A Wartime Diary From Tehran

Yahoo

03-07-2025

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Translated by Salar Abdoh
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched air strikes on nuclear and military sites in Iran. Over the 12 days that followed, the Israeli campaign expanded to include energy and other infrastructure; Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes inside Israel; and the United States entered the conflict with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22. Alireza Iranmehr is a novelist and an essayist who lives in the north of Iran but returned to Tehran to witness and document the bombardment. He sent the following series of short dispatches to his translator throughout the conflict.
The enormous roundabout at Azadi Square was full of cars, yet still felt somehow deserted. Then it dawned on me: Humans—they were mostly missing. Where normally tens of thousands of pedestrians thronged, now there were only a scattered few. Even many of the cars sat empty.
Azadi Square is commonly the first place one sees upon arriving in Tehran and the last upon departure; several major expressways pass through it, and it is not far from Mehrabad Airport, which serves domestic flights. The airport reportedly had been bombarded a couple of days before, but I could not discern any sign of destruction from where I stood—just the smell of burned plastic cutting through the usual city smog.
Earlier that day, in Bandar Anzali, on the Caspian shore, I had been lucky to find a cab driver willing to bring me all the way to Tehran. The driver told me that he'd made the opposite trip with three young women in the middle of the night—and charged them 25 times the going rate. 'You can see what's going on,' he said. 'There's no gas. All the cars are stuck on the road. This is a five-hour trip, and it took us 15 hours.'
He wasn't lying: The stream of cars trying to get out of Tehran appeared endless. Some vehicles were stranded on the sides of the road, having run out of fuel. Men banded together to move huge concrete barriers out of the way, so that they could turn their vehicles around to head back into the city. My driver pointed to the rear of his car and said, 'I had an extra four 20-gallon cans of gasoline just in case. I didn't want to get stranded.'
I asked why he didn't just stay in Bandar Anzali after dropping off the women.
'And stay where? My wife and kids are back in Tehran,' he said. 'And you? Why are you going to Tehran?'
I wanted to tell him that I was going back to Tehran to witness the most important event in Iran's recent history, so that I could write about it. But that suddenly seemed ridiculous and unbelievable. I said instead, 'I'm going to see some of my friends.'
He nodded. 'Be careful,' he said, with a note of suspicion. 'There are a lot of spies around these days in Tehran.'
Was he suggesting that I might be one of those spies? It rubbed me the wrong way, but I didn't say anything.
Now, nearly alone in the middle of Azadi Square, I was seized with doubt, and then fear. The streets and sidewalks seemed wider than before, and newly ominous. I started to walk toward Azadi Boulevard when an ear-splitting sound threw me suddenly off balance.
I looked up at the sky: Anti-aircraft fire and tracers appeared, clusters of little dots that ascended and then turned into flashes of white. There was nothing else in that sky. No airplanes. Down the road, I saw another man standing, looking up with intense curiosity, as though mesmerized.
[Read: The invisible city of Tehran]
No sirens sounded. No crowds ran looking for shelter. There was only the vacant expanse above, and an eerie noise like the buzzing of flies after the anti-aircraft guns went quiet. I'd heard somewhere that this was the sound of Israeli drones searching for their targets. Somewhere far away, an explosion boomed, and then came the anti-aircraft fire again, even farther away.
Strange to say, but my fear lifted. I felt calm as I headed for the home of a friend on Jeyhoon Street—one who had decided to remain in Tehran and said I could spend the night. So I strolled, knowing the sky would light up again before long.
At 2 a.m., after a long break, explosions came, one after another. I had left Jeyhoon Street and was now staying with Mostafa and Sahar, two of my best friends, in an apartment on the top floor of a building at the Ghasr Crossroad. This area of the city was packed with military and security sites that made likely targets for bombardment.
Mostafa worked for the Tehran municipality. Sahar, after years of trying, was finally pregnant. When I'd called to ask if I could stay the night, they were delighted—at last, company in their anxiety. They'd remained in Tehran because Sahar had been prescribed strict bed rest.
'If we stay, we may or may not get killed,' Mostafa told me. 'But if we leave, our child will definitely not make it. So we've stayed.'
By 2:30 a.m., the sound of anti-aircraft fire was relentless. I saw a shadow moving in the hallway: Mostafa. He asked if I was awake, then made for my window, opening it. Now the sounds were exponentially louder, and a pungent odor of something burning entered the room. He'd come in here to smoke a cigarette, and in the effort to keep the smoke away from Sahar and their bedroom, he had allowed the entire apartment to be permeated by the scorching smell of war.
'Sahar isn't afraid?' I asked him.
'Sahar is afraid of everything since the pregnancy,' he replied.
