Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026

This anonymous diary was written during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Tehran and published anonymously on a diaspora website right after connection was reestablished. Over the course of eight days, it narrates the unknowability of those days as the horror was beginning to unfold.

The Persian ironwood tree, harbinger of spring / Photo by alessandrozocc / Adobe Stock. Courtesy WLT 

We bore the ardor of love in our chests.

—Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, “Remember Us”

Editor’s Note

by Daniel Simon, WLT

In the current issue of WLT, “Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026,” translated by poupeh missaghi, presents a stark reminder of the stakes involved in bearing witness, whether through literature, journalism, art, or street protest. The author kept her diary during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Iran and published it on a diaspora website soon thereafter. Such eyewitness accounts remind us that civilians bear the brunt of every war, doubly so when repressive regimes crack down on every form of internal dissent.

Out of fear for her safety, the diarist published her journal anonymously. Throughout, she refers to individuals by their first initial; since the United States and Israel fomented war on Iran on February 28, many Iranians, when talking to Western media outlets—if they manage to circumvent the near-total internet blackout—ask that not even their initials be used. The diarist’s mother, speaking in Azeri instead of Persian, tells her that one doctor in a single hospital signed ninety-three death certificates—for men, women, and children—on the night of January 9. “My mother assumes that calls are being listened to,” the diarist writes, “and perhaps she imagines that whoever is listening cannot understand her mother tongue. My mother speaks in her mother tongue also whenever she is in mourning. ‘Biz chok jeffa chakmishik,’ she says. ‘Biz chok tahhje melatik’ (We are a people who have suffered greatly. We are a people left alone).”

In January, family members searched morgues to find missing loved ones: “They heard that layers and layers of young bodies in black plastic covers were piled on top of one another.” Elsewhere, the regime used silos to pile up hundreds of corpses. Many who survived the protests, including teenagers, were subsequently imprisoned and faced execution.

“All of us imagine that the Americans will show up by Wednesday and crush the regime,” the diarist continues. “Dr. P says, ‘Trump has said help is on the way. The Lincoln carrier is on its way. By Wednesday or Friday at the latest, the regime will be done and over.’” As I write this on March 20—which marks the beginning of Nowruz, the Persian spring equinox festival—the regime shows no signs of being “done and over,” despite three full weeks of the US/Israeli bombing campaign, while civilian casualties continue to mount.

War and rumors of war—the stakes have always been high. Just over a decade ago, introducing WLT’s “Writing Beyond Iran” issue, guest editor Persis Karim noted: “Although Iran is historically a land of poets and poetry, and embodies a culture steeped in the rich exchange of language, ideas, and writing, it has also had a long history of persecuting and driving out many of its finest writers and artists” (March 2015). That history includes the poet Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, shot and killed by Iranian security forces during the July 1999 student protests. In his poem “Remember Us,” Ebrahim-Nejad presages his death but first remembers “the muted songs of the skewered robins” he had observed in his youth, comparing their songs to “the incarnate dreams of twenty-two-year-olds, / their chests against stone.” For the poet, remembrance itself is political—even as he writes in the third-person plural, the brute facts of every death sentence always confront the individual with first-person immediacy: “I remember their message, their fate. / . . . And in repeating their memory, / perhaps— / before I become a poet— / I too shall die at twenty-two.”

The futurity at stake here is one in which remembrance of past persecution serves as motivation for the next generation of protesters’ “incarnate dreams.” Unless their muted song continues to reverberate, Ebrahim-Nejad’s generation—“red-chested” like the robins—will have died in vain. In and beyond Iran, authoritarian regimes have always tried to silence such choric protest. But the singing continues.

