,097, including 181 children under the age of 10, and 5,402 civilian injuries. If this is what “precision warfare” looks like, one shudders to imagine the alternative.

In retaliation, Iran has launched a multi-layered campaign, firing hundreds of missiles toward Israel, striking U.S. assets across the region, and targeting military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Iranian drones and other munitions, as well as the interceptors fired to neutralize them, have also hit civilian infrastructures such as airports, hotels, and energy facilities. Reportedly, 10 Israeli civilians, six U.S. soldiers, and eight others in the Persian Gulf states have been killed. IRGC has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which about 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas passes.

In retribution for killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Hezbollah joined the conflict on March 2 by launching its own aerial campaign against Israel. Israel responded with additional airstrikes and a ground incursion into Southern Lebanon, where, according to the country’s Health Ministry, 50 people have been killed as of Wednesday night. In just the last 48 hours, nearly 60,000 people—including 18,000 children—have been displaced in Lebanon. The situation is chaotic, to put it mildly. The region’s civilian and combat zones of war are quickly becoming indistinguishable.

Beyond the region, the fallout has spilled into the streets of the Muslim world with Shia communities holding protests in support of the Islamic Republic across parts of the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Europe following Khamenei’s assassination. In Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi, violent clashes erupted between demonstrators and security forces when protesters attempted to storm a U.S. consulate, resulting in 22 deaths and 120 injuries. Crowds in India, Yemen, Iraq, Turkey, and Greece mourned Khamenei’s death and condemned U.S. and Israeli actions. What U.S. and Israeli officials may have anticipated as a short military confrontation with Iran has metastasized into a transnational crisis, engulfing the region and potentially expanding into a protracted, borderless conflict.

Despite the Trump administration’s haphazard and contradicting attempts at justifying the confrontation, it is becoming clear that this was a war of choice. Mere hours before the attack began, the Omani Foreign Minister mediating the still-ongoing peace talks between Iran and the United States reported that “substantial progress” had been made toward curbing Iran’s nuclear program and that a peace deal was “within reach.” For the second time in less than nine months, Trump abandoned the negotiating table without exhausting all diplomatic options. For Israel, and particularly for Benjamin Netanyahu, outbreak of war represents the culmination of a long-articulated strategic ambition decades in the making.

Post-Khamenei Iran: Continuity, Contention, and Control

So where does this leave Iran? What will it come of its political future and its ruling regime? The current objectives of the Trump administration are incoherent at best, and its endgame remains deeply muddled. If we continue to assume that Israel is pursuing a regime-change scenario, then we can at least better frame the ongoing chaos as a binary question of regime survival versus collapse. As Ali Kadivar recently argued in a well-informed essay, under either outcome, democratic development is unlikely. To be frank, however, despite the American and Israeli rhetoric, the democratic future of Iran has never been a priority for the hardliners and maximalist advocates of war in either country. The long-term fate of Iran’s political development is relatively inconsequential when weighed against the short-sighted whims of hawks who treat war as a universal solution. The broader consequences (regional destabilization, civilian suffering, and the hardening of security institutions) are perfunctory matters when it comes to the immediate senseless rational of force.

Historically, it is important to situate ourselves within Iran’s longer political timeline and recognize that this is a relatively unique moment. Violent breaks from historical trajectories do not happen often, but this moment is one of them. The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a consequential rupture, marking the first time in Iran’s contemporary history that a sitting head of state has been assassinated by a foreign power. As I discussed in an essay about Iran’s experience during World War I and its aftermath, the country has long endured heavy imperial influence. Foreign troops have occupied parts of the country. Iranian military and political elite have been assassinated by external forces. Great powers have acted as kingmakers or forced abdications. However, the direct killing of a head of a state is unprecedented. In this sense, we are traversing in uncharted waters.

Yet crisis reveal past patterns as much as they may create new frameworks. Amid the current war, the political elite in Iran have relied on familiar institutional plans and governing structures in an effort to consolidate elite consensus, control the security environment, and manage public perception. So, what we are witnessing is a political system confronting an unprecedented shock while leaning on long-standing survival mechanisms. Understanding the interaction of these dynamics is critical to assessing Iran’s short-term political stability. Conditions are extremely volatile, and the unrelenting bombardment may still bring collapse, but so far, the regime remains durable and shows no serious signs of faltering.

The Succession Problem

Much attention has focused on the immediate succession process for choosing the next Supreme Leader, with increasing speculation around Khamenei’s son as a potential successor. The selection process itself is worth watching not only for its immediate outcome, but because it reveals how new powerbrokers may emerge and how long-standing figures lurking behind the scenes might seize this moment. Despite the constitutional provisions outlining a clear appointment path, leadership transitions, as evidenced by Khamenei’s own rise, are less procedural and more a matter of elite bargaining and power politics within a close circle of regime insiders. Khamenei was famously chosen for the position through a relatively nontransparent process orchestrated by figures such as former president of the country Aliakbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Beyond clerical qualifications, the next leader will more importantly need demonstrated ability or at least the potential coercive capacity to manage domestic opposition and foreign adversaries. This is precisely why conservative figures connected to the country’s security and military institutions, such as Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Ali Larijani, are in the headlines and will more than likely continue to play key roles in post-Khamenei Iran. A smooth constitutional façade is being presented, but intense behind-the-scenes negotiations among senior clerics, political insiders, and, most importantly, the security establishment are likely underway to determine the next leader. Given wartime conditions, it is probable that any elite fragmentation will be kept out of the public eye to lessen the risk of domestic unrest or create opportunities for foreign escalation.

Despite all of this, while the role is crucial for maintaining relative elite political cohesion, I find it less relevant to the overall trajectory of the Islamic Republic or its political survival. For all intents and purposes, the Supreme National Security Council currently manages the country without direct supervision from the leader. So, while the next figurehead is important, it is not as immediate of a necessity for regime survival as some may think.

Regime Durability

The Islamic Republic is arguably more vulnerable than at any time since its inception. On the heels of January’s countrywide protests and the regime’s brutal massacre of thousands of demonstrators, its popular legitimacy has eroded. It has faced a severe economic crisis, international sanctions, and now repeated direct military confrontations. The assassination of its Supreme Leader could appear to constitute an existential blow. Yet, so far, the system has not fractured. There have been no visible elite defections. The security forces remain cohesive. Reformist and conservative factions have largely closed ranks in the face of foreign attacks on state sovereignty. Regime insiders have not fled. The machinery of repression remains intact. This durability reflects a structural reality that is often misunderstood abroad. The Islamic Republic is not simply a personality-driven autocracy, but an institutionalized system with complex and well-rooted appendages. Intellectual historian Mehrzad Boroujerdi put it well by saying that the Islamic Republic was never a “one-bullet state.”

The clerical establishment, the judiciary, parliament, economic foundations, intelligence services, and the IRGC form a dense web of overlapping elected and unelected power centers that work together to preserve and stabilize the system. Authority is distributed, layered, and mutually reinforcing. The Supreme Leader sits at the top, but the system does not rely solely on a supposedly divine or charismatic individual to carry on. For nearly four decades, Khamenei consolidated power through political maneuvering, but the institutions beneath him also bolstered his longevity. Each of the system’s bureaucratic and security institutions have their own entrenched interests as well. For example, over the years, the IRGC has evolved into not only a military force but also an economic, political, social, and strategic pillar of the state, employing long-term planning and vision in preparation for moments like this crisis.

A case in point is the IRGC’s current decentralized command structure, which has been decades in the making. Tehran adopted what it calls a “mosaic defense,” empowering regional and provincial commanders to act autonomously should central communications be disrupted or authority become ambiguous. This partially explains why missiles continue to be launched without ongoing instruction from the commander-in-chief. So, contrary to some experts’ claims, autonomous actions by mid-ranking officers are not signs of collapse or improvisation but a part of Tehran’s military doctrine. The canon is two decades in the making, grounded in history, geography, and asymmetric warfare theory. Its goal is to ensure that Iran’s military remains operational and unpredictable even if central command is destroyed. This decentralized approach amid crisis is also echoed in the country’s political administration, with figures such as President Pezeshkian aiming to empower provincial governors and regional officials to do their own problem-solving and executive decision-making.

The Rise of the Security State

Given these dynamics, signs point to a further rise and consolidation of a security state in post-Khamenei Iran. This is a governing model that prioritizes national defense, extensive citizen surveillance, and internal order above other policy concerns. This phenomenon had already started but it will only intensify under wartime conditions. When a state perceives its survival is at stake, coercive institutions gain leverage. This does not imply a formal military takeover, however. Iran’s political system is unlikely to abandon its clerical framework anytime soon. But, it does mean the next leader will govern in a more securitized environment, relying heavily on intelligence and military institutions. This shift carries significant consequences. It narrows the space for political reform, reinforces hardline narratives of resistance and risks further alienating a society already weary from economic hardship, political repression, and unanswered demands for sociopolitical freedoms. A security-dominated transition may suppress dissent in the short term, but will not resolve underlying grievances. Such a model can temporarily preserve order, but at the cost of widening the already substantial gap between state and society.

We are living through one of the darkest periods in Iran’s contemporary history. The fate of a nation of more than 90 million people—spanning a landmass larger than France, Spain, Germany, and Italy combined—hangs in the balance. The population inside the country is enduring bombardment by foreign aggressors while dealing with domestic oppression, with little glimpse of light within the immediate future. Unlike the hopeful cheers of those who believe that a better tomorrow could be delivered by bombs, I do not see clarity nor closure in this moment. If anything, its brutal reality is only a sober reminder of how quickly force can reorder a political landscape without resolving the deeper and layered social, cultural, and economic anxieties beneath.

The assassination of a sitting leader, the regional spillover, and the hardening of Iran’s security apparatus may reshape the balance of power in the short term, but they will not answer the more fundamental questions of rights, legitimacy, governance, and the possibility of a more tolerant political system that the Iranian people have been grappling with for more than 120 years. War can disrupt, eliminate individuals, and redraw strategic calculations, but it cannot magically conjure up a stable political future. For now, I count the dead and hope that the next bomb will be the last.

On January 29, 2026, in a statement issued from house arrest addressing the killing of thousands during the most recent protests, Mousavi directly confronted Iran’s ruling elites and condemned the violent suppression of dissent. He declared the existing political order illegitimate and called on those in power to step down. Mousavi advocated for a peaceful transition rooted in popular sovereignty, including a constitutional referendum, while rejecting external intervention.

The statement has sparked widespread debate and provoked sharp reactions across Iran’s political and intellectual landscape. Some prominent activists, including Bahareh Hedayat, responded with anger and disdain, arguing that Mousavi no longer possessed the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the current movement. Other intellectuals, such as political activist and sociologist Hesam Salamat, criticized the confrontational and exclusionary language of Hedayat’s commentary, arguing that restraint, dialogue, and ethical engagement present the only viable path forward. The full texts of Hedayat’s and Salamat’s responses, translated by Naghmeh Sohrabi, are available on her page, These Are the True Things. I encourage readers to engage with all three texts (Mousavi, Hedayat, and Salamat), as they collectively illuminate the range of perspectives within the opposition and the competing visions for reform.

The text that follows is my translation of Mousavi’s statement, produced as part of a collaborative effort to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives published inside Iran.

Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Statement from House Arrest

The game is over! Put down your weapons and step down from power

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful

A dark page has been added to the long history of our nation—one the likes of which Iran does not recall. With each passing day, the horrifying dimensions of what took place become more evident. A great betrayal and a grave crime has been committed against the people. Homes are in mourning. [Streets] and alleys are in mourning. Cities and parishes are in mourning. After years of escalating repression, this is a catastrophe that will be remembered for decades and centuries. And the river of warm blood of the dispossessed that flowed on the ground in the cold month of Dey [January] will not cease to boil until it changes the course of history.

In what language must the people say that they do not want this system and do not believe your lies? Enough is enough. The game is over. Your oppression has come back to haunt you, and the Zaqqum trees you planted have borne fruit.1 When you donned your battle gear against your own people, you were striking an axe at your own roots. When you crushed those who cared for the people and allowed not even the slightest just word in defense of human rights, you were rolling out the red carpet for foreign intervention. When you plugged your ears to avoid hearing the advice of the well-intentioned, you were, through ignorance, squandering your most precious opportunities. Now it is your turn. Nothing shall remain of you, too, but a story—a story full of blood and violence. Enough is enough. Neither do you have a solution to any of the country’s crises, nor do the people have a choice but to protest again until they get a result. And you will not be able to repeat the catastrophe of the eighteenth and nineteenth of Dey [January 8 and 9]. This is a burden that the military and security forces will sooner or later—and likely sooner—refuse to carry. Put down your weapons and step down from power so that the people themselves may lead this land to freedom and prosperity.

