A woman stands on a rooftop and listens to the city below. Tonight there is only the low hum of traffic, but she knows how quickly it can change: first the dogs, then the distant thrum of aircraft, the percussion of explosions and a ball of orange rising from an airstrike in a familiar neighbourhood.
Footage and interviews from Tehran obtained by the BBC portray a city on edge — people constantly waiting for the next blast while living in fear of the state security apparatus.
Baran (not her real name), a businesswoman in her thirties, is now too frightened to go to work. “With the start of the drone attacks, no one dares to go outside. If I open my door and step out, it is like gambling with my life,” she says. Living alone, she messages friends constantly to check where everyone is. “Even when there is no sound the silence itself is terrifying. I am doing everything I can to stay alive and witness whatever lies ahead.”
Like many young Iranians, Baran’s hopes for change were crushed this year. Thousands died in a brutal regime crackdown after widespread demonstrations demanding reform. “I cannot even remember how I used to live before being reminded of the loved one I lost during the protests,” she says. “I fear tomorrow. I fear the person I will be tomorrow. Today, I survive somehow, but how will I get through tomorrow? Will I even live through tomorrow?”
Repression is now pervasive. Open dissent is nearly impossible: watchers appear everywhere, and footage shows regime supporters driving through neighbourhoods at night with flags on their cars, a warning to anyone considering protest. The official narrative dominates public life — state television airs rehearsed coverage of demonstrations and funerals, interviews with pro-regime figures and denunciations of America and Israel — and portrays the Iranian people as ready to suffer martyrdom.
Independent journalists still try to record alternative accounts, but they face grave risks of arrest, torture or worse. “In wartime conditions you really don’t know what they are capable of doing,” one reporter told the BBC.
Only inside their homes do some people feel they can speak more freely. Ali, a middle-class, educated man in his forties, had hoped the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei at the start of the war would bring change; instead the streets around his house are filled with security forces and masked, armed men at checkpoints. “It is painful when I go into the streets. The city looks like the city of the dead,” he says, adding that he takes anti-depressants “to keep myself normal.”
He sees groups in the streets who openly back the government and who have effectively taken the city from ordinary residents. Many describe conflicted feelings: they want the regime gone but also feel their country is under attack. “The situation is frightening,” Ali says. “The skies of your country are controlled by enemy forces. But at the same time there is always a hope in people’s hearts. It’s not that we are supporting America or Israel. But hoping simply that for one moment, something might happen that ends the current Iranian regime, and that the people will be able to create change.”
In her flat Baran listens for explosions and messages friends across neighbourhoods. “Do you know what the difference is between our sky and the sky of the rest of the world?” she asks. “They sleep under the stars at night, and we sleep under rockets. Both skies give light, but different kinds of light.”
Baran fears the conflict will last for years and leave deeper psychological scars. “This war will not end soon, because this war is inside our homes, inside the families…The war has entered our blood and has entered our lives.”
The residents of this 6,000-year-old city live in daily dread — of bombs from abroad, of the regime and its torturers — a relentless fear that seems to offer no easy escape.
With additional reporting by Alice Doyard.