__________________________

Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026

by Anonymous, translated by poupeh missaghi, WLT

Wednesday, Dey 17, 1404 / January 7, 2026, 8 pm

The city is closed down. All the lights in our street are turned off. You can hear a buzzing sound from outside. Nothing can be seen through the window. I go to the rooftop. The lights in the other street are also off. Even the café in front of our house is closed. I cannot find the source of the sound. I go back inside, call some friends. R says they have been closing business around four p.m. every day. No one feels like going to the store. I call M. He says nothing is going on in the west of the city tonight, but around noon when he passed Jomhouri Street and Ferdowsi Square, before reaching the Embassy of Turkey, the street got busy, and he had seen cement blocks scattered here and there. The iron fences for the BRT bus line in the middle of the street were also pulled out.1 All the shopping centers were closed.

T tells me she has heard from a reliable source that on Thursday the internet will begin to get shut down. B says he should make sure the kids can somehow stay connected to the internet, otherwise they will get anxious. I say, “Wishful thinking. The guy has made a call and asked Gen Z to come out, noting that his hope is with the teenagers, and you are worried about my kids having internet?”

He says, “Yes, I hope you know how to guide your anger, because it’s not Reza Pahlavi who kills. By the way, tomorrow night I won’t be able to make it to the gathering.”

I say, “Did I upset you? Come tomorrow. We won’t argue. Let’s be together, all of us. The cafés are all closed. We will grow crazy from anxiety each on our own.”

“If I come, we’ll drive each other crazy by being around each other. Also, I’ll get stuck there and won’t be able to get back home.”

“Do you think it will get busy?”

“It will definitely get busy. As Taraneh said, this is what a revolution is—it simply finds its way to your door.”2

“Taraneh was saying this in the context of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.”

* * *

Thursday, Dey 18, 1404 / January 8, 2026, 6 pm

The VPNs have been disabled one after another. The only one working is the paid one that we have been using for the kids’ internet and have not dared use on our own cell phones due to security concerns. Psiphon hardly gets connected at all. News is coming in from the city of Arak. People have come out in the city of Shazand. Residents of Abdanan, Malekshahi, and hundreds of other cities on the map of Iran, cities whose names I have never heard before, have been out in the streets for several days now. I call S. He says, “It’s absolute chaos in Isfahan.” He is out.

I adjust the oven temperature, set it to warmer. I have already set the table. I tell my family I am going out to grab some things.

B says with a hint of sarcasm, “Good luck. You know that we have guests coming in two hours, right?” He is upset with all of us. He is fed up with all the arguments our friends and I have been having recently.

“It’s not even seven yet. I’ll be back before you know it.”

I head out. I turn into Takht-e Tavoos Street. All the cafés are closed. The nuts store is turning its lights off. I ask the salesperson, “Are you closing up for the night?”

“Yes, we are. Are you headed out too?”

“I’ve come out to get some things. Which direction are you headed?”

“Everyone at the store has gone toward Vali-e Asr Street.”

I drive toward Hafez Street’s traffic lights. All the jewelry stores are closed. The number of people on the sidewalks is remarkable. Around Hafez Overpass, the crowd gets dense. Young men in groups, a lot of young women, families, women, men, kids, kids, kids. At the intersection of Karim Khan Street and Vali-e Asr Square, the crowd is tightly packed. Around the square, beneath the huge eye-catching billboard always dedicated to one propaganda or another, where police and special forces are on guard even on regular days, there is no trace of them tonight. The people in the cars seem overly excited and honk. Pedestrians walk, silently and pressed against one another. There are no slogans chanted yet.

It is past seven-thirty p.m. I drive up Vali-e Asr Street. Right by the old building of Kourosh Store, by the traffic lights of Zartosht Street, many special forces’ motorbikes have lined up on the sidewalk and by the gas station. In front of them, a line of men in plain clothes, looking like Vali-e Asr Street store clerks, young, tall, and heavily built, wait around; but they are no ordinary men because they are chatting casually with the special forces. A tall man wearing black moves away from the group, taps on the windshield of the Pride car in front of me and shouts angrily, “Keep moving! Keep moving!” He pulls out a baton and continues, “Either you move or I’ll bring down your windshield!” Then he goes back to join the line of the special forces. The first row of motorcycles revs relentlessly, their noise filling the air. I drive north on Vali-e Asr. The crowd walks toward the square. They are shouting slogans. Not having reached Fatemi Street, they have not yet set their eyes on the special forces.