The path that this humble companion of the people proposes is to hold a constitutional referendum by forming an all-encompassing front, inclusive of all the nation’s [political] preferences, based on three principles of foreign non-intervention, rejection of domestic tyranny, and peaceful democratic transition. This is because the establishment of lasting peace and security and rescuing the country from the grip of ruling despotism—grounded in the will and desire of the people—is only possible by the hands of the people and without foreign intervention.

O God, hear the cry that Your oppressed servants bring to you from the depths of their souls to Your presence, and answer their prayers for a free and prosperous Iran. This alone is the consolation that will soothe the grieving hearts of our people. And when the prisoners are freed, the first to be liberated will be [of] Your own faith who, after a long captivity in the grasp of those who trade in religion, will once again see the Muhammadian smile of the sun.

For Iran—and especially for its emerging generation—I wish dignity and prosperity.

Mir Hossein Mousavi

January 29, 2026

After the government-imposed internet shutdown came into effect, 90 million Iranian citizens went dark. I, along with millions in the diaspora could only sit with their silence. My family members outside the country kept calling one another, trying to figure out if anyone had heard from those inside. We constantly wondered about their well-being. Eventually, we started playing a strange guessing game. Which friends, relatives, or neighbors might be the “protest type?” we asked each other. Who would be curious to only observe from sidewalks? Who were too risk-averse to even leave the house? Then, based on our presumptions, we worried extra hard for those we had deemed brazen enough to risk the streets. It was a peculiar, anxiety-inducing exercise, one that was perhaps born from our shared sense of helplessness. An effort to project control in the absence of any credible information.

It was also a way to endure the passage of time, which moves at a tricky pace in such moments. It crawls at a glacial pace in darkness, and then, suddenly, a piece of information manages to slip out—someone posts on social media, or an anonymous source shares a detail with a Western media outlet—and time rushes forward. Days of silence are instantly filled by a news fragment as your brain fills the temporal gaps, ignoring the missing pieces of the fractured timeline. Time moves slowly, then quickly, and then slows down again as you lose the in-country connection. “Has it been a couple of days,” you ask, “or has it been weeks?” I don’t know.

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News trickles in through social media from those who have access to Starlink, estimated to be around 50,000, or from people who somehow manage to connect with a working VPN for a few fleeting seconds. But being mostly in the dark did not make things quieter. The prospect of a revolution loomed particularly large among diaspora opposition groups, who were locked and loaded with a long list of choice words for you, and your ancestors, if you suggested any outcome short of total regime change. If you dared to offer nuanced analyses or alternative scenarios, you were charged with the familiar accusation of being a treacherous supporter of the Islamic Republic, and responsible for all of its past and present crackdowns.

Ironically, the absence of verifiable information from inside Iran only emboldened the voices of those shaping narratives abroad. Diaspora infighting swelled, and speculation intensified about what people in the country supposedly wanted. Some voices went as far as to call for military strikes on Iran to “save” its citizens from their ruling autocrats. Others entertained Venezuela-style scenarios by hoping for the United States to abduct or assassinate the country’s Supreme Leader, thereby unshackling the population from the decades of repression.

Snippets of information that did make it through were repurposed into evidence supporting a range of preferred narratives. A single chant became proof of a unified national demand. Images of bleeding protesters and security forces were taken as evidence of an impending civil war. A picture of a quiet street was read as submission, verification of an exhausted public and a victorious regime. A government building on fire was interpreted as a sign that regime collapse was near. Every fragment of information became inflated, amplified through a cacophony of voices abroad, burdened with meaning far beyond what it could bear. Speculation and wishcasting grew louder and louder, while the silence from those in Iran remained deafening.

An Atrocity Unfolds

Endless diaspora squabbling did not mean that real atrocities were not taking place in Iran. Even if some of the lowest estimates are accurate, the brutal crackdown by the security forces is on track to be the worst massacre in the Islamic Republic’s 47-year existence—perhaps only rivaling the 1988 mass execution of political prisoners. Official government sources inside the country do not have much credibility these days, and some diaspora organizations abroad cloak their political ambitions in inflated death tolls. However, Iran’s National Security Council announced the total killed to be 3,117. Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), a human rights watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., has confirmed 6,221 fatalities with another 17,091 deaths under investigation. The Sunday Times, citing a report compiled by doctors on the ground, puts the number of deaths at 16,500. While blaming the U.S. for the fatalities, even the country’s Supreme Leader acknowledged that “thousands had been killed.” The truth may lie somewhere in between, or future investigations may reveal something more catastrophic. But, for now, even according to the lowest estimates, the sheer violence and death is nothing short of a national tragedy that will haunt victims and perpetrators alike for decades to come.

Internet connections are slowly being restored and some have managed to leak information to sources abroad. With them, fragments of horror are seeping out. Accounts of violence and death are coalescing into a terrifying tableau of massacre. Early reports point to a slaughter in Mashhad, where security forces shot hundreds of demonstrators. According to The New Yorker, corpses were piled in parks and hospitals across the city. A visual forensics investigation by The Washington Post documented a massacre at a bazaar in the city of Rasht by the Caspian Sea, where security forces gunned down dozens of protesters as they tried to flee a fire. In Tehran, rows of body bags lined the floors of the Kahrizak Forensic Center. Families walked through the space screaming in anguish, stepping carefully over the dead, trying not to trample another body as they searched for their own loved ones. An unbearable video from the medical center depicted a father walking among a sea of dead bodies looking for his son. For 12 agonizing minutes he shouted, “Sepehr, my dear, where are you? My son, Sepehr, where are you?”

There is footage of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters walking among black body bags, some marked with hastily scribbled names and numbers. They call out their loved ones as if the dead were merely lost in a crowded park and might suddenly hear, rise, and run back. Some lie beside the bodies clinging to them for a final embrace. Others sit motionless, hands resting on the corpses, stunned into silence.

There is also the machinery of death, the bureaucratic and procedural side of mass killing. A video from Kahrizak shows families huddled in the mortuary as images of the dead flash across a TV monitor. According to an eyewitness account, the slideshow lasted for hours. Reportedly, some victims were so badly injured that their families had to review their pictures multiple times to make sure it was really them. Those who failed to find their loved ones are seen wandering the long corridors of the forensic center and attached buildings, asking morgue workers or fellow mourners for any information. Some were told to return to the road outside, where additional container trucks carrying more bodies were expected to arrive.

As I feverishly scroll through my phone, images blur into one another—street clashes, buildings on fire, sidewalks soaked in blood. Tehran, Mashshad, Isfahan, Shiraz, Karaj, Rasht, Tabriz, Kermanshah, Yazd, Khorrmabad, Ahvaz, Borujerd; chaotic images from city after city flicker past. According to HRANA, 656 protest-related incidents have been recorded across 201 cities in all 31 provinces. But, it is still difficult to get a full picture, to grasp the atmosphere while the shutdown persists. A reporter from Tehran managed to connect to the internet briefly through a VPN on January 20. “The city smells of death […] Hard days have passed and everyone is stunned. A whole country is in mourning. A whole country has a lump in its throat. A whole country’s heart feels heavy,” she wrote.

The Fantasy of a Final Triumphant Battle

The future is more uncertain than ever. Without a decisive political leader or a unified organizational structure, it is nearly impossible to generate a coherent long-term movement capable of posing an existential challenge to the regime. This is particularly true in the Islamic Republic’s case, where the ruling elites have repeatedly demonstrated both capacity and willingness to employ overwhelming violence to suppress dissent, with the recent protest cycle representing the most extreme example to date. As described by Ali Kadivar, a well-established “movement-centered model” of democratic transition emphasizes the slow and gradual construction of social capacity as the most effective path forward, rather than a costly and volatile “race toward a single revolutionary climax.”

An unprecedented feature of the recent protests were numerous chants praising Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah deposed in 1979. Yet slogans alone do not constitute a well-structured and sustained movement for change. In a recent social media post, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar captured the prevailing atmosphere within the monarchist camp well. After attending a demonstration in support of Iran protests in Washington D.C., on January 17, she wrote, “Each time I enter a demonstration in cities around the world, I see the length and width of the Lion and Sun flag grow larger and larger. The more I peer my head around, hoping to understand where this ever-expanding Lion and Sun is leading us, the more confused I become.”

The core predicament facing the monarchists today is the fact that their costly “insurrectionary model” has amplified anger and encouraged direct confrontation with the regime. However, their approach has not offered much in the form of a viable path for sustainable political gains. For now, the society is left to bear the human costs of repression, injuries, deaths, and trauma. Symbols, nostalgia, slogans, and the fantasy of a climactic final battle with the regime’s “evil forces” can never fill the profound void of direction, leadership, and long-term strategy.

Movements capable of delivering a democratic future require extensive organizational, structural, and alliance-building mechanisms to translate outrage to sustained and strategic action. Nonviolent movements reduce the personal, social, and political costs of participation. They offer clear alternatives and parallel institutions to address community needs. They demonstrate readiness for self-governance. They encourage widespread popular mobilization through strategic non-cooperation and long-term strategies. They prove their just cause by showing resilience under repression. Iran’s monarchists have thus far failed to demonstrate such capacities. They have shown an ability to ignite decentralized chaos, partly by relying on rhetorical and political support from some of the most right-wing U.S. and Israeli factions.

They have also managed to capitalize on a fabricated nostalgic image of a utopia that was pre-revolutionary Iran under the Pahlavi Dynasty. For the past 15 years or so, they have broadcasted this narrative inside the country, thanks to Persian-language satellite television outlets widely believed to be funded by the Saudi, Israeli, and U.S. governments. However, they have not demonstrated much beyond shouting slogans and selling a contrived history of contemporary Iran. Without a robust movement with significant social capacity, Reza Pahlavi’s calls for street protests in Iran and decrees for demonstrators to “capture and hold city centers,” have accomplished little but to turn those who followed into cannon fodder.

The regime has undoubtedly lost a significant portion of its already tenuous legitimacy. But we should not confuse the erosion of legitimacy with declining capacity to rule through brute force. History offers no shortage of regimes—from Assad’s Syria to Egypt, from Belarus to Myanmar—that have governed long after their populations politically and emotionally moved on from them. Power sustained by coercion does not require popular consent.

Iran is still mourning. It is too early to know how various segments of the society will respond, what they will demand, or what form of resistance may take next. The sheer scale of violence shocked even seasoned observers, myself included. However, the deeper structural paralysis of a system unwilling to alter its governing logic while a population grows ever more exhausted by sociopolitical suffocation, economic perils, and repression, is not new. What is new is the degree of violence and the growing impossibility of a return to the pre‑protest status quo. The brutality of the crackdown speaks not of regime strength, but of a narrowing prospect for a democratic and free Iran, particularly one that can be achieved at a tolerable cost for its citizens.

The state’s counter‑narrative, which argues that the uprising was a foreign‑engineered plot orchestrated by Israel and the United States, also reflects a system under intense real and perceived pressure both at home and abroad. The Trump administration’s rhetoric, including public calls encouraging Iranians to take to the streets and seize state institutions, has only exacerbated an already volatile situation. The ongoing threat of an American-led military strike on Iran continues to cast a heavy shadow on the current moment of upheaval as well. For now, Trump appears to have backed away from ordering an attack, but as it is his modus operandi, a reassuring statement is often followed by another threat within days or even hours. He prides himself on unpredictability, so it is impossible to put the potential of war to rest for too long.

Shortly after Trump’s message to the protesters and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s invitation for the people to continue their street battles, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that his security forces had “thwarted the plan of foreign enemies meant to be carried out by domestic mercenaries.” There may be elements of truth in the regime’s claims of foreign intervention. Some Israeli sources have publicly acknowledged supporting Iranian protesters. On January 13, Israel’s pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 reported that “foreign agents” were behind the arming of protesters in Iran which has also led to the deaths of at least 214 government-affiliated forces. Whether such claims should be taken at face value or understood as part of Israel’s psychological operations remains unclear. No matter what and despite their best efforts, Iranian authorities will face an impossible task if they hope to absolve themselves of responsibility for the mass killing of protesters and for the conditions that made such foreign meddling conceivable.

