A Report from Tehran
When I woke up in the morning, sleep had not yet fully left my eyes. A dull, gray light was coming through the curtains, light that resembled dust more than morning. My eyes fell on the balcony railings visible through the window. It took me a moment to understand what was wrong with the picture. The railings no longer had their familiar metallic color. A layer of blackness had settled on them, as if someone had sprayed a thick soot over everything during the night. Then my gaze shifted to the courtyard walls. That was when I realized it wasn’t just the railings. The walls had turned black as well. Not stains, not the usual urban grime; a uniform coating, as if the night itself had rubbed against the houses and refused to leave.
I got dressed and, without hesitation, went up to the rooftop. I knew what was waiting for me. After the previous explosion of the Shahran oil depot during that twelve-day war [in 2025], it wasn’t hard to guess. Even so, when I opened the door and looked at the sky, my breath caught in my chest for a moment. The entire sky was black. Not cloudy, not gray—black. A blackness that moved and writhed, like some enormous animal lying over the city. In the distance, a column of smoke was still rising from the direction of the Rey refinery, a column that disappeared into the black haze and then reemerged. I looked toward Azadi Square. Toward Milad Tower. Toward the mountains that always stand behind them. Nothing was visible. Everything had vanished into that same black haze, a haze they said had risen from the burning oil depots of Aghdasieh and Shahran and was now lying heavy over the city.
On the rooftop, the air coolers had turned black as well. The surface of the roof too. I ran my hand along the edge of the wall; my fingers came away black. Our lives had turned black; not in a metaphorical sense, but in the most literal meaning of the word. Black as a physical reality that settled on the skin, entered the lungs, and swirled in the air. Acid rain has fallen too.
They have said this situation will last at least five days. Five days in which the air is no longer air, but something like diluted poison. Doctors warn that it is not just a matter of coughing and shortness of breath; they speak of autoimmune diseases, of cancers that will emerge years later from the heart of days like these. Which means that even if the war ends tomorrow, this smoke will continue inside our bodies. A war that enters the bloodstream.
But outside this city, in cool, brightly lit studios, there are those who speak excitedly about these very explosions. That madman, Qazizadeh, an employee of Iran International, says in a confident voice that by striking these oil depots, the regime will no longer be able to supply fuel for its repression machines. He delivers the sentence in that same triumphant tone, as if reporting a great success. But he forgets to add something. He forgets to say that perhaps there may soon be no one left who would need to be run over by those repression vehicles.
He forgets to say that we, the very people who are supposed to be the subject of that “liberation”, may soon no longer be breathing because of this very smoke. We may not physically exist for the mounted Dushka machine guns on those vehicles to fire at us. When the air itself cannot be inhaled, bullets are no longer necessary.
In this city, war reveals itself in strange ways. Sometimes not with the sound of a missile, but with a black morning. With walls whose color has changed overnight. With a sky that is no longer a sky. War is not only that moment of explosion; it is the moment you realize your lungs, too, have entered the battlefield.
And it is strange that in such moments one understands more than ever what diplomacy really is. Diplomacy is this very smoke that enters homes. This very layer of blackness that settles on the balcony. These very decisions made in reactionary rooms that later appear as cancer in the bodies of people who were never present in those decisions.
On one side, a government that for years has abandoned the people, in the strictest sense of the word, to the grip of poverty and misery, transferring public resources in various ways and at different times to the private sector so that people would be deprived of them, and now those same people must literally inhale its smoke as well. On the other side, those who stand outside and imagine a country can be treated like a chessboard: strike a few facilities, let a few columns of smoke rise, then the regime collapses and everything is fixed. Between these two, we stand; with lungs filling with burned oil.
For warmongers, war is a scenario. An analysis. One possibility among several. For us, however, war is something our lungs must breathe, something that makes the windows of our homes and our bodies tremble from its bombs, and makes us think of graves that are not only the final destination of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) who were killing us in the streets a month ago, but in whose deep darkness my comrades and I, too, must be buried.
Yes, we are ready to pay the price of freedom with our lives, but the price we are paying now is the sacrifice of our lives either for the further entrenchment of the regime’s reactionary rule or for the establishment of a new colonial order. At the end of these days, we will be reduced to statistics, to numbers. The statistics of those who died, the statistics of those who survived, and the statistics of those who, whatever the outcome of these days may be, must continue the struggle for freedom and equality under conditions far harsher than before.
Date of writing: March 8, 2026
Date of publication: March 9, 2026
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