A flash brightened the sky, and a few moments later, the sound of a distant blast swept over us. Mostafa left his half-smoked cigarette on the edge of the sill and hurried to check on Sahar. I saw a bright orange flame to the east of us outside. Apropos of nothing, or everything, I thought of 'The Wall,' Jean-Paul Sartre's short story set during the Spanish Civil War: Several prisoners huddle in a basement, waiting to be shot and wondering about the pain to come—whether it would be better to take a bullet to the face or to the gut. I imagined myself in the midst of that explosion, wondered whether shattered glass or falling steel beams and concrete would be what killed me.
Mostafa reappeared. I asked how Sahar was doing.
'She's still reading,' he said. 'I think it was the Tehranpars district they just hit.'
'No, it looked to me like it was Resalat,' I said. Then, after a pause: 'You remember how during the war with Iraq, if anyone ever smoked in front of a window they'd say the guy is suicidal? For years, my father had blankets nailed over all our windows, to make sure our lights weren't visible from outside.'
'They say the same thing now,' Mostafa said. ''Don't stand in front of windows.' But I think it makes no difference. The more advanced technology gets, the less room you have to hide. Window or no window means nothing.'
I'd imagined that getting inside Shariati Hospital without a press ID would be impossible. But as with just about everything else in Iran, access was a matter of having a contact.
The hallways were packed with injured people, staff running every which way—more than one TV crew looked utterly lost on first entering the building. At one point, someone announced that the hospital was full and would have to redirect the newly injured elsewhere.
I stuck my head into rooms, as though looking for someone I'd lost. That was plausible enough under the circumstances that no one paid me any mind. After a while, I began to feel as though I really had lost somebody. The hospital had become a field of haphazard body parts, the smell of Betadine infusing everything.
A man sat quite still in the hallway, most of his face seemingly gone and wrapped in gauze. Another man had lost a hand. He stared quietly at the ceiling with a strangely beatific look, as though his face was made of clay that was now drying with the impression of an old smile that wouldn't go away.
In one room, a TV crew interviewed a woman. She described the moment her home exploded. First, she'd heard multiple blasts in the distance. She told her husband and child to get away from the window. Then a flash, and the entire building trembled. Their apartment had been on the third floor, but when she opened her eyes, she was in the first-floor parking lot. Rescue workers still hadn't found a trace of her husband or child. She began to cry, and I retreated back into the hallway, where an old man sat on his knees, praying. He was wearing a thick, black winter skullcap despite the heat. He looked up at me and said, 'Half the house is gone. The other half remains. My son and daughter-in-law were in the other half.'
'Are they all right?' I asked him.
The old man didn't answer and went back to his praying. After a while, he started to weep. A half minute later came the sounds of air defenses. A woman screamed, pointing at the window, while several others tried to calm her down.
Outside, an ambulance wailed into the lot. Two days earlier, ambulances had been directed to turn off their sirens so as not to add to the general anxiety. But today, the alarms were back. I was in no special hurry to get to my next destination, but somehow I found myself speed-walking, even running, toward the address.
[Arash Azizi: Iran's stunning incompetence]
The woman people had been calling the 'cat lady' stood at her door, looking past me as though into a burning forest. I followed her to the kitchen, where she handed me a glass of lemonade. There had to be several dozen cats in that house—maybe 60 or more. The woman tiptoed among them like someone walking in a shallow pool of water. 'Only 12 are mine,' she said. 'The rest—their owners have been dropping off here the past few days.'
'How come they don't fight with each other?' I asked. I've had my share of cats and know that they don't readily share space with their own kind.
She said, 'In normal times, yes. They'd fight. But it's as if they know what's going on. When they first get here, they take one look around and then find a corner and sit quietly and wait.' During explosions, the cats would huddle together or hide under the furniture.
I asked her whether she was also afraid. She smiled. 'When you have to take care of this many cats, you don't have time to be afraid.'
A tabby with big, orange eyes rubbed against her ankles. She bent down to pick up the animal and caress it. Some people had abandoned their house pets on the streets when they left the city, she told me. They had little chance of surviving. She'd become the cat lady by posting an ad: For absolutely free, she was willing to take care of anyone's cat.
'My biggest problem right now is finding enough litter and dry food for them,' she told me. 'All the pet shops are closed. I try to give them wet food that I cook myself. But a lot of them are not used to it and get diarrhea.'
She told me that one pet-shop owner she knew had promised to come back to Tehran that night with supplies. I contemplated that as I finished a second lemonade: A pet-shop owner returning to Tehran under bombardment to make sure these cats have litter and food.
Back outside, the sky was quiet. Moving through the back alleys of the Yusefabad neighborhood, I found myself hurrying again, although I had no idea why.
A seemingly continuous flood of cars was returning to the city. Here and there, an anti-aircraft gun would go off for a second, but no one looked up at the sky anymore. Taxicabs were still rare and very expensive, but the metro and buses had been made free for everyone, at all hours.
