On the Third Imposed War

Eight months ago, I invited a group of writers living in Iran to contribute to a collection of texts for Ibraaz Publishing. At a time when much of the Western media was amplifying voices that advocated for, or legitimised, military intervention against Iran, my intention was to give a platform to perspectives largely absent from the dominant media discourse. My concern was not only with whose voices were and were not being platformed, but also with the political conditions determining these ruling editorial interests and perceptions.

Initially intended for publication in February 2026, the commissioned texts have now been surpassed by recent history. Internet blackouts, military attacks, personal losses, and worsening economic precarity interrupted communication with the writers and repeatedly delayed publication: one writer didn’t have internet for nearly three months; another lost his mother during the war. One major escalation followed another, each displacing the last, before anyone could breathe or absorb its consequences, let alone respond. As events unfolded at a suffocating pace, some of the texts, which were written in response to a particular political moment, seemed to have already been overshadowed by other events.

These reflections are therefore not presented as real-time responses to a disastrous situation that is still ongoing, or as a comprehensive account of this period – much of which remains obscure and unresolved – but as first-hand records of a particular historical moment and the conditions that made its documentation so difficult. Their temporal disjunctions and interruptions are inseparable from the circumstances of their production. Together, they form a fragmentary constellation of situated perspectives about a country whose future continues to be narrated, threatened, and decided on from elsewhere.

– Maryam Tafakory

9 March 2026

Believe me, if someone had asked me to write a worst-case scenario for the first ten days of a US-Israeli war against Iran, I could never have imagined that in the very first hours two American Tomahawk missiles would strike an elementary school, killing 168 people, most of them children; that Khamenei – who was losing support even among his own base – would be elevated to the exalted Karbala-like rank of a ‘martyred leader’; that the city’s streets would fall under the constant occupation of Basij and IRGC carnival-like processions; that an unarmed corvette on a training mission in international waters far from home would be targeted and around a hundred young naval cadets would drown in the Indian Ocean; that Trump would openly say Iran’s future map would ‘probably’ change; that Israel’s ‘opposition’ leader would say all the oil fields and energy industries on Kharg Island must be destroyed in order to collapse Iran’s economy; that an oil cloud would engulf Tehran and what remained of its people would be blackened by the oil haze and acid rain; and that ultimately Mojtaba Khamenei, under relentless IRGC pressure, would succeed his father in ‘guardianship’ over the people of Iran.

What happened was far worse than my most pessimistic imaginings as somebody who firmly opposed the war. And this was the bitter harvest of what some of you planted – from the very first moments of the magnificent Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which began in defence of the dignity of a woman’s life and freedom, when you injected your shameful counter-movement of would-be authoritarians into that beautiful uprising with the slogan ‘Man, Homeland, Prosperity’, and cynically forged a reactionary fraternity bond with Netanyahu.

– Sajjad HashemiNejad

Sixty days after the third war began, twenty days into the ceasefire, while I was staring at the mulberry trees on the street where I live in Tehran, a few steps away, a gentleman wearing a formal jacket had placed his briefcase between his feet and was awkwardly reaching  for the last mulberries from the highest branches. Suddenly, it struck me that, in this fragile ceasefire, we were living through the end a cold war.

For my generation, raised after the 1979 Revolution and during the harsh decade that followed, we continued to imagine the moment when the ‘wall’ would come down – the wall that had severed our connection to the outside world. The nationwide reform movement that emerged at the beginning of our youth was the first moment that made the fall of that wall seem  attainable.

Throughout the eight years that the movement held executive power through presidential and parliamentary support and during the first four years of the government that followed,  when it was possible for a mass movement like the Green Movement to arise,  during those years when a transformative collective action such as the Green Movement could still manifest, regardless of what was actually taking place, that image of the future endured: a future in which the wall would finally fall. 

But where did this image – that was present even within the reformist camp, which was itself fiercely opposed to overthrowing the system – come from? Perhaps from all the images of the Wall coming down at the end of the Cold War. We had learned to read them as images of the end of isolation, of ‘joining the world’. Sooner or later, we too were meant to join the world. And the only way we could conceive of this happening was through the fall of the wall.

