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What everyday life is like for Iranians right now

Iranians are still trying to work, study, and parent under the constant threat of both airstrikes and regime violence.

The war in Iran will enter its fourth week on Saturday, with no real end in sight. The Pentagon is reportedly requesting $200 billion to fund the ongoing military operation, even as it unsettles the world economy. Meanwhile, Iranians say that airstrikes are growing louder and more intense as the US and Israel pursue high-ranking officials, infrastructure and other targets in densely populated cities.

Today, I want to focus on that latter perspective — the view from inside Iran. The country has been under a near-total internet blackout since attacks started, making it difficult for Western media to fully capture the mood inside the country or the scale of the damage.

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But Roya Rastegar — a producer, writer and co-founder of Iranian Diaspora Collective, a pro-democracy group — is in touch with a network of people on the ground in Iran. In a piece for Vox this week, she shared their experiences of the ongoing war, as well as their hopes for the country’s eventual democratic transition.

Today, Roya and I discuss the internet blackout, the political atmosphere in Iran and daily life in a warzone. (This conversation has been edited for length and flow.)

In a piece for Vox earlier this week — “This war is putting Iranians in an impossible moral dilemma” — you share the stories of a number of Iranians living through the war. What is communication and internet connectivity like inside Iran now? How are people getting messages out to you?

Communication inside Iran right now is fragmented, unstable, and politically controlled by the regime. This internet blackout isn’t a technical, wartime issue — it is a deliberate, political choice to cut off 90 million Iranians from the global conversation.

The blackout makes it almost impossible to hear about conditions on the ground in real time. Messages are coming out in bursts, not in any steady or reliable way. A friend gets access for a few minutes through a VPN that belongs to a friend of a friend of a neighbor, they send a voice note, or Signal chat — something before going offline again. There is also a distinct sense that calls are being monitored. So even when you are able to talk with people, conversations are constrained by fear.

People are not just dealing with the constant fear and anxiety of bombs dropping — they are also dealing with an information siege. They don’t know what has been hit or where, who is dead or alive, or what is state propaganda and what is real.

So the message we keep getting from people on the ground is: Turn the internet back on. The blackout is isolating people psychologically as much as physically.

What is daily life like for the people you’re in communication with? I was really struck by a collection of translated posts that the Iranian Diaspora Collective shared on Instagram: Iranians talking about how they entertain their kids while hunkering down indoors, or how they try to stay focused on studying even when they can see smoke out their windows.

Are people still going to work and school? Are they able to get food and other necessities? What is ordinary life like under this kind of bombardment?

People are still trying to work, study, parent, shop, clean their homes, and prepare for the new year, but they are doing it under bombardment, under surveillance and under martial law.

Access to basic necessities is uneven, as prices have surged even further. Gasoline is being rationed. More businesses are shutting down — I’m hearing that the majority of businesses have been closed for more than two weeks. Even people who were formerly middle-class are struggling to afford basic things.

“I am becoming increasingly aware of the psychological toll this moral calculus is playing on us as a people.”

Nighttime is especially hard — people can’t sleep. They jolt awake to explosions, planes overhead, and the anticipation of what might come next. People go to their windows or rooftops at the slightest sound to determine whether it was an attack.

Streets are empty in Tehran. Bakeries are open but have no customers. People are staying indoors not only because of the strikes, but also because the regime’s security apparatus is everywhere. I’m consistently hearing — from my friends and sources, and from other friends talking to their friends and family in the country — that people in Iran are more afraid right now of being killed or arrested by the regime’s security forces than they are of bombs hitting them. Plainclothes officers, called Basij, are stopping people on the street more aggressively: checking their phones, questioning them, arresting them.

I’m glad you made that point. My assumption — and I think the assumption of many people outside Iran following the war — is that the airstrikes have been profoundly disruptive to civilians. And they have, to be clear. But you’re saying that people were already effectively living under siege.

Yes. The regime has been waging a one-sided war against Iranian civilians for 47 years. Women, religious and ethnic minorities, poor and working-class people are the ones who are the most targeted by the regime.

Some people have actually told me they get anxious when the bombs stop for more than six hours. For these people, the sound of airstrikes is a “strange comfort,” because their overwhelming fear is not the strike itself but the possibility that the Islamic Republic survives and becomes worse than ever. I am becoming increasingly aware of the psychological toll this moral calculus is playing on us as a people.

While we may disagree vehemently on how, almost all Iranians agree that the regime must go. The massacres in January were a point of no return. The Islamic Republic cannot claim sovereignty while denying the Iranian people theirs. The regime lost its legitimacy when it massacred tens of thousands of people.

