A Report from Tehran
Morning of day seventeen, Grandmother and S had gone shopping near Shohada Square. They had just come home when we heard a loud shaking sound and whistling fill the house. A series of explosions shook everything; we could feel the blasts. We stood frozen in front of the windows. A few minutes later the bombing came again, but from further away. My hands went numb. This had happened to me many times after explosions, my heart would tighten and my throat would close. H called and said they had hit the Shohada power station. S said in a scared voice: “We were only minutes away from death.” F called in a panic: “Where is Mom? They hit Shohada!” When I told him she had left before the bombing, he said crying: “Thank God a thousand times.”
An hour or two later, videos came in from Shohada Square, from the row of pastry and nut shops, and from the torn-down sign of the Medical Building at the beginning of Piroozi Street; from the shattered windows of the Etka store, which in the last days of the year is crowded with people who have come to shop using their workers’ vouchers and ration coupons; from the red walls of the Kanoon Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children’s History Museum. Unconsciously, I choked up. It felt as though my childhood memories had been attacked.
Day eighteen of the war, we had just fallen asleep. It was past 3 in the morning when a huge explosion woke us up. Each of us ran to a window, north or south, to look for smoke and try to figure out where the strike had hit. We found nothing. Wrapped in blankets, we sat on the mattresses on the living room floor and waited for the next explosion. After the sounds of air defense stopped, we slowly fell back asleep. Around 7 AM, our little dog’s whining woke us up. It has been scared and anxious these days, after every explosion or gunshot from the air defense, it wanders lost around the house and quickly runs to someone’s arms or hides in the corner of the couch. A few days ago when I managed to open Instagram, I saw a report about Israeli dogs and cats in bomb shelters. I thought, we don’t even have space for ourselves in the media, let alone our pets.
At 11 AM, we were doing normal house chores. M was on a work call, the other M was exercising, when I heard a whistling sound in my ears again. S was cleaning the windows when she screamed: “Oh no, oh no, it’s falling, it’s falling!” Several explosions rang through the house. M shouted for everyone to sit on the floor. Grandmother, who can’t sit on the floor after her knee surgery, kept saying quietly “I can’t” while cursing Netanyahu and Trump and asking God for help. The explosion was so close we could smell smoke and sulfur inside the house. I don’t know how many minutes passed, but I held P tightly in my arms. Grandfather called his friend who has a shop near Khorasan Square. The old man said: “I’m okay, they hit the gym and the pool”, and hung up without saying goodbye.
The VPN connection also dies from time to time. It was cut off. I follow the news through the “Bale” app, and when there’s no jamming, through BBC Persian, CNN, and Al Jazeera. I added channels from “Khabr_Fouri” to “Al Jazeera” and “Hanzala.” I carefully read posts from non-Persian sources, so I don’t fall into the trap of local media filters. Friends’ reports as eyewitnesses are also a news source I don’t ignore. News came that several other places had been hit too. In the evening, I talked to A, who said they had wanted to hit street checkpoints near the Navab intersection too, but the drone apparently hit a wall and didn’t work. Someone arrived and said: “Near Sarcheshmeh, the ground was black, and people’s burned cars and motorcycles were left on the side of the road.”
Day twenty of the war, No VPN config was working. BAM (National Internet Bank) was still down. I heard that this time the American company Cisco had shut down the hardware systems of BAM, something that disrupted people’s lives at New Year time even more than the bank or the Islamic Republic itself. It felt like pressure was coming from every direction. We started the morning with news of the execution of a young man who had been arrested during the 12-day war on charges of spying for Israel. I thought to myself, if there had been no war, maybe this kid would still be alive. I thought of A, who was arrested a few days after the January [2026] protests. I heard the charge was spying. Worry filled me, though I had always guessed that self-interest would get him in trouble one day. M’s friend sent a message saying that their mutual friend’s boyfriend was killed on the Dena warship, and now a girl who had never gone into the street for any pro-Islamic Republic gathering has gone to walk in his funeral. Today, I can see with my own eyes how the war has drawn into alignment those who, until just yesterday, were spitting in the face of the Islamic Republic.
Day twenty-one, I woke up in the morning to a sound I couldn’t find the source of, I’m not even sure if it was in a dream or real. I was forcing myself to clean the house. Every sound, something clattering into the kitchen sink, the hum of the vacuum cleaner, makes your hair stand on end. I messaged H to check on her. One street above her house had been hit. She called and told me how her body had tensed up at the sound of the fighter jet, and she had been praying for it to just strike already and end this fear. During the conversation, she was taping up her windows, and she spoke about cleaning and gathering the shattered glass at another friend’s house, whose neighbor, the Martyrs Foundation building, had been struck a day or two earlier; about a woman sitting in the alley, calling out for her father, a father buried beneath the rubble of his home.
Day twenty-two, only a few hours left until the New Year [Nowruz]. I went out to buy things for the Haft-Sin table. Many shops were open and people were out shopping, but it didn’t feel or smell like New Year. When you looked at people, you could see that under the shadow of war, living life as normal was itself a form of resistance. Without meaning to, I was avoiding streets that still showed signs of bombing and destruction. The bombing and destruction of Tehran had been my childhood nightmare ever since America attacked Iraq and occupied Baghdad, and today it is part of my daily life. I read the graffiti on the walls: “Death to the Pahlavi whelp,” ‘Our body for the homeland,” “Death to Israel and America.” I reached a brick wall of an old abandoned garage on a side street where for three years “Woman, Life, Freedom” had been written, and on the morning of 8th January I saw someone had clumsily crossed it out and written “Long live the Shah,” and now someone else had crossed that out and written “Death to the traitor.” The history that wall had lived through weighed heavy on my chest, and I walked out of the street holding back tears. I saw a middle-aged man and woman standing at the corner with their shopping, they looked religious, maybe supporters of the Islamic Republic. The man said: “God willing, this year will be as beautiful as the flowers in your hands.” The woman added: “May the New Year be sweet for young people, dear.” A few steps further, I burst into tears. I sat on the curb and cried. I had run out of strength. I thought to myself, these people deserved anything but the suffering that has been going on for years and has come to this.
Yesterday was relatively calm. I had set up the Haft-Sin table, and the clock was counting down to the arrival of the year 1405, when the sound of air defense went off, and a light flashed in the sky, which with the rain and wind was already dancing. I didn’t know if they had shot down a drone or missile or not, but the New Year arrived, to the sound of the enemy’s bombs. Congratulations messages came in one by one. One wished for a free Iran, another for peace, victory, and calm, and some simply wrote “just a day better than today.”
It was around 1 AM on the first day of Farvardin [March 20]. F came rushing back from the roof and said she had seen a light in the sky. A sound drew closer and within a few seconds, 2 explosions shook the house. Just before the second explosion I jumped to the window and opened it, the handle was torn from my hand by the blast wave. I shut it in fear. My body was cold and my hands were numb. We all gathered in the living room. P was curled up in her mother’s arms, shaking with fear.
It is now the morning of the first day of the New Year. The sound of a fighter jet is filling the house. I press my feet into the floor and try to type faster, maybe the roar of the jet will get lost in the sound of the keyboard, and maybe this endless fear will stop. I hope this fear, this war, this dark shadow of death will lift from the heads of these people.
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