But seventeen years after the Green Movement (June 2009), on that day in Ordibehesht (April 2026), under the mulberry trees that had borne so much fruit this year, I realised that I no longer carried that image of the wall falling. It was as if the wall itself had dissolved into smoke and vanished. Or perhaps there had never been a wall at all, and I had finally let go of the need to imagine its collapse.

Should I have been frightened by the loss of that image? Or could I, for a few moments, return to myself – to the street, the mulberry trees, the home – and hold the dream of joining the world against the reality of the world I inhabit? There is no longer a unified world, held together by international institutions and laws, waiting for anyone to join it. 

That ‘we’, which was supposed to one day enter the world, has instead been scattered across it, living contradictory experiences within its fractured reality. This world has, for a long time now, found unity in little beyond its silence before genocide and its deference to imperial power.

There is no we, no world, and no wall between us.

But how was it that, at the very moment of an all-out military confrontation, I felt there was no wall left? Perhaps for one simple reason: a hot war is the end of a cold war.

For artists in Iran struggling against censorship and the security apparatus, the Cold War was often little more than a term used by the state to justify ever tighter restrictions. Yet, paradoxically, much of Iranian art flourished after the first imposed war and during the Cold War, eventually becoming one of its loudest forms of propaganda. Censored Iranian artists made their way to Western festivals to speak of what they were forbidden from saying at home. Even the persistent criticism inside Iran against the festivalisation of Iranian art never managed to interrupt that trajectory.

Gradually, the risk of censorship, detention, and interrogation at home, together with red carpets and film festivals abroad, became a single interconnected ecosystem – one that sustained the art economy, kept artists invested, allowed the authorities to appear unwavering in their position, and consolidated Western festivals as the principal defenders of artistic freedom.

Artists, often unfamiliar with political realities beyond Iran, or with the politics of the institutions hosting them, would suddenly find themselves handed a microphone for a few fleeting seconds, thanking ‘their people’ in their mother tongue before appealing to the world against their oppressive government. Throughout those years, amidst the constant narration of the suffering Iranian artist under censorship, there was no room for the suffering of artists of my generation who, while opposing censorship, did not want to become part of the Cold War economy.

There were many who had spent years living and working in Europe and, upon returning to Iran, tried – with immense difficulty and at great personal cost – to sustain a practice that moved between both sides of that border, sustained by a belief in a politics of internationalism and beyond the logic of the Cold War. But Iran’s poisoned political climate had already decided the fate of any artist – whether inside or outside the country – who spoke about anything other than state censorship: a traitor, a mercenary, or an accomplice of censorship itself.

The Cold War’s cultural industry was, of course, far more powerful than we were. For a long time, many of us had already retreated to small workshops in Tehran, squatted houses across Europe, and gathered in obscure venues from which to continue our cultural work. Such was the bitter irony of our time that even speaking about Palestine in the capital of the Islamic Republic did not spare us the abuse and denunciation of a cultural sphere deeply invested in the Cold War.

Gradually, the machinery of the Cold War moved from festivals outside Iran to the very centre of artistic production within it. A vast body of seemingly political work turned the Cold War market into a natural environment in which artists could grow. Even dealers and curators of non-political art were often drawn to the work of young artists preoccupied with friendship, everyday life, and discussions on gender under the shadow of an ideological state. For the pre-existing infrastructure of the Cold War art economy to survive, the wall had to remain standing. 

Sixty days after the Third Imposed War against Iran began, at the very moment when, beneath that mulberry tree, I was overcome by the unbearable lightness of the Cold War’s end, I felt that we would finally have to land somewhere on earth alongside everyone, including the Cold War’s agents, past and present.

Was this sudden ending, which had descended upon me like a revelation, merely the delusion of a mind cut off from the global internet and satellite television for more than fifty days? Did this ending promise a better time to come?

The long queue at the petrol station just a few steps away, the anxious, waiting streets of Tehran, Trump’s latest threats, appearing on Twitter in the middle of the night as if written by  a permanently drunk monster, the bleak future of Iran’s domestic politics, and the inability of the country’s political system to resolve its internal conflicts and create a democratic framework that could transform this post-war moment into an opportunity for justice, all pointed towards the arrival of a dark and uncertain time.