Your piece traces a tonal shift in the messages you’re hearing from Iranians, both in-country and in the diaspora. Initially, you write, there was a sense of relief that the US and Israel were intervening in Iran — a hope that the regime would fall. But that relief curdled into something else, particularly after the US struck a girls school and killed 168 people, many of them children. That was more than two weeks ago. Has anything changed? Where do things stand now?

People are struggling. It is sickening to see the destruction being done to the country, to your neighborhood.

The binary of “pro-war vs. anti-war” is too simplistic for this situation — especially for Iranians. Maybe to the rest of the world it seemed that Iran was previously in peacetime, but that wasn’t the case. This regime doesn’t govern; it tortures, coerces, maims, threatens, and kills. Violence reached a peak two months ago on January 8 and 9. The regime is the warmonger. At any point, this regime could surrender. How psychotic is this regime that they would rather see the whole country burn down before giving up?

Of course, Iran is a country of 95 million people and then the Iranian diaspora is estimated to include another 5 million. So of course there are also those who oppose the regime and also do not believe this war will bring freedom. Those voices are real and deserve to be heard, as well. Everyone is horrified by the cost to civilians, including the destruction of cities, the psychological trauma, the lack of shelters and warning systems, and the fact that children and vulnerable people are being forced to absorb this terror.

People are waiting, in limbo. People are in grief. They are exhausted. They are afraid, but also hopeful, but also hungry, but also overwhelmed, but also in the dark.

And one more thing has not changed: People continue to be deeply worried about political prisoners. Those prisoners include athletes, journalists, activists, teachers, lawyers, artists — some of the people who would help build a democratic Iran. They are trapped under horrifying conditions, with limited food, water, hygiene, or communication.

And the state is still executing prisoners. Just yesterday, Iran executed three young men for participating in the January protests. This is why Iranians have become so desperate that they see outside intervention as the only remaining path.

You write that the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be allowed “to continue its nearly half-century reign of terror.” That represents, in some ways, the worst case for Iran. I’m curious what you, and the Iranians you’re in touch with, think the best case is. If the regime falls, what or who would you like to see replace it?

There is not a single consensus about who or what replaces it. There are several options, though — there is a transitional council of 35 anonymous leaders inside Iran who have made themselves known to the United Nations. Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel laureate, was just named the head of the Transitional Justice Committee by Reza Pahlavi [a political activist and the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah ousted in Iran’s 1979 revolution]. We are all just waiting to see if the regime can fall. When it does, Iranians will fill the space with a democratic transition.

One thing to do in preparation is to develop a democratic culture and educate ourselves on the political landscape. Political education has been illegal in Iran under both the Islamic Republic and the former shah.

Political education will be key in this next phase of our country’s future. And central to it will be fostering a democratic culture that holds different perspectives without demonizing or threatening people.

On Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed Ali Larijani, a top Iranian security official and the man believed to be running the country since the death of Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader. What was the reaction in Iran?

It was like Christmas morning. Some people were even more relieved than they were when Khamenei was killed, because Larijani is considered to be one of the architects of repression, propaganda, and the hardening of the regime.

That news also came the morning after Chaharshanbe Suri, an ancient Zoroastrian fire ritual that immediately precedes Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. People jump over fire as a cleansing act. I was stunned to see so many people inside Iran going to the streets to celebrate Chaharshanbe Suri — jumping over fire, singing, dancing. The risks were immense because the regime had told people to stay home. And yet, people came out. Of course, the regime’s thugs chased them out of the streets, shooting at them and threatening arrest.

You are — in addition to your writing and your work with the Iranian Diaspora Collective — working on a documentary about six young dancers in Iran. Where are they now? What are they doing? How does this war play into their story and the story you were telling about them?

We had just wrapped production in December in Iran. When we were in development of our film, we had to do a tremendous amount of trust-building with them. It took many, many months before they felt comfortable participating in any kind of documentary. Over time, their enthusiasm grew.

When the massacres happened in January, I thought they would be too worried to contact us — especially during the regime-imposed blackout, which always comes with heavy surveillance. But when we were able to finally get in touch with them we learned something incredible — even after the massacres, quite literally when the streets were still covered in blood, our cinematographer told us that some of the dancers were insisting on filming. Even now, they want to continue filming.

As the director, this is hard for me to process, because of course my first instinct is safety. I want them inside their homes. I want them protected until this war is over. But they are young and they are brave, and they refuse to live on the terms the regime sets out for them. At this point, our film has become almost an existential assertion for them: that they exist, that they matter, and that they demand to be seen.

And that just tells you so much about these dancers — and their generation. They don’t want to merely survive. They want to assert life, beauty, agency, and presence in the face of constant threat of annihilation.

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