“Death to the three corrupt groups: the mullahs, the leftists, the mujahedin.” “Death to the dictator.” “Death to the dictator.” By the Fatemi Street traffic lights, the crowd has grown larger in the darkness of the sidewalks.

“Long live the king. Long live the king.” “Pahlavi will be back.”

The special forces’ motorcycles start moving north in the street. They seem like the ones I had seen in front of the gas station. They drive onto the sidewalk. The crowd runs to the street. The cars honk. The traffic is intensifying. I drive north, turn from Vali-e Asr Street onto Takht-e Tavoos. Not much is going on here. Special forces are waiting on Mirza-ye Shirazi Street. I head back home.

My cell phone loses reception in our parking garage.

When I open the apartment door, it is eight-thirty. Except for one guest who has a kid and has left early on to get to our place, no one is yet here. I realize they have cut down the cell phone service. The internet too. Even SMS messages do not go through.

Five more guests arrive. The whole neighborhood is up in the air. You can hear the shouts of “Long live the king! Long live the king!” through the windows. With the internet shut down, the kids do what they never do: they have come and joined the adults to hang out.

My response to the last message of my sister abroad, who had asked that I call her when I get to our parents’, has been frozen midair in WhatsApp, undelivered. I had written, “We’ll call you tomorrow” and given her a certain time.

I recognize a familiar voice shouting in the street, “Death to the dictator, whether a king or a mullah.” Through one of the windows of the building in front of us, someone else shouts, as if in response, “Death to the three corrupt groups . . .” I recognize Z’s voice, shouting once again, “Woman, Life, Freedom.” From the building in front, the response comes, “Long live the king. Love live the king.” R, our neighbor across the hall, says, “They weren’t shooting in Vali-e Asr Square, but in Felestin Square, pellets were everywhere in the air. Something got stuck in my tire, but it didn’t flatten it. It’s a strange, barbed ball. They shot them at the cars that were honking.”

All phone lines are cut off. Not just cell phones; landlines are not working either. We cannot do anything other than wait for the other guests to arrive. S, who was imprisoned during previous protests, leaves her child with us and goes out with R to drive around and see what is going on. It is almost ten. The slogans shouted through the windows have become faint. We go to the rooftop. We can hear shooting from Hafez Street. I ask, “Are they shooting up in the air as warning?” I hear someone responding, “It’s a burst of gunfire! What warning shots?”

The scent of tear gas burns our throats and eyes. We go back inside the apartment. We can still smell it inside too. Perhaps they have thrown some in the street below us; the scent is just too close. I close the windows. I turn off the oven. Except for my husband, me, and the children, everyone has gone out. It’s eleven-thirty. Someone buzzes the door. Two unexpected guests arrive. N asks for water. My husband says, “Do not use water. It just makes your eyes hurt more.” The guests go out into the balcony to smoke a cigarette, to help ease the burning in N’s eyes. They say, “We realized we couldn’t go back toward Vali-e Asr. The roads to our house are blocked. So, we decided to come this way.”

I do not know N’s girlfriend. She does not say a word. She has been hit with pellets. Her leg is hurt. She is worried that the kids understand what is going on and get terrified. We send the kids into one of the rooms. She comes to our bedroom, takes off her pants. Her ankle is wounded; it is bloody. I say, “S is a doctor. She’ll be back here soon. She knows what to do. Don’t worry.”

N asks for a bandage to wrap up his girlfriend’s leg.

“Are you sure there are no pellets left in the wound? Shall we just wait for S to get here first?”

There are still no signs of S and R. Perhaps they are stuck in the streets. We hear gunshots. The kids are terrified. We have closed the door to the bedroom, so the kids don’t happen to see the young woman lying on our bed.

I see S and R parking the car outside. I run to the door and tell them about N’s girlfriend being injured. S says, “She’s lucky they didn’t hit her in the head.”

