My initial reaction to the US attack on Iran

In lieu of an analysis and in a total communications blackout

It’s only been some hours since President Trump stood in front of a podium with a white baseball cap with USA written in black on it and announced that the US had attacked Iran. So I’m writing this post now to say…What was it that I was going to say. It’ll come to me in a second.

I found out about the attack when I woke up at 5 am and saw a bunch of messages from friends I hadn’t heard from in a while. They were all variations of how sorry they are, how they’re thinking of me and my family. Expressions of love.

My heart sank but my mind refused to believe what it knew to be true.

Instead of checking the news, I checked my email. “War!” was an email subject. I moved away from it. There were also some requests for media appearances. I moved away from it.

I just wanted to connect with my loved ones in Iran. “Salam,” I wrote to my best and oldest friend in the world but the message didn’t get delivered. By then bombs had already been falling for several hours. The dreaded phone and internet shut down had happened when I’d been sleeping. Somehow that just crushed me.

Before—before the last time US and Israel attacked Iran in June and before the Islamic Republic of Iran killed thousands of its own people over 2 days—I’d had a chance to talk to her. Like me, she had survived the 8 year war with Iraq in the 1980s. Unlike me, she’d never left Iran. The June 2025 war had shattered her nerves. Early on she’d seen one of the bomb dropping drones whiz past her bedroom. Before…before now, she’d been able to get in touch and we’d made jokes and talked. This time, I was sleeping when the bombs fell and I know, I know, she was at work as she always is. And I know. I know she was scared. But that is all I know.

I call. It rings. No one answers. I text again and all I say again is Salam. This weird irrational feeling that I can’t say anything else so as not to spook her. So dumb, I think. But I can’t say anything else. It remains undelivered.

The thing I was going to say was to remind everyone that the internet and phone lines are down in Iran. That the images and videos and messages that are circulating all belong to the early hours of this war. And the truth is, we really don’t know what is going on.

When I got up, I immediately went to BBC Persian tv. I turned it on as I started scrolling through my phone. BBC Persian had compiled some videos from before the communications blackout. Multiple videos of people filming plumes of smoke from afar as you could hear them cheer. They hit the supreme leader’s office/residence, a woman cried out. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. Probably laughing I thought. Their compilation also included on the ground footage of the bombed out wreckage in a neighborhood in Tehran. People were running away on the margins of the shot. I was transfixed by the man walking towards the perimeter, reaching another man watching the destruction, and shaking his hand as he also started looking. Something about that casual handshake. I turned the sound up thinking I’ll also hear this cheering and laughter that the BBC had started its compilation with but nothing.

But the video that stays with you is the one from south Tehran, Pasteur St. The BBC posted it with a warning. The camera is on street level pointed at grey/beige smoke coming from not much of a distance. The woman wearing a grey tracksuit, her hair in a ponytail on her phone runs by. You first hear her voice: Mom, mom! Then you see her run across the street saying: Mom! Come out of the house mom! Come out of the house. People are running away from the smoke which is getting thicker and slowly seeping into the street. Where’d they hit? A voice asks. The Supreme Leader’s house/office, someone says. As the smoke starts moving towards the camera and people are running, someone says then why did they hit someone’s house?

I scroll through my friend group on WhatsApp. They were out—at work, running errands—and their real time messages were focused on getting home, getting off the streets. One of them says where she’s at, the traffic is at a stand still, and there’s smoke everywhere. Go home, someone else says. I’m trying to but the roads are closed, she answers. Someone says everyone was let out at her husband’s work but there’s no transport so he’s walking home. Someone says they’re bombing. Someone says there’s anti-ballistic missiles. Someone who for the past months has been praying for a US attack leaves a voice message saying: they attacked. I was in the streets. It started. She sounds out of breath. She’s whispering. I wonder if I can hear a bit of excitement in her voice or if I’m just reading into it.

I catch snippets of the news again talking about how some of the reactions have been of joy. I try to find it in my messages, in the Instagram reels and posts of people I know, I follow, I love or I respect. But there’s only the need to get home, to get their family home, to figure out how to stay safe as they sit in a traffic jam, to decide if they stay put at work or brave walking home on the streets. Then there’s a total communications blackout and they’re all gone. Kind of like poof.

I call my best and oldest friend again just to hear the phone ring. I might be a cynic but I’m clearly an optimist. I hear the voice of the son of Iran’s deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi. I shut my computer’s lid. I don’t need to know. What I really need to know is if my loved ones are alive. If they’re scared. If they’re safe. He can’t tell me that. I don’t need to know what he can tell me.

Every time you raised doubts as to whether a military attack on Iran is going to make the already intolerable life better in Iran, every time you asked for an example of when a war like the one this was always going to lead to a better situation, every time you asked if Pahlavi or Trump or whomever is the savior, the answer was: What’s the alternative?

I start unloading the dishwasher. I want to just drop the plates on the ground and hear them shatter.

I can’t seem to get a handle on my thoughts. When I was a kid and we lived in Iran during the long long and bloody war with Iraq, my dad would often make me have these debates with him. He would make me argue both sides of an issue, any issue. He thought it was important that I be able to analyze things from every angle. To be able to see things as they were and to consider all evidence, not just things I liked, or I agreed with. I hated doing that at first, then I started to love it. Every argument, every topic was a puzzle you needed to solve. Doing that became a part of who I was. Who I am.

What was it that I was going to say? Maybe it was that I don’t feel like being analytical right now. I just want to hear my loved ones’ voices. I want to know they’re alive. That they’re ok. I want to know that Shahrzad Hemati, whom I’ve never met but who wrote “I hope that if a bomb hits our house, it takes all of us. Me and Afra and Nader when we are in each other’s arms,” is ok.

I’ve had this horrible thought for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been thinking about the fact that my family, my relatives, my friends and I, we survived the bloody war with Iraq. Those months when we couldn’t go to school because any moment a bomb could fall anywhere and kill us, we survived those months. Then 3 months after the war ended, my family immigrated. So many of those I knew and grew up with stayed in Iran. Over these decades, they’ve survived the Islamic Republic and its cruelty. They’ve survived the war with Israel and the US, and its blind destruction. They survived the vehemence with which the Islamic Republic has been crushing all hope out of the country. What if there’s only so many chances you get to survive? What if something happens to them? What if the smoke pluming all over the city and then seeping through the streets as people run away catches up with them?

I’m ashamed to even think this. I don’t want to think this. I don’t. But what’s the alternative?