I decided to visit my publisher, Cheshmeh bookstore, on Karim Khan Avenue. My latest book came out just a month ago, but the war froze everything, book launches especially.
Cheshmeh had hung a white banner outside. It read: Our shelter is the bookstore. The words gave me a warm feeling after days of fear. Inside, the store smelled of paper. Several of my old writer friends were there, amid a crowd talking about politics.
A young man with tired eyes was showing his cellphone screen to two others and saying, 'Look at what they're writing about me. 'He's in the regime's pay.' Look at all these horrible emojis and comments. And why? Just because I posted something saying, 'I pity our country and I'm against any foreigners attacking it.''
'They write this sort of garbage about all of us,' a middle-aged man offered. 'Don't take it seriously. For all we know, they're just pressure groups and bots.'
The young man didn't want to hear it. 'If I was in the pay of the government, don't you think I should own a home by now at least? I've lost count of how many pages of my books they've censored over the years. Folk like us, we take beatings from both sides.'
A gray-haired woman with a blue shawl over her shoulders said to him, 'Do and say what you think is right, my son. Some people want to mix everything together.' She had a kindly voice that seemed to calm the young man down a little bit.
From behind me, someone said, 'I fear this cease-fire is a hoax.'
Another voice replied, 'No, it's really over. America entered to make sure they wrap it up.'
I bought a newly translated book by a Korean author, chatted a little more with friends, and left, taking one last look at that miraculous white banner: Our shelter is our bookstore.
I had hardly slept since the U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear sites two days earlier. At my friend Nasser's house, during the long night of explosions, I'd fixed my gaze on a small chandelier that never stopped quivering. The last night of the war was the absolute worst. A few hours after the world had announced an imminent cease-fire, Nasser's windows were open. The familiar flash, the ensuing rattle and jolt. Nasser ran out of the kitchen with wet hands, shouting, 'Didn't the fools announce a cease-fire?'
The explosions came in seemingly endless waves. I was in the bathroom when one shook the building to what felt like the point of collapse. The lights went out, and there was a sound of shattering glass. I spotted Nasser in the living room. He was trying to stand up but couldn't. That chandelier had finally broken into a hundred little pieces. Nasser said nothing, which was strange. I turned on my phone's flashlight and shone it at him. He didn't look right and kept his hand over the side of his abdomen. I turned the light to that area and saw blood.
'What happened?'
'I have little pieces of glass inside me.'
'We have to go to the hospital.'
'We can't go now. Let's go sit under the stairway. It's safer there.'
[Arash Azizi: A cease-fire without a conclusion]
The building was empty. Everyone else seemed to have left the city. Nasser couldn't: He was an electrical engineer for the national railway and had to remain at his post.
Under the stairs did not feel safer. The building was old and flimsy. I had the feeling that one more blast would send the whole thing crashing down on us. I examined Nasser's wound under the flashlight. It was about eight inches long, but not very deep and not bleeding too much. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that we were somewhere else when, from outside, I started to hear laughter and voices. I looked at Nasser to see whether I was imagining things. His face was chalk white, but he, too, had heard them.
I opened the door to the outside. Four teenagers were standing right there, in the middle of the street, watching the fireworks in the skies over Tehran with excitement. One of the boys was holding a huge sandwich, and the girls were decked out in the regalia of young goth and metal fans the world over. If it hadn't been for the sound of explosions, I would have imagined I'd been thrown into another time and dimension altogether.
The kids looked thrilled to have run into us. One of the boys asked, 'What's happening, hajji?'
'My friend's been injured.'
'Dangerous?'
'I'm not sure. I'm thinking I should take him to a hospital.'
'You need help?'
I backed Nasser's car out of the garage. It was caked with dust and bits of chipped wall. The kids helped us, and two of them even volunteered to ride along to the hospital. The sounds of explosions retreated as we drove, but the silence that followed was deep and somehow foreboding.
Nasser got stitched up fairly quickly. Dawn light was filtering into the emergency-room waiting area as we prepared to leave, people murmuring to one another that the cease-fire had begun. I looked around for the kids who'd come with us to the hospital. They were gone. I thought about how, years from now, they'd think back on that night, and I wondered how their memories would compare with Nasser's and mine.
That was the last night. Now, leaving the bookstore, I went to the bus terminal at Azadi Square. Tehran was back in full swing; coming and going were easy too. I bought a ticket to Bandar Anzali and, as I boarded, took one last look at the Azadi Square monument—an elegant testimonial to the long suffering of modern Iran. The very next day, June 25, the Tehran Symphonic Orchestra was set to hold a free concert in the square. It was already hard to believe that this city had just experienced a war.
*Photo-illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: PATSTOCK / Getty; duncan1890 / Getty; fotograzia / Getty; natrot / Getty; Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto / Getty; Getty.
Article originally published at The Atlantic