“They hit people in the head?” I ask.

“It’s hell out there. At the intersection of Bozorgmehr, Felestin, and Vesal, there is blood everywhere on the ground. They were shooting like insane men.”

They come upstairs. Q also gets there. He has parked far away and walked here through the side streets. S says that N’s girlfriend’s leg wound is not serious; that she can wait until the morning and then S is going to coordinate with the hospital she works at for her to go get X-rays, to see if there are any pellets left in the wound or not. No one feels like having dinner. I take some food to the room for the kids. Each has a tablet in hand and is playing an offline game.

It is past midnight. There is no noise coming from outside. The guests want to leave. R is headed to the northern neighborhoods of the city. We exchange landline numbers. Since none of us have ever called each other on landlines in the past several years, we do not have each other’s numbers. S and her child stay with us for the night. Everyone else leaves, saying they will call when they get home.

R has gotten home. She says what she has seen in Tajrish Square is nothing less than outright violence. More than what she had seen downtown.

J has gotten home too. He says, “Our neighbors are shrieking. Their son has been killed on Felestin Street. He has a glass-cutting shop there.”

I hear wailing from our own street. With S we run outside barefoot. The gate to the front yard of the old house next door is wide open. Two young men are sitting on the ground by the door. One of them has a bloody temple. I know his mother; she feeds the stray cats on our street.

“They killed our uncle right in front of me and my brother. We couldn’t take back his body.”

Haaj Khanoom, their mother, is sitting in the middle of the front yard, without her usual hijab.3 She is wailing. S has stayed back by the door to check the wound on the boy’s temple. The other boy has thrown himself over his mother’s legs. The mother wails, “I knew they were going to kill. I knew they were going to kill. Why didn’t you bring him back? . . . Abbas! Why did you give his body to the forces of Yazid!4 They’ve killed my brother, Ma’am. . . . They’ve killed him.”

I pull the son away from his mother’s body. I lean her by the wall. I turn to the boy. “Go get her some water. Tell me what happened. Where were you?”

“Nezam Abad. They were killing left and right. Only shooting in the head and the heart. A bullet hit my uncle Abbas in the middle of his forehead. He lost his life in front of our eyes. They were attacking with all kinds of things. All kinds of things. Bursts of bullets. Daggers. All kinds of things.”

Haaj Khanoom wails. We take her inside their house. Her husband is holding the phone in hand; his shoulders are trembling; he is looking for his older brother-in-law’s phone number. But the landlines are once again disconnected. I try to assure Haaj Khanoom that her brother might still be alive. She says, “We’ll find him tonight. There was this guy in the Basij Forces of Javad Al-Aemmeh Mosque who was Abbas’s customer. I’ll call him tonight. . . . We’ll find him. Perhaps they’ve taken him to the hospital.”

One of the sons addresses their father, “Dad, do you understand? Uncle Abbas is dead. The guy shooting kept shouting that tonight is just the pre-celebrations. That the real celebration is going to be tomorrow. That they are going to shoot with heavy machine guns.”

S has brought some Betadine from our house for the wounded son. She gives Haaj Khanoom some chlordiazepoxide to calm her down. The boys go into the house. We close the gate and go back to our own building. In less than half an hour, many cars arrive in our street  and women in black veils run all the way to the neighbor’s house. They are wailing. A young woman cries out, “Abbas! Abbas! My Abbas!”

The kids are now asleep. Phone lines are still down.

S says, “The boy’s forehead was full of pellets. He needs to go to the hospital.”

I cannot sleep all night long.

* * *

Friday, Dey 19, 1404 / January 9, 2026

S returns to her house. I get in the car to go check on my parents. Vali-e Asr’s intersection is filled with BRT bus fences pulled out and spread around. There are still a few burned motorcycles and a police van lying around. My mother is in shock. She pours me some tea. My uncle is there too. He says last night Imam Hossein’s Hospital looked like Karbala.5 “I don’t even know how to describe it. A hundred to two hundred people. I’m not sure. Bou-Ali and Al-Ghadir hospitals were the same. In the east side of the city, they have just killed. They opened fire on people. Everyone was badly wounded; everyone was bloody.”

