Iran: “Even Hope Is Uncertain”

Before I arrived in Isfahan, I had no clear image of war in this city from the news or from phone conversations. By the twelfth day of war, multiple attacks had struck the north and south of Isfahan, and what stood out in domestic and foreign news was damage to the historical buildings.

But the intensity of the explosions, the images and destruction from multiple attacks on the outskirts, were blurred. Isfahan has a centre - the beautiful old city, recognised globally - and a 360-degree periphery around it, neither famous nor beloved. A periphery holding two-thirds of the city’s population, over two million people, and the constant birthplace of protests and uprisings in recent years.

In this vast ring around central Isfahan, in the mountains north and south of the city, among homes of mostly migrants, military zones have been built. During this war, we heard about explosions in some of them; others were known only to the people living nearby.

Tourism has taken on a new meaning here. After the explosions stop, for a few hours, either the same day or the next, many people go to wander near the blast sites. On the 13th day of the war, I too got into a car with a few others and went to see the destruction. Like everyone else, I began comparing explosions and levels of damage.

The police station at Police Square still had intact walls, but houses two alleys away were destroyed: one reduced to rubble, others with only skeletons left, and those with “minor” damage – no windows.

The shockwave from one bomb had spread in all directions. Around it - one side being the Teachers’ University and residential complex - everything was damaged. I only saw ruined homes and pickup trucks and car trunks carrying TVs, carpets, dishes, bags and suitcases out of the residential complex.

We went to visit the cemetery to see the young faces whose photos had been carried during protest memorials, radiant and eternal. We couldn’t. The cemetery gate was closed, blocked with large concrete barriers and guarded by armed men.

Najafabad, a town near Isfahan, is full of orchards, full of fruit. On the way back, I pointed out blossoming branches rising above garden walls to our five-year-old, Paria, and said, “Look how beautiful they are!”

She loves nature, but this time she said, “I don’t feel like it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t have a good feeling about them,” she said.

Before the war, her mother had held a budding branch and said, “In a few days it will blossom. See how beautiful it will be.”

Now Paria thinks the blossoms caused the war.

The bomb that struck the Morality Police building nearby was the first explosion she heard. The sound was so close that she only screamed and wouldn’t come out from under the couch. Since that day, she doesn’t want to hear anything about war. At any mention or loud sound, she says, “Khamenei is dead, the war is over.”

Six-year-old Radin, like Paria, cannot understand the war. He asks dozens, hundreds of times a day, “Why did the war happen?”

He’s one of those kids that relatives call hyperactive. He only sits still with a phone in his hand, scrolling YouTube or playing games. His mother found a play centre open for a few hours daily; it’s far, but she says it’s worth it.

Sometimes they return at dusk, the time when armed forces come out into the streets. Radin found a way to calm his fear: he pulls a mask over his face and carries a toy Kalashnikov.

“If they want to kill us, they’ll see I’m like them,” he said. “I’ll say I’m with you.”

Reza, 48, has found no such solution. There is a building, said to be a weapons factory, near where he lives with his family in Mahdieh town. It was during the June 2025 12-day war, when they weren’t home. This time, Reza was riding his motorcycle home when a fighter jet targeted the building. He rode through black dust and metallic ash, head lowered, until he reached home.

Now, Reza goes to work less and spends more time at home. He sits with his hand clenched under his chin, staring straight ahead.

Reza supported war. He believed without military action, this government cannot fall. He had been among the January 2026 street protesters and was hit by pellets on his back.

He said, “If I went back in time, I’d still go to the streets. I still believe without military force, it’s impossible to get rid of this regime.”

But now he is afraid. At first, he hid it. Then he told his wife Roya that he knew he was safe, but was afraid of the sound.

She replied, “The pressure of explosions is itself a war injury.”

Roya said this with certainty, but each day she becomes more and more paralysed in making any decision.

She changes her mind every day, every hour. With every sound of an explosion, with every look at the refrigerator growing emptier by the day, with every glance at the stitches on her hand, cut by shattered window glass on the day of the factory explosion.

And with every thought about today and yesterday, she becomes pro-war and then anti-war.

Hope has taken on a new meaning in Reza and Roya’s home. Sometimes, with a sense of hope, they can pass hours talking about what will happen next in the war. Reza is pessimistic, expecting more destruction, while Roya reassures herself, “Isn’t it inevitable that these days will lead to the fall of the mullahs? They’re finished.”

Reza holds her hand, smiling, thinking of the only school in their neighborhood and the rumours that it has now become a government base, hence a potential target.

“Ambivalence isn’t always bad.”

Today, I am more ambivalent, more uncertain than ever - torn between light and darkness.

We jump after each and every explosion. Then we go out to see the site. I don’t know what this visiting of the bombed sites gives people, but I’ve grown to like it. At least I feel something more than just hearing the blasts.

Yesterday, passing the night-scented stock flower pots and sprouted greens, my sister said, “Poor things - no one pays attention to them anymore.”

I picked one red stock flower and brought it home.

I also visited the street that, on nights before Nowruz, the Persian New Year, is the main market of northern Isfahan’s outskirts.

Every year, we used to this market go at 3 am and it was lively, full of people: Persians, Baluchis, Afghans, Arabs in their traditional clothes.

Now, one day before the new year, the sidewalks hold a third of the usual crowd. The city is covered in banners and billboards of Ali and Mojtaba Khamenei. I’ve never seen the city so saturated with banners.

Scattered crowds wave flags from under bridges and car windows; armed men display their rifles. And we stay away from our windows.

None of this will ever feel normal. You carry its possibility with you in the street, and each time it strikes you as sharply as the first.

I want - and perhaps it is proper, living in wartime - to end this with hopeful words. But this constant movement between good and bad feelings, between ugliness and searching for small beauty, makes even hope uncertain. A kind of uncertainty that isn’t always bad - especially when, even if everything else dies, the cycle of seasons will remain alive.

Long live being alive.

The author is a writer who lives in Isfahan.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Aasoo.