A look at the physical and narrative battles between regime supporters and the opposition over the ownership of public spaces is also illuminating. Two weeks into the unrest, the Iranian government organized large pro‑regime rallies attended by tens of thousands as a show of force and public support. The authorities do have a history of boosting attendance for such events through incentives, but to claim every participant was coerced is implausible. While the credibility of most surveys of Iranians is in question, some estimates suggest the Islamic Republic’s base of support to be at around 20 to 30 percent. The true figure may be more, but even such a low estimate speaks of a constituency of 10 to 20 million people, who for a variety of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and ideological reasons, continue to bolster the system. What would the day after the Islamic Republic look like for them? Any credible opposition movement must begin to answer this question or at least demonstrate that it has given it some serious thought.

Voices of Moderation Drowned Out

Amid the clash of competing domestic and foreign factions, moderate voices who have long advocated for a more peaceful transition of power, nonviolent resistance, and diplomacy have been sidelined. In a recent video message analyzing the current conditions, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Iranian reformist journalist, political analyst, and a figure close to the country’s nationalist-religious coalition, declared defeat. “All the hopes I struggled for—that we might traverse through these dangerous mountain passes at a lower cost, with some measure of safety—those, in my view, are now over. Today, I consider myself a defeated person,” Zeidabadi said. He added that “there is hardly any room left for voices that argue for nonviolence.”

In a telling op-ed titled We Were Defeated, Mohammad Fazeli, a sociologist and a figure close to the moderate former president Hassan Rouhani and the current reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian, wrote, “Perhaps the only consolation is that we […] did everything we could, but the force of history, the force of those who do not think like us, the force of those with vested interests, the force of those who were steadfast believers in their wrongdoing, the force of arrogance, conceit, delusion, and the force of violence, were far greater than we were.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by prominent Iranian political activist and artist Parastou Forouhar, whose parents were killed amid a series of chain murders (1988-1998) of Iranian dissidents critical of the Islamic Republic. While remaining steadfast in her path of nonviolence resistance, she expressed tremendous grief about the current conditions and warned about the dangerous extremist approach of radical factions within both the opposition and the ruling authorities in Iran. She empathized with her audience over the deep feeling of istisal, a desperate feeling that also contains sentiments such as “deracination, a sense of no hope, no ability,” and an impression of “being destroyed.” Forouhar cautioned that as monarchist factions abroad call for confrontation, and the regime continues its rootless crackdown, the arena for peaceful solutions shrinks. It is in this restrictive space that tragedy deepens.

Taken together, these statements reveal a bleak reality. The sociopolitical space in which moderation once operated has narrowed to the point of near extinction. Reformist and moderate figures who devoted decades to advocating restraint, dialogue, and gradual transformation now speak in the language of exhaustion and defeat. This is not necessarily because their logic has been disproven, but because some of the domestic and international conditions that once allowed them to gain traction have eroded. Between the internal despair of state repression and external maximalist demands, the calls for violent rupture have intensified.

A bitter irony remains. In this process, the actors most capable of reducing harm are pushed to the margins. What is drowned out, then, is not merely a political position, but a principled stance for community care, social survival, and change rooted in long-term movement-building. And yet as some muffled voices still insist, despair is not a terminal condition. Collective anguish does not have to culminate in annihilation. Even in its wounded condition, segments of society that believe in steadier and less costly paths to change may still manage to resist the urge of vengeance long enough to rebuild.

Many questions remain unanswered. Can those bearing the brunt of repression and deepening socioeconomic hardship be convinced that foreign intervention delivers catastrophe rather than deliverance? Can patience and perseverance still be summoned under unprecedented state repression? Whether Iran’s diverse internal and external sociopolitical actors are willing or even able to follow the path of restraint remains uncertain. However, it does grow more unlikely with each act of violence and every turn toward exclusionary politics.

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Such poor economic conditions appear to be the core driver behind the current protests. However, as street demonstrations spread and state repression grew, demands moved beyond basic financial grievances and expanded to include major political demands, with segments of protesters even calling for regime change. According to a report by Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), a nonprofit watchdog group based in Washington D.C., as of January 4 the protests had spread to at least 222 locations across 78 cities in 26 provinces. While mobilization has taken place in both urban and rural areas, the scale and demands of each gathering have varied, as has the response from security officials. The authorities have justified these divergent approaches by claiming they seek to distinguish between “protesters” and “rioters,” allowing the former to partake in peaceful marches while confronting the latter “without leniency.” How such distinctions are made, and based on what criteria, remains unclear.

As described in a piece by sociologist Ali Kadivar, the demands of protestors span a wide range of issues and at times even appear to be contradictory. While in some areas slogans have been chanted in support of the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, in other areas, particularly universities, demonstrators have rejected both the idea of a monarchy and the current theocratic system. Likewise, despite ongoing protests and state repression in the country’s western provinces, predominantly inhabited by Kurdish and Azeri populations, these regions show no unified support for one political camp over another. Verisheh Moradi, a Kurdish political prisoner, issued a statement from prison saying “no to religious authoritarianism” and “monarchy.” During a volleyball game in Urmia, the capital of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, fans shouted anti-Pahlavi slogans.

Without a clear political leader or a unified organizational structure, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the crowd to coalesce around a limited set of shared demands and merge to constitute a force capable of posing an existential threat to the regime. External threats from Israel and the United States certainly complicate the regime’s calculations. But, as of yet, aside from shuffling around administrators and minor policy adjustments such as replacing the Governor of the Central Bank and proposing direct subsidies to families, there have been few indicators that Iran’s political elite are willing to alter their broader governing approach.

Paralysis, Structural Suspension, and Uncertainty

This brings me to the current dynamic of state-society relation in Iran, which could be defined by a condition of relative paralysis for all parties involved. Such circumstances often result in hopelessness, fatigue, exhaustion, anger, depression, and a general lack of direction. To borrow a term from Iranian sociologist Alireza Ghadimi, Iran is experiencing a state of “structural suspension,” a situation in which forces of social change from below and forces of suppression from above are simultaneously active, without either side able to fully eliminate or subdue the other. This paradigm has produced paralysis on both sides, making it impossible to return to the previous status quo while also barring a clear path toward political transition.

The indecisive nature of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule has only reinforced this condition and pushed the state’s suppressive apparatus back toward familiar, time-tested methods that helped produce this purgatorial state in the first place. Protests erupt. The state either refuses or severely restricts peaceful mechanisms for expression and change through civil channels. Protests persist and, at times, turn violent. State repression intensifies. Unrests eventually fizzles out. But, the return of the next cycle is inevitable since the root causes remain unaddressed. After a period of relative calm, a new catalyst ignites the next round. This debilitating carousel has become a familiar pattern in Iran repeating amid at least four rounds of major protests in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022.

The main purpose of this piece is not to hash out the details of every cycle since 2009. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the scale, the demands, the geographical spread, and the state’s responses have varied each round and should not be treated as identical. These cycles have also unfolded amid substantial changes and continuities in Iran’s regional calculations and international affairs. Some crucial transformative events include the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and the 2025 Israel–U.S. military attack. It’s important to be reminded of the fact that these protests do not occur in a domestic vacuum. While this may seem obvious, it bears repeating amid the flood of uninformed commentary produced by social media influencers, politicians unfamiliar with the country, and celebrities eager to capitalize on the moment for online attention.

What does appear to be a consistent thread, however, is the political elite’s persistent inability or unwillingness to allow citizens to pursue their legitimate demands through peaceful, institutionalized, and globally accepted mechanisms of state–society negotiation. These tried and tested methods include a free and competitive ballot box, a free press, freedom of assembly, strong NGOs as constituency representatives, unfiltered social media platforms, and public campaigns addressing controversial issues without fear of reprisal. Over time, such avenues of expression and mediation have either been eliminated or progressively restricted.

The View From Above and Below

To better describe this state of suspension, it would be useful to take a look at the forces of bottom-up change as well as top-down deterrents. The groups driving bottom-up pressure have been composed of the youth, women, segments of the urban middle class, and portions of the merchant class. They continue to demand individual freedoms, gender equality, meaningful political participation, economic improvement, and fundamental reforms in governance. Regardless of their socioeconomic background, the Iranian population is highly educated, politically aware, and familiar with global standards of living through modern means of media and communication. As a result, their core demands have remained relatively consistent. The political system, however, has repeatedly shown itself unwilling or incapable of addressing these needs in a systematic and sustainable manner. Temporary band aids such as recent announcements of direct monthly subsidies have historically served as short-term remedies rather than more enduring solutions.

From above, the political elite have employed a range of repressive tactics to ensure their own longevity and suppress the bottom-up push for political change. Iran’s governing system is composed of an interconnected web of elected and unelected legal, security, political, and cultural institutions that work together to preserve, stabilize, and reproduce conditions favorable to maintaining the status quo.

It is the existence of such a robust system that leads me to doubt the regime would be willing to show any flexibility in the short term or collapse following Khamenei’s departure, whether it be natural death or the result of an ill-advised foreign military operation. Much attention has been placed on the implications of succession for the regime’s longevity and a post-Khamenei transition will undoubtedly represent a major moment in Iran’s contemporary political history, filled with uncertainty and far-reaching consequences.

However, a more plausible scenario, in my view, is a reconfigured iteration of the Islamic Republic, perhaps under the same name, but one that is more responsive to citizen demands and better attuned to the realities of a globalized world. Such a system would require far greater flexibility, balance, and nuance than the rigid, one-dimensional strategy of resistance at all costs that has defined much of the current approach.

It’s always entertaining to play the role of a fortuneteller, but I do not claim to predict the future, nor to assert that such a transformation will necessarily occur. What I am far more confident in describing is the present condition of political paralysis—a state of suspension in which neither bottom-up forces nor top-down power holders have been able to decisively outmaneuver or overpower the other, and where neither side has shown a willingness to fundamentally reconsider its vision of how the country should be governed or how its people wish to live. For now, the tug-of-war continues, with neither side gaining immediate ground.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, marked by widespread death, famine, hunger, and collapse of healthcare infrastructure, continued to worsen throughout the year. In September, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory declared that Israel has committed genocide. Several international organizations and watchdog groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reached the same conclusion and called for an immediate end to the atrocities. In October, the United States, in collaboration with Qatar and Egypt, brokered an ongoing ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, however, the truce has faced numerous accusations of violations from both sides, and the conditions on the ground remain highly fragile. The idea of a Palestinian state withers away as Israeli settlers, often protected by soldiers, continue to expand land grabs in the West Bank as part of an escalating campaign to consolidate territorial control.

In June, a 12-day war erupted between Iran and Israel, which also involved direct strikes on Iranian nuclear sites by the United States. Iran, despite its public posture, suffered significant losses. According to Israeli sources, 30 Iranian commanders and 11 nuclear scientists were killed, while eight nuclear facilities and 720 military sites were targeted. Iran’s Health Minister reported 1,060 deaths with nearly 700 of them civilians. In retaliation, Iran launched approximately 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones at Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. A ceasefire was eventually declared under U.S. pressure, but tensions persist, and there exists a probable risk of another armed confrontation between the two countries in 2026.

Syria continued to experience significant political upheaval following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. A new constitution was ratified in March, appointing Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamist militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, as the interim president in charge of a five-year transition period toward a democratic presidential system. While the new authorities have established commissions focused on transitional justice and post-war reconstruction, progress thus far has been rocky at best. Sectarian violence took place in the spring, resulting in hundreds of deaths in clashes between government-aligned forces and remnants of pro-Assad groups. A Druze militia insurgency also challenged the transitional government between April and July, further destabilizing the country. The December U.S. strikes against Islamic State strongholds in central Syria highlight an additional obstacle for the Syrian government. Although dismantling ISIS remains a priority for the interim authorities, critics have begun questioning the nation’s long-term sovereignty amid the continued involvement of external forces.

In Yemen, the U.S. launched a major aerial and naval campaign in March against the Houthi radar systems, air defenses, and drone and missile launch sites used to attack commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. These attacks worsened an already dire humanitarian situation shaped by more than a decade of foreign intervention and internal power struggles. Close to 20 million Yemenis are currently in need of aid, with 2 million children facing malnutrition, and millions more lacking access to basic healthcare and essential services.

It was amid this backdrop, particularly the “12-Day War,” that I decided to launch my Substack, The Guarded Domains. As I explained in the inaugural post back in June, I wish the publication could have commenced under more auspicious circumstances, but we rarely get to choose our beginnings. Amid the turmoil described above, my goal was, and remains, to create a relatively calm and reflective space to offer much-needed context and nuance to region’s ongoing challenges.