My mother is happy that at least one of her daughters is not in Iran; one less person to worry about. She has heard that all her sister’s sons were out last night. One of them has a broken shoulder from the baton beatings. My aunt’s son-in-law has been hit in one eye with pellets. Mom says, “Do you remember that he had voted for Ahmadinejad?6 Even he went out last night. Everyone was out last night.”

My mother has many firsthand accounts, from Naazi Abad neighborhood, from Nasimshahr. She says, “You should come to me for the news from the southern parts of the city. They don’t really kill around Vanak Square.7 They keep their bullets for the poor kids, those who’ve got no one to turn to.”

I say, “Last night R saw the opposite of what you say in Tajrish Square.”

My father says, “It doesn’t really matter, rich or poor. Mr. B said they were mass shooting in Sa’adat Abad Square as well.”8

My mother says that last night they opened fire on people in front of Seyed Al-Shohada Mosque in Naazi Abad. A family member of hers who is a nurse saw at least fourteen bodies at Salim Urgent Care in Ali Abad. The people who were shot at in Naazi Abad were taken to the clinic. The family member said the clinic staff were walking on a pool of blood; she said a man came in, with cut-off fingers collected off the pavement, accompanying wounded protesters who had been attacked with daggers.

My mother heard it said that the young protesters felt rage and resentment from 2022, from the bullets that were shot at Siavash Mahmoudi.9 The Basij Forces opened fire on them, and the young protesters retaliated, taking the lives of two Basij members. My mother says, “People don’t have anything to lose to be afraid. They eliminated the Basij leader there.”

My father says, “Pahlavi should come out and take responsibility for the consequence of his public call for protest. Mass killing. Pure violence.” I expect a fight breaking out between the two of them immediately. My mother slams her tea glass on the table, turns to me and says, “Were voting boxes available around the corner? Were people out of their mind to go out into the streets? Tell him to go say that to the people who have had enough, talk them into not listening to what Pahlavi says.”

Their satellite channels are not working anymore. My mother insists that I go home before sunset, to not sit around and watch my father and her fighting. I get on my way. All along Vali-e Asr Street, security forces stand guard. Big black armored vehicles are lined up at every intersection.

I reach home. I buzz Haaj Khanoom’s door. There is no answer. There are no black fabrics or any other sign of mourning hanging on the outside wall of their house as is custom. I go upstairs. I call R. She has gotten news from Nahavand, from Isfahan. She says a massacre has taken place. She says she will be going out to the streets in her car tonight, toward Vanak Street. She promises to update me. I want to go out too, but I know my family are not going to take kindly to the idea. I call L, who did not show up last night. He says, “Sadeghiyeh neighborhood was an apocalypse last night. Like a war zone.” He says he will go out tonight too, just to see what is going on. I do not hear back from anyone until midnight.

* * *

Saturday, Dey 20, 1404 / January 10, 2026

I head to the office in the morning. The motorbike couriers are already there, except for one of them. They say the guy’s younger brother, only sixteen years old, was arrested the night before in Fardis, Karaj, and sent to the adult prison; that he has gone there to see if he can get any news of him. Mr. Sh recounts what happened in Nezam Abad, telling us about three young people from their neighborhood who died from bullets to their chests; about people raiding the Vahdat Police Station because from its rooftop they had shot at protesters. He says never in his life had he seen so many daggers, says the regime forces had come to stop people with whatever they had at their disposal. He says, “On Friday, they didn’t let people gather outside anymore, but they still shot at the houses’ windows. They cut off the internet to finish us off. They pulled down the curtains to kill us in silence.”

No one can really work in the office. There is no internet, and everyone just keeps wandering between rooms. Each person arrives with new updates about those killed. The office secretary goes home; she has heard that members of her family were killed in Kermanshah. How many people? She is not sure; has heard about five.

