Life in Iran, Amid Repression and War

Hours after the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, a writer in Tehran texted me. “The war has started,” he wrote, followed later by an animated emoji of an arm emerging from a puddle of green slime to flash a thumbs-up.

I had first connected with the writer, whom I will call Hadi, in late January. Hadi was part of a broader group of Iranian dissidents who had spent much of their adult lives toggling between imprisonment and self-imposed invisibility. But the increasing brutality of the regime was like nothing these people had ever experienced. “Something has shifted very dramatically,” Hadi told me at the time. “There is more open anger. Elderly women openly curse the regime. . . . Social suffering is now tied, in people’s minds, to political rage.” He continued later, “That rage is now everywhere. It lives beside mourning. It lives beside fear. It lives beside exhaustion.”

A widespread internet blackout, enforced by the regime, has made it difficult to connect with those inside Iran who have been grappling with the human consequences of the government’s crackdown. “The country has been plunged into silence,” Hadi wrote to me in January. “In a forced darkness, misinformation spreads easily, and people are left with fragments.” That silence was part of the reason he had reached out, why he felt the need to document what he was seeing.

At great personal risk, Hadi connected me with dissidents, political prisoners, and their relatives, who all described their plights as the regime’s repressive campaign escalated in the weeks leading up to the war. He also began sending me daily updates in the form of videos, voice notes, and diary entries. He explained the histories of Iranian protest movements, and he observed the destruction in his besieged city. His sobering reports were often tempered by a dark humor. Today, in a new, as-told-to interactive piece for The New Yorker, I share much of our correspondence.

After the American and Israeli bombardment began in late February, Hadi’s messages turned into a live feed of evidence, chronicling the war’s imprint on daily life in Iran. He sent images of street corners where bakery lines stretched for blocks. One video, which he filmed over his shoulder, showed a rally of regime supporters filling up an alleyway at night. Another clip showed a plume of smoke billowing from the Revolutionary Court, which had been hit in an Israeli air strike. “I was brought there in handcuffs, with a beard on my face from having spent months in solitary confinement,” he wrote to me. “That’s where I was put on trial. It’s strange and ironic now to think about what has happened to that building.”

The days wore on, and neighborhoods emptied as people fled town. Grocery stores ran low on basic foods like meat and eggs. The price of cigarettes doubled. Hospital wards, A.T.M.s, and gas stations closed. The internet became more unstable, and Hadi’s updates arrived less frequently, but with more urgency. Some of his friends were disappearing. Others were getting harassed by agents of the regime, who arrived at their homes to confiscate their devices and assault their relatives. Today, on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, Iranian authorities executed three men who were convicted of killing police officers during anti-government demonstrations in January.

In his last dispatch to me, earlier today, Hadi sent a photo of a haft-sin—a traditional table he had laid with old poetry books and mementos from “lost loved ones,” like a candle he had lit for his mother, which he would keep burning until morning. His message was reflective and hopeful: “The moment of the new year’s arrival was striking,” he wrote. “It reminded me of a Nowruz from my childhood, during the war with Iraq. We were sitting at the haft-sin table, and I was watching the goldfish in its bowl when suddenly the electricity went out and the air-raid sirens began to wail. Back then, Saddam Hussein was attacking us. Today it is Trump and Netanyahu.”

“I have a strange sense of optimism,” he continued. “I feel that this could be a very important year for the country. Even amid war, the weakening of the forces of repression may offer new possibilities for Iran’s freedom movement.”

Read the interactive story »