I will leave it to you to decide whether I have achieved that objective and whether the pieces have been engaging, informative, and worth your time. But, as the calendar year comes to a close, it felt appropriate to share a brief summary and highlight a few milestones from the publication’s first six months. Since launching in June 2025, I have published 10 articles, which have been viewed 3,000 times. I hope to write more in the year ahead, though the length of my essays—typically hovering around 1,400 words—and the demands of daily life make it difficult to publish more than one piece per month. Nonetheless, with better planning and renewed energy, I hope to increase output in 2026.

As part of this year-end reflection, I also wanted to share the five most-read articles on The Guarded Domains, based on their views and engagement metrics, with you. I will be removing the paywall from these pieces for two weeks, should you wish to revisit or share them with others.

1. Lost in Translation – In this personal piece, I reflected on my childhood and teenage years in Tehran and the significant role a small neighborhood bookstore played in shaping my love for literature and instilling lessons that extended far beyond the written page.

2. Lines in the Sand, Flags in the Air – Originally published as a shorter piece by Amwaj.media, this article examined the rise of a new form of nationalism in Iran in the aftermath of Israeli strikes and the shifting political landscape. I explored how the state is blending pre-Islamic patriotic symbols with religious themes to rally citizens around a nationalistic identity and foster unity.

3. The Snapback Spiral – This post analyzed how the reimposition of UN sanctions on Iran has deepened a sense of collective exhaustion among ordinary citizens rather than producing meaningful political change. I argued that prolonged economic pressure has eroded the middle class, weakened political participation, and contributed to “politics of exhaustion” that slowly drains everyday life through uncertainty, inflation, and despair.

4. Wandering Minds and Wandering Missiles – I wrote about the emotional aftermath of the “12-Day War” focusing on the shared trauma felt by Iranians both inside the country and abroad. Through personal memories of the Iran–Iraq War, the piece explores how ambiguity, fear, and unanswered questions shape collective experience during conflict. Ultimately, it argues that a nation is sustained not just by territory or institutions, but by shared memories, emotions, and the ways people try to make meaning amid chaos.

5. The Things We Destroy – This article focused on Israel’s strike on the building of Iran’s state broadcaster, examining the cultural and historical loss rather than the physical target. I explained how the IRIB’s “Glass Building” was a landmark of modern Iranian architecture and a shared public heritage.

I cannot conclude this post without sincerely thanking you, the reader. The Guarded Domains would not exist without your consideration, encouragement, and support. I am deeply grateful for your readership and for overlooking any shortcomings as the publication continues to find its footing. I hope to continue to improve the quality and scope of my work in the year ahead. I am certain that 2026 will prove just as consequential for the region, its leaders, and citizens.

As always, I warmly invite you to share your thoughts and feedback. Your perspectives help guide the publication’s future direction and ensure it aligns with reader interests. Are the pieces too long, too short, or too technical? Would you like to see more or less of certain themes? Are there topics I haven’t covered that you’d like to see explored? How do you feel about the writing style and tone? Is the publication visually engaging and easy to navigate? Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and welcomed.

Finally, The Guarded Domains remains a reader-supported publication. Its first six months were made possible thanks to your subscriptions and financial support. Subscriptions enable me to devote more time and resources to research, writing, and technical improvements. If you enjoy the work, I would also greatly appreciate your help in sharing the content and inviting others to subscribe, whether as free or paid members.

Thank you once again for being part of this community. I wish you a peaceful holiday season and a wonderful New Year.

World War I undeniably altered the political, social, and economic foundations of the world as we know it today. It brought about the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, accelerated the expansion of European colonial control into the Middle East and Africa, and marked the rise of the United States as a global power. Borders were redrawn across Europe and beyond, and new states were created. A large body of scholarship exists about this period, including classic works such as John Keegan’s The First World War and Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August as well as more recent studies, including Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace and Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers. Despite their valuable insights and interpretations of the conflict’s origins and consequences, these works, similar to the overwhelming number of existing literature, tell the story largely from European or American vantage points.

What remains overlooked are the war’s deep and lasting effects on the Middle East, North Africa, and the rest of the Global South. As always, there are important exceptions. David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace and Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment treat the Middle East and East Asia not as peripheral theaters, but central to understanding the war’s legacy. These works challenge Eurocentric narratives, and show how wartime interventions across Ottoman and Arab lands, as well as calls for self-determination from Indian, Chinese, and Korean leaders played a central role in shaping global dynamics amid the war. Despite such laudable efforts, however, critical gaps persist.

Among the least explored narratives is that of Iran, a country officially neutral yet profoundly affected by the war’s geopolitical intrigues. Positioned between the British and Russian spheres of influence, Iran became a battleground not by choice but by circumstance, enduring occupation, famine, epidemic, and social upheaval. This piece aims to illuminate Iran’s World War I experience, exploring how a nominally neutral nation became a theater of foreign domination. By examining both historical accounts and personal memories, including those of my own family, I hope to foreground an often-sidelined part of this crucial historical event.

Sovereignty in Name Only

Iran declared neutrality at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In practice, however, the country was already under the heavy domination of Russia and the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 divided Iran into two major zones of influence, ending a long dispute between the two nations over Persia. The United Kingdom agreed to stay out of the northern part of the country, Russia recognized the southeastern part as British domain, and the middle was left alone as a neutral buffer zone. As stated by historian Abbas Amanat, “Iranian sovereignty existed largely on paper.”

By early 1912, approximately 20,000 Russian troops occupied Iran’s northern provinces. There were several local resistance movements, but none of them ultimately managed to stop the invading armies. In Khorasan, northwestern Iran, for example, civilians tried to put up a fight and took refuge at Imam Reza’s shrine in Mashhad. However, the Russian cannons shelled the holy site’s golden dome and looted its treasury.

The British also expanded their military presence in southern Iran by utilizing Indian infantrymen armed with muskets, also known as sepoy units. They advanced from the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr toward Shiraz and Isfahan. As described by Amanat, the local shops closed in protest, clerics declared boycotts on British goods, and a large contingency of merchants refused to sell goods to occupying troops. Armed rebellions began among southern tribes such as the Qashqai of Fars Province, which were brutally suppressed by the British.

By 1911–1912, political conditions deteriorated in Tehran as well. The Majles (parliament) rejected foreign ultimatums for surrender two times, effectively passing a vote of no confidence for the pro-British Prime Minister Najaf-Qoli Khan Samsam al-Saltaneh. The Prime Minister, however, refused to abide by the vote and ordered the Cossack Brigade, an Iranian cavalry unit modeled after the Caucasian Cossack regiments, to occupy the Majles, expel its deputies, and close off the premises. This decision was mainly driven by immense British and Russian pressure, with the latter stationing 12,000 troops at the Caspian port of Anzali by December 1911, and threatening to march to Tehran, if the capital did not capitulate.

When Neutrality Fails to Offer Protection

By the advent of World War I, the British and Russians had established a strong foothold in Iran. Some Iranian nationalists hoped for German forces to loosen the Anglo-Russian grip and provide the country a potential path to self-determination. As the war marched on, however, the country gained little more than enormous anguish and devastation.

As descried by Touraj Atabaki in a collected volume of essays on Iran and the First World War, Persia soon became a battleground of the great powers. While the neighboring Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks decided to pick up arms, join the Central Powers, and counter Russian expansion by seeking German support, Iranian leaders hoped for their nonalignment to save the day. The Qajar dynasty believed joining either side would be reckless, especially because the British and Russian forces already had a dominating and unpopular presence on Iranian soil, and there was no clear indication of what to be gained from joining either side of the conflict. This neutral posture did not offer the country much protection, and almost immediately, Russian, British, and Ottoman forces turned Iran into an active battleground. For all intents and purposes, the state collapsed, tribal war broke out, supply lines were challenged, and society imploded. As highlighted by Amanat, from 1915 to 1921, Iran experienced “the darkest period in its modern history” while battling occupation, famine, and epidemic disease.

In response to rising German penetration across the southern regions, British authorities redirected their troops away from Ottoman Iraq toward Iran in 1915. Determined to preserve their own British and Indian units for the main campaign, they organized a new body of roughly 11,000 recruits drawn from local Iranian communities. This formation, designated as the South Persia Rifles and commanded by Sir Percy Sykes, assumed responsibility of maintaining order by suppressing German-allied tribes and networks. By 1916, its brigades were present across key urban and coastal centers, including Shiraz, Kerman, Isfahan, and Bandar Abbas.

Meanwhile in the northern part of the country, an armed resistance movement budded in Gilan Province, headed by a group of Iranian partisans popularly known as the Jangalis or “forest dwellers.” Led by a local leader Mirza Kuchek Khan, the Jangal or Forest Movement was a nationalist and anti-imperial rebellion that fought the Russians and opposed the weak central Qajar government from 1915 to 1921. By 1918, they succeeded in gaining control of Gilan and parts of neighboring areas, setting up an independent socialist republic.

Iran’s northwestern and western regions became active battlefields as well with civilians often picking up arms to confront Russian and Ottoman offenses across Azerbaijan, Kermanshah, and Hamadan. Between 1914 and 1917 parts of these provinces changed hands at least eight times with each transition causing tremendous humanitarian and economic costs. Some of the atrocities are well documented by historians such as Oliver Bast and Nasrollah Safipour Fatemi. The occupying forces plundered thousands of homes, burned agricultural fields, abducted children, and raped women. According to Amanat, domestic population displacements put tremendous strain on the social life in many parts of the country. Tens of thousands of internal refugees fled the Ottoman forces from cities like Tabriz and Hamadan to more southern and central parts.

Following the forced migrations, life did not get easier for the displaced populations or host communities. A typhus epidemic spread rapidly via lice, leading to immense suffering and loss. Lack of food and resources caused mass starvation and famine. The conditions were worsened by British advances in Mesopotamia (1915–1917), which cut off supply routes that traditionally linked Persian Gulf to central Iran as well as to Basra and Baghdad. By 1915, the British and Russian power-sharing structure had collapsed and the entire country had become a free zone for any foreign army that could overpower competing forces. According to historical estimates, the combined toll of war, famine, and disease claimed at least one-fifth of Iran’s population. Between 1917 and 1920 alone, roughly 20 percent of the country’s people perished.

When War Knocked on My Family’s Door

This history is neither too distant nor too abstract for many Iranians, including my own family. At the age of nine, my grandfather lost his entire family during the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic that followed World War I, and grew up an orphan. He was from a small village near the city of Qom in central Iran where a family took him in and raised him. He eventually married the family’s daughter—my grandmother—and later, in search of stability and opportunity, moved to Tehran as they began to raise their children.

Both of my grandparents passed away relatively recently, but they carried with them the lived memory of a generation before them, an entire population shaped by wartime occupation, famine, and disease. The stories they chose to share with their children and grandchildren were not typically framed within the context of a global conflict and an imperial struggle between great powers, but as fragmented recollections of everyday survival. They retold experiences of farmers enduring a poor crop, families uprooted without choice, foreign troops hindering mobility, or in tales that felt abruptly cut short, entire villages wiped from disease. “What do you mean they were then just gone? What else?” I’d ask. “That’s it. An illness came and they were gone. We don’t know much more from that side of the family,” my grandpa would respond matter-of-factly.

Here’s to their memory, their families’ memories, and the memory of all The Great War’s victims, especially those whose suffering unfolded far from Europe, yet just as profoundly shaped the contemporary world.

The sanctions were originally lifted in July 2015 under United Nations Security Council Resolution 223, which endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Deal. The agreement, reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States), limited the country’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and other provisions. There were countless domestic and international debates about the costs and benefits of the deal. However, according to international monitoring agencies, the U.S. government, and the European Union, the JCPOA was functioning until around 2018. Then, everything gradually began to unravel.

In May 2018, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran in an effort to pressure Tehran back to the negotiating table to get “a better deal.” Iranians protested, insisting they had never left the table to begin with. In response, Iran gradually escalated its uranium enrichment, reaching near-weapons-grade levels of 60 percent by 2024. The Biden administration also refused to rejoin the agreement, arguing that Iran must first return to full compliance. Tehran declined, insisting for all-Trump era sanctions to be lifted as a precondition. They also demanded a guarantee that a future American President would not again abandon the deal. Despite campaign promises to restore the agreement, President Biden ultimately failed to deliver, allowing a window for diplomacy to close even further.