I call my mother. She can barely talk but tells me that last night, the son of their building’s janitor was killed by bullets in Emam Hosein Town in Eslamshahr.

My mother says, “Mrs. B has said that conditions in the morgue are horrifying. Mrs. B’s brother who is a doctor signed ninety-three death certificates himself in their hospital last night. Eleven young women. Six kids. The rest men, all killed with direct bullets.” My mother does not say this in Persian but in Azeri. She assumes that calls are being listened to, and perhaps she imagines that whoever is listening cannot understand her mother tongue. My mother speaks in her mother tongue also whenever she is in mourning. “Biz chok jeffa chakmishik,” she says. “Biz chok tahhje melatik.”10

I call N. She says, “Last night, crowds were very scattered. There were no families out there. The crowds were disorganized, but there were still many people around, and the violence was tenfold compared to the previous night. No more batons and pellets. Only real bullets were shot.”

“They’ve learned well from Syria, putting their lessons into practice.”

M says, “Yes, exactly like the Homs massacre. The only difference is they did not drop barrel bombs on people. I say with certainty that they killed thousands of people last night. I myself saw at least ten young people killed in just one hour, and I was not even at the center of what was going on.”

I turn my computer off. I head toward my parents’. Schools have been shut down on the fake premise of severe cold weather. The universities too. I see my mother waiting at the door. She has more bad news. The son of a family member of the neighboring building’s guard is killed in the town of Vavan in Eslamshahr; the family had just migrated there from a village. My mother says their own building’s janitor has gone to Kahrizak morgue with the building manager. They heard that layers and layers of young bodies in black plastic covers were piled on top of one another. They saw refrigerated eighteen-wheelers at the gate. They were not able to get any answers, came back empty-handed.

I try to give my mother phone numbers of a few lawyers to pass on to the old janitor. My mother says, “Write them down on a piece of paper. They are not in any condition to file a complaint or seek justice right now. The boy had just finished his compulsory military service; he had not even received his completion certificate yet. Right now, they are just hoping to get his corpse back.”

I decide to return home. After many months of quitting smoking, I crave a cigarette. I stop by the grocery store in my parents’ neighborhood to buy some. I greet the owner. He has heard about the janitor’s killed son. He says, “Last night, they killed many in Sattar Khan Street. Two owners from branches of Daryani Supermarkets were killed. Our family member who owned one of the branches of Shila restaurants east of Tehran was also killed. His body was stolen by the regime.” I buy cigarettes and sit in the car. Intentionally, I drive slowly. Vali-e Asr Street is packed with special forces positioned all along. Some scattered groups of protesters are walking to the main street, but the crackdown forces are too many for any tight protest formations to take shape tonight.

N arrives at our place around sunset. She has news of many children under eighteen being arrested in Sadeghiyeh, Nasimshahr, Eslamshahr, Gha’emiyeh Town, and Bahram Abad. He says the children have been taken to the Fashafouyeh Prison for adults. N says, “The executions are going to start any minute.”

N calls a satellite installer to come to our house so we could perhaps get some updates from the BBC Persian television channel. I call my mother who once again starts to speak in her mother tongue. That means she is not bearing good news. “They have asked the janitor whether he has money to pay hundreds of millions of tomans to get the body of his son back. He has said no. Then they have turned to the building manager and said the family should go and sign a statement that the young man was a member of the regime’s security forces in order to get the body and bury him on Monday. The family has accepted.” My parents want to go to the cemetery with them on Monday. I say I want to go too. My mother immediately switches to Persian, “Don’t even mention it,” and hangs up.

We turn the lights off at home. It is not yet ten p.m., but we want to try to sleep, even though we know we probably will not. Even my husband who does not follow politics closely has heard about the call yesterday from Pahlavi for people to go take over key government buildings. He wonders, “What can people do with empty hands? Doesn’t he know how savage the regime is?”

“I wish they would arrest Khamenei alive, the same way they did Maduro. There is no other way,” I say.

