Tehran Diaries: A poignant portrait of life under war, repression in Iran

Tehran Diaries: Dispatches from Iran Under Siege

by Raha Nik-Andish

Published by Hachette

90 pages ₹250

 

Sustained US-Israeli attacks on Iran since February 28 and the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz have thrown the world into turmoil as countries  scrambled to manage oil and gas supply disruptions. But how have ordinary Iranians coped with the sustained bombings and internal crackdowns on civil rights? Prolonged information blackouts by Iran’s theocratic regime have muffled the voices of its citizens for years. Of course, the upsurge of serial anti-government protests since 2017 over rising prices, corruption, and women’s rights is the clearest indicator that the regime’s grip is weakening — notwithstanding the impressively orchestrated mourning at Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral. After the Women! Life! Freedom! movement of 2022, for instance, women can walk around scarf-less and unmolested. But these are incremental gains still. For most Iranians living under an unpopular regime that is fighting a war against a hated superpower and its detested ally has been a schizophrenic experience.    

Tehran Diaries: Dispatches from Iran under Siege does not indulge in polemics. Both dispiriting and uplifting, this slim book is a collection of dispatches by the academic and dissident Raha Nik-Andish for the London Review of Books blogs. It is a simple and evocative recounting of how ordinary citizens cope with the daily internal and external threats to life and livelihood.

The book is bracketed by the US-Israeli attacks in 2025 and 2026. The editors chose a somewhat disorienting receding timeline. It begins in March 2026, about 10 days after the US-Israeli attacks resumed on February 28, moving backwards through the 12-day war (June 12–23, 2025) — which was supposed to have annihilated Iran’s nuclear capabilities — and ends in May 2025. 

“In going backwards we attempt to ask how we got here,” the editors explain. War is now the “ongoing reality in Iran and across the Middle East,” they add, “but before war and during it, there was life too.”  Nik-Andish is a pen name for a writer who worked through an intermediary to smuggle his writings out of Tehran, a project that could have resulted in a death sentence if discovered.   

Notably, the US-Israeli attacks have not legitimised the regime for ordinary Iranians. This is well documented in the introduction titled “Hell Has Arrived”, which highlights the absurdities of the information blackout following the US-Israeli bombings. The author learns from a London-based Persian TV service that Ayatollah Khamenei has been assassinated. There’s no confirmation from state media, which continues with upbeat TV programmes. But the people have heard and emerge from their homes in suppressed celebration. “Everyone in the high-rise apartment buildings around me and across Tehran has come out onto their balconies. The entire nation is taken by surprise… Completely empty streets suddenly fill up with people. It’s a party. People shout and honk their horns.” Emboldened, people openly mock the Basiji — the state’s “volunteer” paramilitary militia — who retaliate with customary brute force. Official mourning is imposed the next day with religious people commandeered to “cry and heave in supposed collective grief”. Among everyone else, the mood is lighter — the author notices one of many images of Khamenei stencilled across city walls has been disfigured with garden soil. 

Since the bombings began, the regime has made concerted attempts to rally the nation. Every night from 9 pm to midnight, the Basiji gather in city squares to shout anti-Israeli and anti-US slogans. “This is the government’s attempts to bully ordinary Iranians into silence. However, for the majority of us, their songs and slogans are meaningless. We’ve heard them ad infinitum since 1979.”  In January 2026, Raha Nik-Andish describes the national protests that resulted in almost 30,000 deaths and one of the longest internet blackouts in its history. The people were egged on by Reza Pahlavi. The author may be unaware that this former crown prince, who is seeking a restoration of the monarchy, is a US stooge with no grassroots base in Iran. As it was, these protests, for which he provided no meaningful support, resulted in unprecedented and frighteningly vicious violence by state security forces. Raha Nik-Andish describes a plainclothes policeman sitting on top of a very young boy and repeatedly stabbing him with a knife.

 

Even as the regime lavishly celebrates a “victory” when the bombing abruptly stopped after 12 days, life for less jubilant Iranians is reduced to a tiring struggle for food, basic necessities, safety — and parrying official corruption. Raha Nik-Andish is a freelance university lecturer who augments his pay of 35 cents (35,000 tomans) an hour driving for Snapp!, a ride-hailing service, at night. It is a job that enables him to take unfiltered soundings from ordinary Iranians riding in his cab.  

As he writes, “These days, the condition of being Persian defies simple categories. It is full of deep contradictions about one’s country: caught between pride in a rich cultural past and shame over the current political reality….These feelings are shaped by a kind of internal exile — even while you’re in your own home.” The last chapter underlines the bleakness. It is titled “Looking for a Job, Living and Dying,” all of which — even the latter — involve unique challenges in this tragic nation.