Europeans stayed in the JCPOA, while grumbling about partial noncompliance until this past Monday, September 29, when the EU confirmed it would reinstate sanctions. Smarter experts than I have tracked the many ebbs and flows of the process, debating the “why” and the “why now” questions, and analyzing the best paths forward to keep diplomacy as a viable option. Rather than spilling more ink about the technical and policy details, I want to focus on the broader sense of frustration, helplessness, and fatigue among the Iranians—a weariness born from what could be called “politics of exhaustion.”

The Security Council’s recent decision re-instates six UN resolutions from 2006 to 2010, including: 1) an arms embargo; 2) a ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing; 3) a ban on ballistic missiles launches and related technology transfers; 4) a targeted global asset freeze and travel ban on listed Iranian individuals and entities; and 5) authorization for countries to inspect Iranian cargo by air and sea. Some international think tanks have suggested that the “economic impact of UN and EU sanctions on Iran would be limited, given the gravity of US restrictions” already in place. Similar sentiments are echoed by the political elite in the country. Yet Iranians remain anxious nonetheless.

Markets have already reacted negatively to the looming unpredictability and further international isolation. The specific impact on ordinary citizens is not yet clear, and an ongoing subject of technical analysis by economists and financial experts. But, in terms of the public’s emotional state, the word exhaustion is ubiquitous. Dozens of articles by in-country media report widespread hopelessness, unease, and reduced spending, driven by political and economic uncertainty. The shadow of another military confrontation with Israel also looms.

In an interview published by local media, Hossein, a 45-year-old jeweler from central Tehran, described the conditions. “We no longer know whether to be happy or sad. Our [financial] capital constantly rises and falls with these decisions. Since the [12-Day-War], there has been less buying and more selling. People sell [their jewelry] for tuition, surgery, and other necessary expenses […] People can’t afford to buy […] Their pockets are empty,” Hossein explained.

Nima, a 32-year-old supermarket salesman added: “When most things are [calculated based on the U.S. dollar exchange rate], an economic shock is inevitable after the snapback. Optimistically, sales will drop a little; pessimistically, we will be miserable.”

For many ordinary citizens like Nima, and my own family and friends in Iran, snapback is not merely an economic or diplomatic term. Not many are interested in debating the legal nuances of the process. More than anything else, the phrase communicates caution and signals yet another period of hardship and uncertainly—another dark road with unknown twists and turns. For them, snapback is a lived experience, not a negotiation clause. It is about whether meat will be affordable next week, whether they may need to dip into their savings for basic needs, or whether medical bills can be covered. The term is often spoken with a weary sigh, not the dispassionate language of distant experts. As the word reappears in the headlines, so does the public’s anguish—an entire nation collectively experiencing the “Sunday blues,” anxiously waiting, irritated, and dreading the unknown.

Life under sanctions has grown more difficult, though it is far from new. Iran has been subject to broad or targeted sanctions in some shape or form since the early 1980s. Since 2005, America has designated Iranian individuals and entities for alleged involvement in nuclear proliferation, ballistic missile development, support for terrorist groups, and human rights abuses—resulting in a dizzying and ever-growing list of thousands. A mounting body of evidence and academic research, however, suggests that rather than effectively curbing the nefarious activities of government officials and affiliated organizations, the sanctions have disproportionately harmed ordinary citizens.

I spoke to a friend of mine in Iran a few days ago. He is a college-educated white-collar professional who belongs to the middle class, which has been pummeled by the international sanctions since the early 2010s. For him, the exhaustion had tipped over into full apathy. When I asked him about the snapback sanctions, he quipped, “Snap what? What are you talking about? What’s snapping? I followed the news for a while, but lost track of where things stand. They have been snapping for 40 years. They snap. Then they snap forward. Then backward. What can we do? We are snapping our fingers, I guess and hoping for the best.”

Historically, the middle class has made up the core of support for political moderation and reform since at least the 1990s, and its weakening has contributed to low election participation and the rise of hardline factions; its decline is linked not only to domestic mismanagement and corruption, but also the strategic failure of Western sanctions led by the United States.

Economists have quantified the results. A peer-reviewed article in the European Journal of Political Economy by Mohammad Reza Farzanegan and Nader Habibi concluded that between 2012-2019, sanctions caused an average 17 percentage point gap between the potential and actual size of Iran’s middle class. By 2019, a year after Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, the middle class was 28 percentage points smaller than it should have been. Another study by the prominent professor of economics Djavad Salehi-Isfahani demonstrated the middle class declined from 58.4 percent to 48.8 percent between 2011 and 2019. With the return of the UN sanctions, this trajectory will likely continue.

My own anecdotal evidence from inside the country aims to underscore a crucial reality. Behind the abstract numbers that get thrown around by economics, politicians, and diplomats, there are millions of ordinary people facing the tangible impact of international pressure. Sanctions have largely failed to change Iranian government behavior. But, they have harmed the middle class and caused widespread exhaustion.

I am also exhausted. Following this issue since 2015 while reading and writing redundant arguments for almost a decade is draining. The sense that the issue has been driven into an impossible corner, one that may not resolve diplomatically, only adds to the fatigue. Observing the gradual hardening of positions on all sides—fueled by hardliners in Iran, the U.S., and an intricate network of foreign lobbies—has been grueling. I continue to write because that’s all I know, but there is little left to say. The sanctions road has been traveled many times, with results falling far short of the stated objectives.

Meanwhile, hardliners in Iran continue to push the rhetoric of resistance. This is also a tiring framework, the rationale for which grows more opaque with each passing day. Unless Iran is attacked by Israel again, which would push everyone into a war mentality and redefine the very notions of offense, defense, and struggle.

I am not sure what tomorrow will bring, but I do wonder if the exhaustion felt by many is a deliberate strategy by certain hardline factions within the Iranian government and the West. Scholars such as Marta Welander and Leonie Ansems de Vries have explored the concept of “political exhaustion” in other contexts such as migrant camps, border governance, and everyday struggles for mobility. For them the concept is an intersectional notion that entangles power, resistance, violence, and solidarity in a complicated and ever-evolving process. Those in power may intentionally wear people down, make life harder, reduce resistance, limit mobility, and curtail agency, they argue.

Could sanctions against Iran function similarly? Might the public’s exhaustion be an unintended consequence or intended effect of U.S. and European policy?

These are haunting questions and the issue of intent is a hard one to study. But, as Welander and Ansems de Vries suggest, the “politics of exhaustion” is not about dramatic displays of force, but about the slow, grinding attrition of hope, possibility, and resistance. In Iran, this not only manifests in rising inflation and currency devaluation, but also in the quiet despair of youth delaying their futures, condensed grocery lists, and shuttered businesses.

“Politics of exhaustion” employed as a coercive tool promotes a sense that nothing will change and sociopolitical participation is futile. And this very feeling, this numb fatigue, becomes a form of control. Tragically, internal and external hardline forces seem to converge in this strategy and benefit from its anticipated or inadvertent consequences. Whether through economic isolation or domestic repression, the result is the same. The public becomes too tired to push back, too preoccupied with survival to imagine alternatives. This may be the most insidious form of violence—not one that shocks, but one that slowly suffocates.

This conversation is particularly relevant in light of Israel’s recent attack on Qatar on September 9, which further destabilized ongoing cease-fire negotiations mediated by Doha. I learned a great deal from fellow participants Niki Akhavan, Peyman Jafari, Negar Razavi, and Daniel Tavana, who approach the topic through nuanced historical, anthropological, media, and political lenses—a comprehensive approach rarely seen in dominant narratives about the ongoing tumultuous situation in Iran and the broader region.

What follows in this post are my contributions to the questions posed by the moderator, but I encourage you to read the full exchange.

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1. What have the Iranian government’s primary foreign policy objectives been over the past decade?

The underlying logic of Iran’s foreign policy has revolved around the core principle of “strategic deterrence,” or as Iranian military officials refer to it, “forward defense.” The Islamic Republic maintains that it will not initiate war, but it has the capacity for “rapid and proportionate response” to incursions. This doctrine rests on three pillars: 1) building an “Axis of Resistance,” 2) maintaining a nuclear program, and 3) expanding the country’s missile arsenal.

For Iran, “strategic deterrence” functioned as a dissuasion tactic intended to impose costs on potential aggressors. Following this logic, the “Axis of Resistance” was built as a defensive shield through diplomatic engagement and material support for non-state actors and allied governments in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Palestine. This network aimed to keep conflict beyond Iranian borders, and when necessary, wage asymmetric rather than direct warfare. This strategy emerged partly in response to Iran’s limited modern weaponry compared to advanced military capabilities of rivals such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, as well as from historical lessons drawn from the Iran-Iraq War.

2. Were they successful in achieving these objectives?

There have definitely been some gains but also serious costs to Iran’s foreign policy. Building a defensive shield through the “Axis of Resistance” has come at the cost of economic hardship, international isolation, and domestic challenges. The loss of key allies such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and the recent 12-day war, has further strained the core pillars of Iran’s strategy. A surge in nationalist sentiment and relative state-society unity following the war may temporarily bolster past practices, but the conflict has also exposed the limits of the deterrence doctrine and undermined the leverage once gained through its dual-track framework of resistance and diplomacy.

Until the 12-day war with Israel, this approach proved to be relatively low-cost, flexible, and effective. It was rooted in the war-of-attrition logic developed during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), which emphasized the use of prolonged battles to deplete enemy resources over swift victories. The recent conflict, however, has forced Iranian officials to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their security plan. The present moment is marked by confusion, indecision, and ongoing debate, which some in-country scholars have described as the “purgatory of ceasefire.”

In a similar vein, Iran’s nuclear program has served more as a tool of diplomatic leverage than a direct pursuit of nuclear weapons, though the threat of weaponization always looms. Through this balancing act, Iran has sought to gain bargaining power, deter threats, and strengthen its regional and international standing. This calculated ambiguity has produced mixed results. It has brought occasional diplomatic recognition, most notably amid the 2015 Iran Deal negotiations, as well as severe economic sanctions. Meanwhile, Iran’s missile program offers conventional retaliatory capabilities, especially given its aging air force.

3. Looking back into history, are there continuities in how Iran has pursued its foreign policy interests (even before the Islamic Republic)? How and why have these calculations or interests changed over time?

Widening our historic lens beyond the formation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, which rarely happens in Washington’s analysis of Iran, reveals important continuities and changes in how the country has defined its interests over the past century. Notions such as protection against foreign intervention have long been central to Iran’s foreign policy, particularly since the 19th and early 20th centuries, when fluctuating borders and repeated foreign interventions played a key role in shaping national identity. These historic conditions informed Iranian views on nationalism and expectations from their state, especially regarding its responsibility to provide territorial defense.

As a case in point, not unlike his successors, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941-1979) defined the country’s national interests around pillars such as sovereignty, regional dominance, and military advancements, particularly during the second half of his reign. A close reading of declassified documents from the late-Pahlavi era (mid-1960s-1979), for example, reveal remarkable continuity in the Shah’s negotiations with America over Iran’s nuclear program. While the Shah invoked “national rights” the Ford and Carter administrations remained deeply concerned about weaponization potential and actively curtailed the country’s nuclear ambitions. The Islamic Republic’s current anti-American posture complicates diplomacy, but historical evidence also shows that US nuclear policy has been mainly driven by nonproliferation concerns rather than apprehension over the nature of the regime in Iran. The popular narrative of unequivocal US support for the Shah, promoted by the Islamic Republic, also misrepresents the historic fact that several US administrations during his reign tried relentlessly to limit the nuclear program. While today’s focus is on uranium enrichment and debates in the 1960s and 1970s centered on plutonium production, the underlying concern in both cases is weaponization.

A significant change has been Iran’s overt anti-American posture. During the Pahlavi era, the US viewed Tehran, albeit sometimes reluctantly, as an ally. The Shah’s direct line to Washington enabled him to cultivate a nuanced relationship, leveraging US support and entangling Washington through military deals and other means to bolster his position against regional threats such as Iraq’s Ba’athist regime, the Soviet Union, and internal dissent. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has maintained several core principles of Iran’s historic foreign policy. However, the current government’s framework is more blatantly grounded in anti-imperialism and self-reliance, while simultaneously pivoting toward Russia and China for economic survival, strategic balancing against the West, and enhanced global connectivity.