But that day, after forty days of resistance and of feeling the ground move beneath my feet, I felt I could take one unsteady step outside myself – outside this subject born during the First Imposed War and brought to an end on the sixtieth day of the Third Imposed War – and finally look at us: myself, that gentleman, the mulberry trees of my neighbourhood, and my exhausted city of Tehran, with its long history of uprisings for freedom and of resistance to preserve its sovereignty; to look at these things from outside the framework of the ‘Free World’, as we really were, with all our interconnected problems and countless sufferings. Yet there we were, standing on our own feet. 

- Golrokh Nafisi

I walked down Baluchestan Street in Gisha yesterday. A building on the corner of the ninth alley had been bombed. We used to live on the seventh. There was nothing left of it. The building next door was half-collapsed. If you looked carefully through the rubble, you could make out what had been a child’s room. The windows of our old apartment had shattered too.

A few days before, I passed by the diplomatic police building at Ferdowsi Square. It had been levelled. Not destroyed: levelled. There wasn’t even any rubble to look at. I don’t know how to describe what standing in front of these empty spaces in the city does to you. The dread and the grief that come with them are not things I know how to process properly.

I grew up on Pasteur Street. Both sides of my family had lived there for decades. The old parliament building and the officers’ academy that I walked past every day on my way to school and whose architecture I admired, the presidential building at the top of our alley, the Pasteur Institute next to my grandfather’s fruit shop, the Gendarmerie building on Kargar Street before Enqelab, and all the streets and alleys that connected these sites – for years, I travelled these routes daily. All of them are now either severely damaged or in ruins. 

In forty days, thousands of buildings across Iran were destroyed by the United States and Israel. I have no interest in the question of why they hit this place or that. I despise that question. Wherever they struck, they had no right to strike. Whoever they killed, they had no right to kill. If the destruction of buildings I had simply grown accustomed to seeing undoes me this much, how can I begin to imagine what it is like for those who have lost someone, or own homes are now rubble? How can I say this war is not my war? A war against the United States and Israel will be my war for as long as I live.

Many in the Iranian diaspora – those who stayed silent or retreated into the carefully calculated stance of ‘no to war, no to the Islamic Republic’ during the US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran – share a common worldview: a narrow, absolutist moral lens in which the Islamic Republic’s history of violence is sufficient justification for ‘regime change’. What often goes unsaid, but quietly underlies this position, is an approval of ‘regime change’ by any means necessary.

They condemn anyone even remotely associated with state institutions; anyone who exposes and critiques the humanitarian impact of sanctions and war without blaming the Iranian state; anyone who would rather be in the streets every night than sitting passively watching their country be destroyed; anyone simply trying to live their lives and improve their country’s conditions from within; and most importantly, anyone who advocates for Iran’s right to defend itself and resist against the Israeli-US war of aggression, a war in which the nations’s very existence is at stake. This facile framework is nothing but a reduction of the complex, material reality of survival and political work into a question of moral purity, arbitrated by people who are not here. You will never hear a solution from them. Now, as we are being bombed, if not the IRGC, who will defend this land and its people? You – so concerned with Iranian women, ethnic minorities, the working class – tell us: do the bombs and missiles exclude them from their range? Tell us how you plan to defend them against an enemy that killed 168 people (120 of whom were children) on the first day of its invasion, and has gone on killing women, men, and children ever since.

I’ve seen the same judgements and condemnations extended to the Palestinians and Lebanese for accepting support from the Islamic Republic: ‘How can you do that knowing the Islamic Republic is a brutal dictatorship?’ This question ignores a more fundamental one: who else, among those claiming the moral high ground, was lining up to provide the material support necessary for their resistance? And which states do they believe are virtuous enough to lend a hand to Palestinians?

There is a profound irony in calling for our moral purity from inside countries – European, North American – whose existence and prosperity are funded by perpetual warfare, and secured through the ongoing killing of civilians through sanctions, deportations, and military invasions. You engage with these states every day. You take their grants, accept their institutional invitations, and build your careers inside their cultural infrastructure without treating any of it as a moral compromise. 

It is a selective memory that allows for someone to engage in performative morality and to  prosecute the ‘other’ while remaining blind to the systemic violence carried out in and from one’s own backyard. Such so-called moralists feel compelled to engage with state institutions built on colonisation and genocide, yet they frequently fail to recognise this same pragmatic necessity when it is practised by others living under bombardment, under occupation, and systems they did not choose and cannot easily exit.