“You feel shy about advocating for a foreign military attack; instead, you bring up the Maduro technique,” he responds.

We do not say anything else.

* * *

Sunday, Dey 21, 1404 / January 11, 2026

I sleep all day long. I have sent the kids to stay with their grandparents with my husband. I do not even turn the lights on all day long.

* * *

Monday, Dey 22, 1404 / January 12, 2026

We shut down the office at noon. We have not had even one client. I head toward my parents’. It’s close to four p.m. and they are still not back from the cemetery. They have gone along with the building manager and the old janitor. I put some tea on to brew. I check the regime’s own Fars News Agency for the thousandth time. Now they are publishing images of piles of bodies with no shame, saying terrorists have come and killed people, saying this is all done by antirevolutionary forces, that Israel is to blame. Nothing stops them from showing off the corpses. A photo reportage shows piles of bodies in silos belonging to the Forensic Medicine Organization. From the noises coming from the front yard, I figure out that my parents are back. Everyone is sitting in front of the building. Covered in soil, crushed, stunned. I feel ashamed that I do not know the family name of my parents’ old janitor. The building manager breaks down in tears. Yesterday they had asked the janitor to go into the silo all by himself to identify his son. The manager had forced his way in with the janitor. He says, “Seven hundred bodies, eight hundred bodies, no, there were many more than that. The identified bodies, with their names attached to the foot of the plastic covers, were arranged on one side, and on the other side, there lay the unidentified. We found the janitor’s son in cover number 25. He looked as pale as the moon. The moon. He had lost so much blood that there was no color left in his face.” The old janitor had given the regime all the needed signatures, had committed to hold the funeral with less than ten people in attendance.

My mother says, “Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery looked like scenes from the time of the Bam Earthquake. I only saw such things during that earthquake. Everyone had their beloveds—their youth, their fathers, their wives—lying in a black cover in front of them, waiting for the hearses to come take them for the funerals. None of the thousands of the devastated people there are going to ever forget. Everyone was recounting to one another.  Everyone was mourning with one another. Everyone would step forward to embrace whoever left the silos after identifying their loved ones. Strangers were weeping in each other’s arms. No one is going to ever forget these things.”

The old janitor has already left and gone home. His family is to arrive tomorrow from the provinces so they can all be together in mourning. They were threatened by the regime that they could only announce the death after completing the burial. They were told not to hang black mourning fabric in front of their house. His wife has been unable to cry. She had brought her son’s military service uniform with her to the cemetery, embracing it all day long.

All of us imagine that the Americans will show up by Wednesday and crush the regime. Dr. P says, “Trump has said help is on the way. The Lincoln carrier is on its way. By Wednesday or Friday at the latest, the regime will be done and over.”

I drive back home. The streets seem covered in the dust of death. Most of the stores are closed. It is cold. The air is polluted.

* * *

Tuesday, Dey 23, 1404 / January 13, 2026

My Snapp ride driver is from the city of Lahijan.11 He says his neighbors there were killed. His cousin has been wounded and, for fear of getting arrested, he was taken to a hospital in the neighboring city of Kuchesfahan, admitted under the pretense of having had an accident. The driver says a massacre has taken place in the city of Rasht.

* * *

Wednesday, Dey 24, 1404 / January 14, 2026

I fill up the water bowl for the stray cats of our street. Haaj Khanoom has not left food out for them for the past several days. Our neighbor upstairs sees me and asks if I have any news of Haaj Khanoom. I tell her I was going to buzz their door, and we head in that direction together. The son whose head was wounded the other night opens the door. I ask how he is doing, and he tells us that with the S’s help, he went to an urgent care and underwent outpatient surgery, had four pellets removed from his temple. The body of his uncle Abbas was transferred to Mashhad and got buried. He says, “Haaji had it very hard.12 My older uncle couldn’t bring himself to go to Kahrizak morgue for identification, so my father went instead. He found my uncle among hundreds of covers. We thought he had been shot only once, but there was also a bullet in his neck.” Their family has not held any memorial service either. His mother is in Mashhad for now. The boys are staying put in the house because of their wounds and the fear of getting arrested. The boy says, “We are not pro-monarchy. But right now, that’s not even the point anymore. These guys will kill us all.”