It is also important to point out that such anti-colonial paradigms were not invented by Islamic revolutionaries as a complete break from the past; rather the current Iranian government absorbed and reinterpreted many existing pre-revolutionary discourses. Anti-Western attitudes and critiques of “Westoxification,” for example, were promoted by Pahlavi-era cultural elites as early as the 1960s, despite the Iranian government’s Western-dependent modernization agenda. This line of thinking was gradually adopted, expanded, and institutionalized as part of the Islamic Republic’s official ideology, including its foreign policy.

4. Today, there’s a lot of talk in Washington that the Iranian government is facing its most serious crisis since its establishment in 1979. The popular policy view in DC is that Iran suffered a humiliating loss from the “12-day war,” which set back their nuclear program and destroyed their top security leadership. Combined with Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and the Houthis in Yemen; the fall of the Assad government in Syria; and growing domestic opposition to the Iranian government, the Islamic Republic is the most vulnerable it has ever been. How would you assess Iran’s security position after Israel and the US attacked Iran?

I don’t want to downplay the facts. Iran, despite its public posture, endured significant losses in the 12-day war. Israel claims to have killed 30 Iranian commanders and 11 nuclear scientists, and targeted eight nuclear facilities and 720 military sites. Iran’s Health Minister reported 1,060 dead with nearly 700 of them civilians. The civilian toll alone will leave an indelible mark on Iranian society, with trauma that may last for decades—a sociopolitical reality that receives little attention in Washington’s macro-level analysis. The IAEA confirmed US strikes caused serious damage to Iran’s above-ground nuclear sites, though the full extent remains unclear. A Pentagon assessment suggested only a months-long setback, yet the US president claimed the program has been “obliterated.” This has promoted a facetious response from Tehran, which argues that if the facilities were destroyed, there should be nothing left to inspect or sanction. Leaning into this narrative, Iran has adopted a short-term strategy of “nuclear ambiguity” as it builds internal consensus on a longer-term path.

The collapse of the Assad regime dismantled over a decade of Iranian investment in Syria. Combined with Israel’s blows to Hezbollah and Hamas, for now, Iran may find itself fighting on the back foot, reassessing its deterrence doctrine under mounting regional pressure and strategic uncertainty.

Yet it would be shortsighted to see this as Iran’s exit from the battlefield. Much writing on the topic focuses on the immediate crisis, but a broader temporal frame, may reveal multiple potential avenues for Iran to regain influence by exploiting emerging power vacuums.

While Tehran’s next moves remain unknown, its strategic calculus could extend well beyond the near term, factoring in the possibility that Israel could overplay its hand.

5. Turning then to the point about domestic opposition, how did Iranians view their government before the war began – particularly as it related to their foreign policy? Were there observable social and political differences or tensions inside the country? Areas of agreement? Have these views changed in any clear way since the war?

Depending on the exact moment in question, the Iranian public’s attitudes toward their government’s foreign policy have long reflected a mix of ambivalence, opposition, and support. Yet Washington’s analysis often reduces the people to a homogenous grey blob stripped of nuance, diversity, and political complexity. In reality, the society is marked by pluralism and shaped by overlapping factors such as social class, economic status, and cultural upbringing.

The population, now over 90 million, is highly educated, politically aware, and capable of distinguishing between foreign threats and domestic repression. Before the 12-day war, a substantial portion of the citizens had expressed frustration with the government’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy. This was reflected in protest slogans like “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, my life for Iran,” which criticized the Iranian government’s regional spending over domestic needs. Such sentiments were also echoed by reformist and moderate technocrats, intellectuals, and politicians. Recent opinion polls have shown the diversity of views. For example, in October 2024, even though a majority remained skeptical of normalizing relations with Israel, a majority also supported restoring diplomatic ties with the US. The public’s pro-American sentiments may shift after the recent conflict, but there is currently insufficient evidence to draw a definitive conclusion.

The aftermath of the 12-day war is disrupting some long-held beliefs across the political spectrum. For the first time in recent memory, the threat from abroad is no longer theoretical as Tehran and other major cities endured nightly bombardments; an experience many opposition voices had dismissed as fictional hardliner “resistance” rhetoric. Despite existing widespread belief that the ruling authorities’ have contributed to the crisis, these opposition groups now find themselves relying on the same state and security apparatus to defend the nation. This uneasy dependence has emerged amid a fragile ceasefire, the longevity of which remains in doubt.

In the wake of the 12-day war, a new iteration of Iranian nationalism has emerged as well, which is being forged through a dynamic negotiation between state and society. This version blends love for the homeland with religious symbolism: framing Iran as a sacred land tied to Shia sanctuaries and ancient Persian mythology. Amid the war’s collective shock, there appears to be a temporary sense of national unity, but its endurance is precarious. As time passes, old divides are likely to re-surface between government factions and among various segments of the society and the state. Historically, amid such factionalism and domestic sociopolitical protest, the ruling elites tend to find ideological allies within the population while marginalizing opposition voices in their national narrative.

6. And how do you as a researcher make such assessments? What pieces of evidence do you rely upon to analyze Iran politically?

For my assessment of Iran’s domestic opposition and state-society relations, I do my best to rely on a wide range of evidence to form a layered understanding of the dynamics. I draw from some opinion polls to track shifts in public sentiment over time. I also pay close attention to protest movements and their demands. Intellectual debates within the country—whether in journals, university circles, or clerical speeches—offer further insight into the evolving landscape of how the state and society interact. I monitor the activities of opposition parties and assess how they attempt to mobilize support, both inside and outside Iran. Social media platforms like Telegram, Instagram, Clubhouse, and X provide real-time access to popular discourse, while academic scholarship helps contextualize these developments. Finally, I study official government rhetoric and state media narratives to understand how the Iranian government frames its legitimacy and responds to internal dissent. The interplay of these sources form my analysis of Iran’s state-society dynamics.

7. Where does Iran go from here? What security calculations do you foresee the Iranian government making moving forward? Do you see a path toward a peaceful resolution between the US and Iran? Has Iran’s relationship to the Arab world and/or Turkey changed since the war? Will this shift the regional balance of power in any way?

Iran’s political system is autocratic. Nevertheless, dominant narratives in Washington often overlook the limits to the Supreme Leader’s power. The idea that all government actors follow Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s decrees ignores the Islamic Republic’s complex and opaque policy-making system, which involves numerous executive structures, institutions, and bureaucratic layers. Policy-making in Iran, like most countries, still requires a process of consensus-building, in this case with bodies such as the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), in coordination with the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), executive branch, and other stakeholders, translating the Leader’s general directives into action. This process is ongoing right now with multiple potential directions being debated. As the internal negotiations continue, however, some preliminary agreements have emerged among officials and opinion makers.

Most Iranian government insiders and critics have concluded that Israel’s aim was regime collapse, leading to chaos and potential partition. Opinions on US intentions differ. Security organizations and hardliners in Iran argue that Washington has given Israel free rein in the Middle East. In contrast, centrist, reform minded, and diplomacy-orientated Iranian analysts believe that the US made a long-term strategic error, echoing its misadventures in Iraq and Libya, with Netanyahu dragging America into an unwanted war. This understanding has produced two diverging schools of thought in Tehran.

The far-right in Iran argues military escalations justify exiting the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and perhaps even pursuing nuclear weapons as deterrence. Moderates and reformists advocate for strategic calm, diplomatic re-engagement, and easing of internal sociopolitical tensions. Their vision may include flexibility on red lines like enrichment, regional presence, and the missile program. This approach hopes to signal transparency and an attempt at driving a wedge between Netanyahu and Trump. The pro-diplomacy camp also criticizes strategic ambiguity, citing Libya and Iraq as cautionary tales. The upper echelons of power have not set a definitive path. However, like the others on this roundtable, I see the President’s appointing Ali Larijani, a veteran moderate conservative, to lead the SNSC as a cautious pivot toward pragmatism.

Domestically, the public will ultimately decide whether any conciliatory approach by the government has gone far enough. Much has been written about the “rally around the flag” response, yet what perhaps matters more is who is carrying the flag. Many intellectuals and critical politicians who acted as a bridge between the state and the discontented public have been sidelined, exiled, or jailed. Opposition attempts to revive some figures have yet to produce tangible change. Even in less dire conditions, national reconciliation is a difficult undertaking, yet now it is more crucial than ever. If the state continues to isolate itself, it risks losing vital societal support amid the crisis.

The leadership is forced to walk a tightrope of managing domestic expectations, rebuilding deterrence capabilities, and re-igniting diplomacy as the threat of the UN Security Council’s “snapback sanctions,” set to expire in October, looms. Though voices of moderation struggle to be heard these days, de-escalation remains Iran’s best option. Achieving it, however, is more difficult than ever. Any new outbreak of conflict, regardless of which side initiates it, risks dragging regional and global players into another prolonged and costly Middle East war.

The truce brought an end to the nightly bombardments and missile strikes on Iranian cities, and with it, the people exhaled a long-awaited sigh of relief. In the aftermath of hostilities, many have found themselves overwhelmed by uncertainty, grappling with the sudden shift from chaos to calm. While trying to piece together their fractured lives, and perhaps even their sense of self, they began processing a complex mix of emotions such as fear, grief, hope, and exhaustion. Slowly but surely, a semblance of the rhythms of everyday life began to reappear.

In one of her first social media posts after the war, Giti Khameneh, a veteran children’s TV host who began her career in the 1980s, shared a video on Instagram. The footage was of three children setting up a game of street football. The kids were running around, aimlessly kicking the ball, bickering back and forth about the makeshift rules, and momentarily moving the goalposts (two orange traffic cones) to let a car pass. The scene unfolded under the soft, familiar voice of the TV anchor. “Oh, life…life…life […] I never thought I’d get this much joy from the sound of kids playing ball […] I want to admit that today, this game carries a different kind of feeling for me.”

The short video was a poignant reminder that life, against all odds and in the aftermath of dismal times, doggedly resumes. It captured the quiet, and perhaps even inadvertent, resilience that persists under the shadow of turmoil. More powerful than any political statement or partisan analysis, it revealed how spaces once marked by sorrow and fear can be reclaimed by the simple, grounding joys of ordinary life. In this case, a midday pick-up game of football, played by three restless children on cracked asphalt.

It’s too early to fully grasp the impact of the 12-day war on Iran’s Generation Alpha (0-14). In time, as they grow, develop, and find their voices, they will be the ones to tell their own stories. For now, though, many late Generation X and early Millennials—myself included—cannot help but view such scenes through the lens our own lived experiences of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988).

For me, Khameneh’s video captured more than an endearing moment. It reflected a profound generational encounter. In the weeks since the ceasefire, throughout conversations with friends, loved ones, and scholars of Iran, I have sensed a subtle, but unmistakable connection between segments of the Iranian society who are separated by time, yet linked by shared experience. Each generation has lived through its own war, endured its own crisis, and discovered its own coping mechanisms, with unique twists as well as striking similarities. Those who grew up during the Iran-Iraq War carry memories of fear, survival, and interrupted innocence—emotions that we now see reflected back to us in the faces of the children of today. They’ll tell their own tales in time, but that video, in all its simplicity, felt like a small but robust bridge, connecting the enduring spirit of childhood across time and space.

The Comforting Arms of Remembering

They say nostalgia is a potent drug, and these days, I find myself reaching for it more than ever. Perhaps this is my way of coping with the psychological weight of the moment. It is not uncommon for people to revisit childhood memories during times of crisis, searching for emotional anchors or a sense of safety rooted in the past. Children and young adults of the 1980s were forced to grow up quickly, yet, much like today’s youth, they clung to a sense of normalcy wherever they could find it—street games, family, and children’s programing on state TV.

The nature of broadcast entertainment has changed dramatically over the decades, but during the 1980s and early 1990s, the screen time for most Iranian children was limited to whatever was on state-run television. With the gradual introduction of computers and satellite dishes, that landscape began to shift, but slowly and unevenly. Back then, the children’s lineup was a daily ritual, with only a handful of programs aired once a day in the early evenings. The shows typically featured a mix of dubbed animated series, mostly imported from Japan and Eastern Europe, paired with locally produced educational sketches and puppet segments. The content was simple, but purposeful, often reinforcing important lessons such as brushing your teeth, finishing your homework, and the importance of listening to your parents.

For yesterday’s children, Giti Khameneh, now in her 60s, is inseparable from the memory of those turbulent days. With her gentle demeanor, kind face, and soothing voice, the TV host offered her young viewers something rare and precious at the time—a sense of safety and comfort. Accompanied by Looney Tunes, The Pink Panther, Tom and Jerry, and a hodgepodge of dubbed Polish, Croatian, French, and Czech, cartoons, Khameneh served as a small but steady anchor in a world that felt scary and uncertain. The animated segments and puppet interludes provided brief moments of escape for children overwhelmed by the sounds of bombs, anti-aircraft cannons, sirens, and the constant hum of general anxiety.