If you want to take a moral stand, then do so fully. Keep your hands clean if you must while your people are being slaughtered and your infrastructures being destroyed – but at the very least, be consistent.

– Elham Rahmati

Saturday, 7 March 2026

Today marks one week since my country once again came under attack by Israel and the United States. A war we had been expecting. I’m not the only one who felt this. Ever since the June War and its abrupt ceasefire, it seemed we were all waiting for the day when we would once again be jolted awake by the sound of American, or perhaps German, missiles tearing through the sky.

I go back and reread as much as I can – the Telegram chats from the support groups my friends and I created in the aftermath of the January massacre. I say ‘as much as I can’ because the internet has been cut across the country since the first hours of the attack. I don’t want to dwell on the reasons – it doesn’t really matter. What matters to me is my father’s frustration at the lack of internet, forcing him to spend the entire day flicking between satellite TV channels trying to work out what is happening.

Friday, 13 March 2026

K., who until the war – and even this morning – had defended it, came over. I promised myself I would’'t talk politics.

The day was quieter than the ones before. Quieter meaning only four or five strikes landed somewhere nearby.

Around ten that night, as K. stood by the door saying goodbye, something exploded close by. Very close. Our ears, now trained to recognise the approach of fighter jets, drones, and missiles, had heard nothing. One blast. Then another. Then another. A few seconds of silence. Then four more.

I felt for K. when I saw the fear drain the colour from his face. But I also caught myself thinking, a little cruelly: good. At least now he has had to confront the reality of what he had been defending.

Thursday, 26 March 2026

I can’t bring myself to do anything. Every morning I gather up the fragments of myself left over from the night before. Like one of those tired self-help mantras, I tell myself that it’s a new year now, that I must be stronger, more resilient, the kind of person who wakes before dawn ready to fight. It never lasts. By evening, the fragments have scattered once again, each in a different direction.

For some time now, I’ve found myself asking the same question every night: which piece of news, which event, which image from the day hurt me the most? Maybe I’m looking for a pattern. A way to escape. Or at least somewhere to take cover before the next wave of shrapnel arrives. 

This afternoon, I gathered all the strength I had and returned to a translation project I’d started before the war: testimonies from people in Gaza living through genocide. I was making good progress until I reached a passage from Sargon Boulus's ‘The Gods of Zaqqum’: 

‘O you who search for meaning, here there is no ode, no song. Only the sound of bones being crushed beneath the wheels of time, and the smell of burnt flesh the wind carries from tomorrow. The mirrors have shattered, and our faces have become strangers even to ourselves.’

And once again, without seeing a single image of my own people being killed, without hearing the sound of a single explosion, everything came undone.

Saturday, 28 March 2026

All night I lay awake, staring at my phone, scrolling through Baleh channels while anti-aircraft guns thundered overhead and the ground trembled every so often from explosions – one close, another so far away it may have been my imagination. I don’t even know what I was looking for. A photograph of a friend’s house? Or what? As if there was anything I could have done.

Like my Palestinian friends, I can now tell the difference between the sound of a cruise missile and a fighter jet. I know exactly how close they have to be before I should jump and look for cover.

But last night the war had a new card to play: thunder. The crack of thunder through the spring rain in Tehran. Except for the few times I saw lightning split the sky, every rumble made me think somewhere else had just been hit. Each time, I reached for my phone. Breaking news: explosions heard in western Tehran. 

A few minutes later, the update: the sound was thunder. Only then do I realise I’d been holding my breath all that time. I breathe again. Then another clap of thunder. A few hours pass. The city seems quieter now. I think perhaps I can finally sleep.

How did you spend your day?

Sleeping.

My mother calls. We exchange the usual greetings. Before I know it, half the day is gone. She wants to know if we're okay. ‘Nothing’s happened, my love,’ I tell her. ‘The city’s calm. We're safe.’

I lie. She knows it but lets the lie pass. When the call ends, I close my eyes again. It’s as though I don’t want to meet the new day. I don’t want to feel everything I felt yesterday all over again. I want to sleep, if only to put it off for a little longer.

How did you spend your day?

Frightened.

When I wake, the light behind the curtain – now covered by a blanket, pinned in place for a little extra protection – has already lost its strength. I can hear my brother laughing with our friends outside my room. It warms me. It’s good that we’re still able to laugh, right?