The boy continues: “It’s interesting. Your friend the doctor who does not wear the hijab is not pro-monarchy either. I’m so grateful to her; she helped me so much. That day in their clinic, many people came in, saying they had accidents or that they were hit with steel bars at construction sites; they were all operated on for free.”

I come back home and call N. She says she has heard that the internet will be reconnected in the next few days. She asks whether I have heard the news, the speculations of an imminent war.

“Do you think they will attack us?” I ask.

“You don’t want them to?” she asks me in response.

“Is there any other way left? You think I love the Islamic Republic, but I am just afraid of what the future brings,” I say.

“You know that they say more than twenty thousand people have been killed in two days. Israel killed only a thousand-something during twelve days of war, and many of those were military personnel.”

We say goodbye. I don’t feel like talking to anyone these days. I am terrified of the internet getting reconnected. Of getting news from all the small towns and from thousands and thousands of people like my parents’ janitor. Of seeing all the videos that will be let loose. I am terrified that after seeing them, I won’t be sane anymore.

I call my mother. I can hear that she has cried. Two young men in her family have been killed. One was seventeen and the other thirty-five. Like the janitor, their parents too did not inform the rest of the family of the killings. Two days after the burials, the family just learned while attending another family member’s memorial service. My mother says, “They too lived outside of Tehran. Didn’t I tell you that the regime’s guns get more ruthless when it comes to the poor?”

“Mom, they killed dad’s friend’s son in the Sa’adat Abad area, in Kaaj Square. It doesn’t matter to them. We all are cannon fodder to them,” I tell her.

My mother curses in her mother tongue. I hang up. I won’t talk to anyone anymore, I promise myself. I cannot bear any of this. Why would I want the internet to get reconnected?

I have now removed all the black covers for our overcoats and fancy clothes in the closet and put them away. I cannot bear seeing black covers in the closet. They remind me of the piles of bodies in black bags in the morgues. They remind me of the massacre. I cannot bear any of this.

The following days are all black. Complete silence.

Today is the 3rd of Bahman. Starting last night, the internet has been getting spottily connected. I know my sister N has been very worried the past few days. In total blackout, with no news from any of us. When my Telegram gets connected, I write to her, “Hi.”

She writes, “I don’t know what to say.”

I write, “On my disconnected computer, I wrote some things that I am going to send your way.”

Translation from the Persian

Editorial note: Read “Remember Me," a poem by a student protester killed in Iran in 1999, from this same issue.

Translator’s Notes

The original Persian essay was published on the Aasoo website and is translated by permission.

1 Tehran Bus Rapid Transit system.

2 Referring to Taraneh Alidoosti, an Iranian actress, and her comments in a recent documentary interview broadcast on BBC Persian.

3 Haaj Khanoom is a title for women who have been to Mecca for pilgrimage, but in everyday discourse it has come to be used generally to refer to religious women.

4 The enemies of Imam Hussein, the third Shiite imam, in the battle of Ashura.

5 Where the battle between Imam Hussein, the third Shiite imam, and Yazid is said to have taken place. A place of symbolic significance in Shiite culture.

6 Former president of Iran for two terms. His first-term win, said to have been due to a rigged election, was controversial and led to the famous Green Movement protests in 2009.

7 A square in the northern part of the city.

8 Another square in the northern part of the city.

9 A young protester who was killed during the Mahsa Jina Amini protests in 2022.

10 From an Azeri song meaning “We are a people who have suffered greatly. / We are a people left alone.”

11 A ride service similar to Uber and Lyft.

12 Haaji is a title for a man who has gone to Mecca for pilgrimage, but in everyday discourse it is used generally to refer to a religious man.

Via WLT