The anchor’s comforting presence wasn’t just about her demeanor; she also actively engaged her young audience within the program itself. In one recurring segment, for example, she and other colleagues showcased drawings mailed in to be featured on the show. She’d read the children’s names, ages, and hometowns one by one, turning each submission into a moment of recognition. Looking back now, I realize that many of those drawings depicted soldiers, warplanes, bombs, and missiles, a reflection of the long arms and heavy grip of the wartime environment.

In a recent interview, Khameneh shared that children sometimes called in off-air, expressing how frightened they were by the sounds of bombs, especially when their parents weren’t home. In response, she would carefully tailor her monologues to speak directly to those kids, reassuring them that the explosions would end soon, and their parents would return before they knew it. It has been years since I have followed children’s programming in Iran, and I find myself wondering about today’s equivalent. Is there one, or are kids today just at the mercy of the various algorithms that dictate what pops up on their computer monitors and tablets?

That war officially ended in 1988 and, as it is obligated to do, life moved on. The world slowed down a bit, and everyday life rediscovered its familiar rhythm. But through that transition, Giti Khameneh remained a familiar face on Iranian television up until the early 90s. She left the country in 1994 and earned a master’s degree in Drama from California State University, but returned to Iran in 2010, where she continues to host programs for young audiences to this day.

The Street Ball Bounced Again and Again

Of course, childhood was never defined solely by what appeared on the television screen. Away from the television’s reach, the simplest objects became endless sources of joy. One such familiar item, known to kids since at least the 1970s, was a plastic ball or toop pelastiki. These balls were inexpensive and ubiquitous at almost all convenience stores across the country. With just a bit of pocket money, kids could easily buy one and gather to play games of gol koochik, street football that provided countless hours of entertainment.

The balls, however, were low quality and extremely light. I still remember the plastic smell, likely from cheap chemicals that easily evaporated under the sun or other additives used during manufacturing. Kicking them slightly too hard would send them flying unpredictably over fences, onto rooftops, or into passing traffic. Their light weight made them nearly impossible to control, turning the simplest game into a chaotic scramble. Kids from those days remember the many encounters with angry neighbors who frustrated by loud noises or retrieving a ball that had landed in their yards for the umpteenth time, would yell, and at times, even tear up the ball in protest. The result was a flattened lifeless piece of plastic lying at your feet, which at that moment, felt like the whole world had come crashing down around you and your playmates. But, by the next day, no one remembered the horrible confrontation, and life went on. A new ball bounced again and again, and we all played once more.

Worse yet, these balls weren’t built to survive the rough conditions of street play. A sharp pebble, a stray nail, or even the rough edge of a wall could easily puncture them. It would deflate instantly, collapsing in on itself without so much as a hiss. One moment it was bouncing fine, and the next, it was just a crumpled piece of plastic; a game over before it really began. But, necessity is the mother of invention. So, kids found a clever workaround by buying two balls. One would be sacrificed, cut open, and used as a protective outer shell for the other. These makeshift creations were called “toop do-layeh,” which literally means a “two-layered ball.”

This may sound simple, but pulling it off was tricky. If the incision was too large, the outer layer would be useless—the inner ball would just fall out. Too small, and you couldn’t squeeze the second ball in. Some surface area inevitably remained exposed, but it had to be as small as possible, since any unprotected part was vulnerable to the elements. Knowing how to layer a ball was a respected skill among the kids. It bought you real credit on the block. After all, your friends were counting on you to deliver the game ball. If you ruined it, you’d land yourself in the doghouse for a while. But if you got it right, you were a hero, at least until the next game.

These balls were the beating hearts of countless hours of play. Kids set up makeshift goals using rocks as markers or drawing lines on asphalt to create small pitches right in the middle of alleyways and side streets. Teams would form, rivalries took root, and in some neighborhoods, informal tournaments became the highlight of the summer. Certain kids became legends of gol koochik. Their peers would honor their talent with nicknames inspired by internationally renowned football stars, “the neighborhood Zico,” for example. Sometimes, a player’s quick footwork would earn exaggerated praise. “He’s got more than two feet,” someone would shout. And just like that, a player was christened with the nickname “The Centipede.”

These tight urban games didn’t reward long passes, sprints, or fancy free kicks. There was no room. With no more than four players per side, and the field flanked by parked cars, curbs, tree trunks, or other obstacles, success came down to personal technique and finesse, which meant tight control, quick reflexes, clever footwork, and an endless supply of backheel passes and “nutmegs,” the coveted technique of slipping the ball between an opponent’s legs and reclaiming it on the other side.

The background soundtrack to those street matches was often moms yelling from windows, warning kids to move out of the way of passing cars or to come home before dark. Between those shouts and the thud of a plastic ball bouncing off curbs, however, something bigger was happening. That’s where the earliest dreams of becoming professional footballers quietly took shape. In early 2000s, as a five-year-old, Ali Gholizadeh grinned as he kicked a ball around like hundreds of thousands of other kids across Iran before and after him. He went on to play for Iran’s national football team. Other renowned football players such as Alireza Mansourian and Vahid Shamsaei have similar stories.

The kids of yesterday and today have now experienced war, separately, but also together. Across generations, they share something heavy and hard to understand. In the end, perhaps what defines a generation isn’t just the bombs or the broadcasts, but the small ways they cope, create, and carry on. What connects the children of the past with those of today is not only the shared experience of war, but the enduring instinct to gather, to play, to invent, and to reclaim joy in the midst of uncertainty. The same makeshift games of street football that once filled alleyways in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s remind us, once again, that life insists on continuing. I’ll admit that the ball in the video shared by Khameneh looked a bit fancier than the flimsy plastic ones we used to chase, but the spirit behind the game felt achingly familiar. It was a quiet reminder that life pushes forward—one kick, one pass, one bounce at a time.

Before I dive in, I want to mention that this article is the first piece shared exclusively with you as a paid subscriber to The Guarded Domains. It’s an expanded version of my published article, but this platform allows me to offer more nuance, without the constraints of word limits or tailoring to a particular publication’s audience. I hope you find this version thought-provoking and ultimately see it as a value-added contribution. If there’s any part of the article you find unclear, or if there are areas you’d like me to explore further, please don’t hesitate to let me know. As a paid subscriber, your feedback is highly valued, and I’m more than happy to dive deeper into topics that interest you.

After a public absence during the 12-day war with Israel last month, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on July 5 unexpectedly appeared at his Husseiniyya, a prayer hall used for religious rituals. The timing was significant. It was Tasua, an important date on the Shia calendar marking the eve of the slaying of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein ibn Ali. The following day, known as Ashura, commemorates the 680 CE massacre in Karbala, in modern-day Iraq. Revered as the third Shia Imam, Hussein is hailed for fighting to the bitter end rather than submitting to a caliph denounced as corrupt and unfit to rule.

Khamenei was dressed in a black robe and surrounded by leading officials from all three branches of government. He waved to the crowd, who rose to their feet and greeted him with chants of “Heydar, Heydar,” a defiant Shia cry meaning ‘lion,’ associated with Hussein’s father, Ali bin Abi Talib (656-61), the first Shia Imam. What happened next surprised many observers. Iran’s top leader motioned to Mahmoud Karimi, a well-known eulogist leading the event, to approach his chair, where he whispered a few words to him. Karimi then returned to the microphone and announced that the Supreme Leader had asked him to perform his new rendition of the patriotic song “Ey Iran” (‘O Iran). He obliged by reciting the novel verses in a strong yet somber voice. Penned in the aftermath of Israel’s surprise attack, Karimi had made several changes to the lyrics, weaving in religious themes with love for the homeland, referring to Iran as “the land of Karbala” and “the nation of Ashura.” He sang:

In my soul and spirit, you remain, O homeland,
It’s you, it’s you, you are the shrine (sanctuary),
It’s you, you are my home.

Oh Iran, Iran, may no foul hand ever touch your pure embrace,
O shining light, may you be safe under the protection of Heydar,
My soul and spirit,
O divine homeland, courtyard of Imam Reza,
Iran of Zulfiqar (Ali’s legendary sword), Iran of Ashura.

Your soil blended with scent of Karbala,
You, you are the one whose fortress became the red banner of the water-bearer (Saqa),
O our ascension, whose sky is marked by the red line of the martyrs,
Our existence, offered in your name.

Your people’s hands held in God’s hands,
O cradle of loyalty and faith,
You, proud and victorious across all the worlds,
As long as this Husseini zeal lives within you.

Khamenei quietly beat his chest, his eyes filled with tears. At times, he raised his fingers to his forehead in a reflective and mournful gesture, covering his face. This marked the first time a nationalistic song had been recited in the Supreme Leader’s Husseiniyya since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

This episode was no exception. In the wake of the 12-day war with Israel, Iran has witnessed some of its most patriotic Ashura-related gatherings in recent memory. Eulogists lamenting the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali and his companions have infused their lyrics with Iran-centric language from classical poetry, pop songs and nationalistic melodies. This mix of supposed secular patriotic symbols and religious rituals has surprised many, especially those accustomed to eulogies traditionally focused on the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, framed through moral lessons such as the importance of resisting injustice, the value of courage, sacrifice, social responsibility, and the eternal struggle between good and evil.

The new string of lamentations are a blend of notions that may appear contradictory at first—an amalgamation of homeland, loyalty to Prophet Muhammad and Shia Imams, and the broader Shia struggle for recognition and influence. For example, the above mentioned performance by Karimi was a rendition of one of the most enduring nationalistic songs, originally written in the late 1960s by Touraj Negahban, composed by Mohammad Sarir, and performed by well-known pop singer Mohammd Nuri.

Such patriotic messages calling for unity were not exclusive to gatherings organized by state elites. In a congregation organized by ordinary citizens in Yazd, central Iran, a eulogist addressed a personified Iran, singing, “In your cause, when do our lives have any value? Eternal may be the land of Iran.” The words belong to a patriotic song dating back to World War II, written during the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran that led to the overthrow of Reza Shah. Hossein Gol-e-Golab penned this nationalistic poem after seeing Allied flags flying over an Iranian military barracks in Tehran. In response to the recent iteration of the song, a mid-ranking hardliner cleric and the Deputy of Political and Legal Affairs of Iran’s Center for Parliamentary Research remarked, “Today, Iran and Islam have become one.”

Another powerful example emerged in Borazjan, a city in the southern province of Bushehr, where renowned eulogist Mehdi Akhundzadeh sang the following nationalistic verses addressing the nation:

Iran,
Speech became a storm of bullets,
The street ran red with blood,
But in the end, the final word was:
My life, a gift to Iran,
My life, a gift to Iran.

Iran,
I swear by your weary soil,
By Damavand’s silent, stifled cry,
That my zeal to keep on living,
Is bound to your joy,
Is bound to your joy.

Iran,
If they broke your heart,
Chained you with bonds of hate,
[Know] many nameless lovers still,
Sat with you in pain.

In accordance with local tradition, several concentric circles of men locked arms, beat their chests, and moved rhythmically in unison as they rotated around the eulogist. This song was originally written and performed by classical music singer Salar Aghili.

Interpreting the Moment

With Iran in the grip of patriotic fervor, some observers argue that the phenomenon is evidence of the state’s waning Islamist ideology. The latter has come under tremendous strain following the domestic upheavals in recent years, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that erupted in 2022. Seen from this perspective, Israel’s attack has compelled the Islamic Republic to latch on to nationalism as a last-ditch effort to forge cohesion among a divided public and generate popular support.

While this argument cannot be definitively proven or refuted by analyzing Ashura ceremonies, what is clear is that treating this confluence of messaging as a novelty is ahistorical. It overlooks the fluid nature of Shia lamentation traditions, which have evolved over several centuries. Ruling elites in Iran have long attempted to appropriate the annual ceremonies to promote their own ideology, just as societal segments have pushed back—refusing to serve as passive recipients of top-down narratives.