Then the anti-aircraft guns begin again. Everyone falls silent – so do I. Without thinking, my hand reaches for my phone. ‘Sahand, wake up. It's started again.’ I don’t get up.

Instead, I begin testing all the VPNs. One finally connects. Messages from my friends start coming through. Instagram loads. The first image: a neighbourhood in Tehran swallowed by smoke after a missile strike. The next: a woman standing on the ruins of her home. The next: the Iranian Red Crescent’s daily tally of the war’s destruction across the country. I don't even finish reading the caption before I lock my phone. I can’t. 

I light a cigarette and turn my phone back on. I reply to a worried friend, saying I’m all right but frightened, and that, strangely, the sound of Tehran’s air defences firing somehow calms me. I help another friend send a message to his grandmother in Abadan. 

Then the guns begin again. I remember my Palestinian friend asking, in the middle of the genocide, about the meaning of life. The meaning of life itself. Does anything still mean anything when we’ve all been reduced to bodies waiting to be consumed and slaughtered?

I wonder what would happen if the next missile landed here. Into how many pieces would our bodies be divided? What would death look like in that moment? How will the others find out what became of us? How long will it take before they hear that we’re gone?

I find myself wondering which photograph, which words, could hold an entire life. How is a life supposed to fit into a single image and a few sentences? I think about the lives we never got to live. The dreams we never reached.

How did you spend your day?

Searching for an answer. 

If only I could at least find an ending to this text.

Saturday, 28 March 2026

…

– Sahand Saadatmandi 

Sanctions have long been used as a means of exerting pressure on authoritarian regimes and governments responsible for human rights abuses. But decades of experience across sanctioned countries have shown that sanctions are a double-edged instrument: rather than weakening authoritarian rule, they can sometimes reinforce the very conditions that sustain it.

Economic hardship alone does not make a revolution. History offers countless examples of severe economic crises that did not lead to political transformation. What matters is not simply how people live, but the distance between how they live and how they believe they could or should live. If we compare living standards in Iran today with those of fifty years ago, the depth of popular discontent may seem puzzling. But compare them with the life people believe the Iranian state could have offered, and that discontent becomes far easier to understand. The state constantly invokes the first comparison to delegitimise dissatisfaction. But people do not revolt simply because of what they have; they revolt against the gulf between what they have and what they believe should have been possible.

Nor does impoverishment necessarily create democratic politics. The Great Depression in the United States, for instance, did not produce a revolution. As Crane Brinton argues in The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), major revolutions cannot simply be understood as rebellions of the desperately poor; the French and American Revolutions drew significant support from relatively prosperous sections of society.

There is, moreover, a danger in assuming that desperation naturally produces demands for freedom. A population reduced to survival may seek salvation rather than autonomy: a powerful leader or state capable of cutting through ordinary politics and promising immediate relief. These are precisely the conditions in which authoritarian and totalitarian politics can flourish.

Material deprivation also erodes the practical capacity for political resistance. People struggling to feed their families have less time, security, and energy to organise, strike, practise civil disobedience, or build networks of solidarity. What remains may be sporadic eruptions of anger and despair – powerful but difficult to sustain and relatively easy to suppress. Sanctions may therefore weaken, rather than strengthen, the conditions necessary for democratic transition.

Parts of the Iranian diaspora have nevertheless increasingly looked outside Iran for political salvation. Unable to exercise direct influence inside the country, they have turned towards foreign governments, sanctions, and even military intervention as instruments of change. In some circles, opposition to sanctions or war is consequently treated as support for the Islamic Republic, while those warning about poverty, economic collapse and the erosion of Iranian society are marginalised or accused of defending the state.

This politics of being rescued from outside carries its own consequences. By encouraging the belief that change will ultimately be delivered by foreign powers, it risks undermining political agency and confidence within Iran itself. Diaspora activism can then begin to resemble lobbying for the geopolitical interests of foreign states – interests that do not necessarily coincide with either the freedom of Iranians or the democratisation of Iranian society.

If freedom is the goal, we must strengthen society rather than wear it down. People consumed by the struggle to survive have little time or capacity to demand their rights, organise politically, or hold power to account. Democracy takes root in a society with the strength to stand on its own feet, not one exhausted by the daily struggle to survive.

– Reza Yaghoubi