According to official data, as of last year, 3,100 registered Husseiniyya and 93,000 hey’at (religious associations which organize Shia religious ceremonies) were active across the country. Akin to pop-up congregations or neighborhood groups, the latter typically operate only during the Islamic lunar month of Muharram, when Ashura is marked. Events reflect and cater to a wide range of social classes, political ideologies and people from different economic backgrounds; while some religious associations align themselves with the political establishment, many others reflect a wide range of interests, mirroring Iran’s diverse geographical and ethnic makeup. In this vein, some hey’at are even flexible enough to represent local customs.

Indeed, a closer look at the history of Muharram and Ashura-related lamentations shows that the rituals do not belong to any given authority or social group, but serve as a fluid medium for state-society expression, contention, and, at times, cohesion.

Change and Continuity Over Time

Ashura rituals took wider root in Iran with the rise of the Safavid Empire in 1501, when Shah Esma’il I (1487–1524), adopted Shia Islam as state religion. He enacted policies that led to the conversion of almost the entire Iranian population to Twelver Shiaism. Such rituals are part of a 524-year-old institution, one that could not have endured without responding to the social market of demands that typically emerge from ongoing negotiations between the people and the ruling elite.

As scholars such as Kamran Aghaie have argued, Shia symbols and rituals have shown patterns of both change and continuity since their introduction to the Iranian plateau. They have played a particularly crucial role in promoting social bonds, collective identities, and shared ideals. Successive regimes—whether the Qajars, the Pahlavis, or the Islamic Republic—have each, depending on the exigencies of the moment, used these rituals to legitimize their rule or suppressed them when perceived as political threats. As such, lamentations have always reflected the social and political conditions of their time.

While still serving as a general in the Qajar Dynasty’s Imperial Army, Reza Khan, the eventual founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty, established his own Husseiniyya. During that time, and in the early years of his reign, when he still leaned heavily on religion as a pillar of legitimacy, he portrayed himself and his inner military circle as protectors of Imam Hussein at the Battle of Karbala. Nematollah Ghazi, a politician during the Pahlavi era, wrote in his memoir:

“During the Muharram of 1919, on Ashura, Reza Shah led the Qajar-era Cossack mourning procession. He took off his shoes, [drawing on old burial traditions] covered his head and body with mud and straw, and during the Sham-e-Ghariban ceremony [the night of mourning following Ashura], he held a plaster candle in his hand and joined in the recitation of elegies.”

The Iranian Cossack Brigade, modeled after the Caucasian Cossack regiments of the Russian Army, even had its own forms of lamentation. As they marched through the streets during Muharram processions, they chanted, “Had the Cossack been in Karbala, Hussain would have not been left thirsty and alone.” Reza Shah could not protect that message indefinitely, however. Grassroots groups later altered the lyrics to reflect their dissatisfaction with his enforcement of western-style clothing, which included the forced removal of the hijab in public spaces. In protest critics sang, “Had the Cossack been in Karbala, they would have torn the veil from Zaynab’s head,” referring to Hussein’s sister, whose grave near Damascus is a major pilgrimage site.

State-Society Negotiation Through Mourning Rituals

The above anecdote illustrates the ongoing exchange between the people and their ruling elites. The top-down message seeks to present the leadership as the protector of Islam, Shiaism, and its revered figures. The people, however, or at least a segment of the population, do not simply accept this crafted rhetoric. They push back against policies imposed by the leadership and resist what clashes with their own cultural, religious, and sociopolitical understanding and practices.

Under the Islamic Republic, Muharram rituals have both divided and united the state and society. While not exclusively so, some nationalistic lamentations during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War promoted harmony between the public and the political establishment. By contrast, during the Green Movement protests that erupted in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential elections, opposition demonstrators marched on the occasion of Ashura, chanting, “This month is the month of blood; Yazid will fall,” comparing Khamenei to the Umayyad caliph who ordered the killing of Hussein ibn Ali.

At times, as a sign of acknowledging popular demands, prominent eulogists close to the ruling elites include criticisms in their lamentations. In 2024, after protests against the compulsory Islamic dress code, Mahdi Rasuli, one of such figures, blamed the domestic turmoil on foreign powers, chanting, “In this staged game, our heads are on the table; that unveiled girl is also our daughter; these divisions are the roots of all ruin, the [real] fight is about Iranian unity.”

While such lamentations may not always be linked to tangible change in official policies, they do demonstrate how rituals continue to be utilized as sites of negotiation. They may also provide an opening for politicians to jump on the bandwagon.

What Kind of Nationalism? Whose Nationalism?

Iran may be at a crossroads of a new iteration of nationalism, which some label as neo-nationalism. The emerging ideology seems to blend love for the homeland with rhetoric on safeguarding Iran as a shrine tied to sacred Shia figures. It foregrounds the “Iranian nation” rather than the “Islamic Nation,” and celebrates Iran as a great civilization rather than boasting of control over a vague regional expanse from West to Central and South Asia. While the idea of Iran as a timeless nation echoes Qajar- and late-Pahlavi-era nationalism, the current version includes new elements shaped through an ongoing exchange between the ruling elites and the public, as well as in response to external threats. This version of nationalism also contains a similar flavor to what took place under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The backdrop of the former populist president’s press conferences were at times decorated with Achaemenid Persian guards that adorned the ruins of Persepolis.

Today, symbols representing Shia Islam, nationalism, and the Islamic Republic’s military strength have already been erected across the country. Authorities in Tehran have installed a massive mural at Enghelab (Revolution) Square featuring an image of Khamenei with the text “Sing, Ey Iran,” referring to the famous patriotic song. At Vanak Square, another mural depicts Arash, a mythical heroic archer from Persian folklore who gave his life to set the boundaries of Iran. In the background, his arrow is accompanied by a barrage of ballistic missiles presumably on their way to Israel.

In essence, a creative process is on display—with political leaders and citizens utilizing existing sociocultural and religious tools to interpret the moment and shape the future. This ideology is never constant or uniform among all state and society members. New scenes, such as Iranian flags at Ashura ceremonies and nationalistic lamentations before the supreme leader, are a shift from past practices. Yet many aspects of such rituals, namely as a mode of exchange between the state and society, show high degrees of continuity. Though the outcome of this evolving dynamic is uncertain, the rituals and symbols persist as vital arenas for asserting power and expressing resistance. In the longer term, it remains to be seen whether unity is being fostered on new pillars, or if a novel challenge to the state is being born.

For those of us living outside the country, the emotions are relatively similar. It feels like many of us who have lived in Iran, have loved ones there, or feel an emotional connection to the country have all experienced mutual trauma. Even from afar, there’s constant anxiety. I’ve had my phone glued to my hand for the better part of a month now, and I still find it hard not to pick it up at least three or four times an hour. I drag down the dreaded screen to refresh my social media feed, waiting for the latest updates that could bring yet another round of unbearable news. There’s guilt in being safe abroad while I go about my daily routines. There’s also confusion. It feels like my brain is demanding answers, constantly asking, “What in the world happened?”—but no answers are coming. It’s a strange in-between space, where you’re physically distant from the war, but emotionally right in the middle of it.

During many sleepless nights throughout the war, I kept thinking about this shared trauma and how it brings people closer together. I was familiar with the theory of a nation as an imagined construct, but I had never experienced it so viscerally. For me, it became clear that a nation is far more than lines on a map or institutions that claim to represent it. It is a feeling carried in the collective memory of its people; in their grief, resilience, and hope. Amid moments of fear and uncertainty, when Israel claimed to have full control of Iran’s skies and cities across the country faced nightly bombardment, I felt how deeply one’s identity can be rooted in such shared experiences, even thousands of miles away. A nation, in that sense, becomes something lived. It could perhaps be defined as a network of emotions, memories, and connections that hold people together when everything else is falling apart.

Arguably, the closest example of such a shared history for Iranians was the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Those who lived it will forever recall bittersweet memories—laughing and crying together about their collective memories of survival. I’m a child of the 1980s myself and a flashbulb memory from when I was barely three years old continues to haunt me to this day. During the War of the Cities, when Iraq’s army shelled a number of major urban areas, my family and I lived in central Tehran. If you ever talk to an Iranian who recalls the terrifying sounds of air-raid sirens, chances are they’re remembering this phase of the war.

I was laying on my stomach in our living room, keeping busy with my coloring book. In an instant, the entire house shook and the windows rattled. I jumped up and ran toward the kitchen to find my mother. I found her looking lightheaded, still holding a kitchen knife while leaning against the counter for support. I jumped into her arms, but I don’t remember much else. When I revisit the memory with my mom, she confirms it all and tells me that we ran to the basement right after. Our neighbors joined us in the cellar, which had become a reliable refuge during bombardments in the three-story apartment building we called home.

I never witnessed the death or destruction of that blast firsthand, but decades later, I learned from my parents that what I remembered was part of an infamous tragedy. An Iraqi “wandering missile” that was supposed to hit a barracks had instead landed on a street just behind our neighborhood mosque. Those familiar with Tehran’s layout, especially the areas around Haft-e Tir Square, might have heard about the Al-Javad Mosque and the adjacent street that was completely flattened by the blast. Almost an entire city block was destroyed, with many civilian casualties.

During the Iran-Iraq War, the term “wandering missiles” eventually became a popular phrase laced with gallows humor. It turned into a catch-all expression to explain away countless inconclusive incidents where both the perpetrator and the intended target of an attack remained unknown to the public. Not unlike the present moment, ambiguity reigned supreme. Minds wondered, but no answers came. Somewhat jokingly, and perhaps out of necessity, “wandering missiles” became a temporary placeholder in the absence of reliable explanations. The phrase came to mean different things to different people. It conveyed the incompetence of officials who couldn’t clarify policy. It captured the deep uncertainty of war. It hinted at the deliberate use of strategic ambiguity in the heat of battle. And, perhaps most often, it simply explained why a structure that stood yesterday no longer existed today. Needless to say, the phrase was carrying a heavy load for a questioning population of roughly 40 million people at the time.

For the Iranian and Iraqi governments, the phrase had plenty of strategic benefits. To send political messages, show off their deterrence capabilities, signal that previous red lines were no longer relevant, or suggest that certain targets were now within reach, both countries set off bombs, missiles, mines, or other munitions without anyone claiming responsibility. Over time, it became routine. People would wake up, read about the latest site that had been destroyed, wonder why no one was taking credit, then chuckle and say it was probably another “wandering missile” before going about their day. To this day, some Iranian officials still refuse to own up to certain military maneuvers. An interview with Hossein Alaei, a retired IRGC commander who led Iran’s maritime forces during the war, from April 2017 serves as an illuminating and perhaps even humorous example of what I am describing.

After referencing Iran’s decision to attack Kuwaiti sites and ships in the Persian Gulf during one of the final phases of the eight-year war, the interviewer challenges Alaei with a pointed question. “Don’t you think after the decision to mine the Persian Gulf, we mobilized the entire world against us?,” he asks. Alaei claims that the Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini rejected the idea. The interviewer presses further, noting that the same Leader had previously said, “As soon as you see the first American tanker, hit it.” Alaei responds that Khomeini didn’t issue a direct order, but a Kuwaiti ship went over a mine regardless.

Interviewer: “So, we clearly left the mine there.”
Alaei: “Who says we did? You are saying that.”
Interviewer (smirking): “Oh, it just appeared? A wandering mine?”
Alaei (chuckling): “Yes. A wandering mine.”
Interviewer: “Ultimately, it had to have been planted either by Iraq or by us?”
Alaei: “When a mine is sent off, it can wander. I’ve experienced some wandering Iraqi mines myself.”
Interviewer: “We also had wandering missiles at the time.”
Alaei (smiling): “Yes, ultimately, when it’s war, such events happen. They launch and God knows where they will land.”

And now, decades later, we find ourselves in another moment shaped by ambiguity. Some analysts have already argued that for the foreseeable future ambiguity, especially in regards to Iran’s nuclear program, may become official policy. The country’s government and the population is dealing with another chapter where the lines between intention and accident, action and consequence, offender and target are constantly blurred. Once again, missiles have been launched, and people are left without answers. This time around 90 million minds are searching for clarity in a haze of conflicting narratives and emotions.

Today, we are still struggling to find the right words to describe what we are living through; to make sense of the absurd, to find purpose in the chaos, to pin down answers that keep slipping away. New terms will likely emerge again to help us carry the weight of the moment. I bet they’ll be laced with dark humor too. I bet, just as before, they’ll hold the pain and uncertainty of the times. The words will stretch, albeit clumsily, once more, to serve as a landing place for our drifting thoughts. But as always, time is a wiser sage than you and I. For now, all we can do is hold space for the wandering—the meandering of the mind, of course, not the missiles.