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“I don’t know when I will be able to contact you again.” my cousin Ahmad told me during a WhatsApp call from Tehran last summer, in the midst of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. “Maybe it wasn’t wise to come here. Afghanistan would probably have been safer.” For days, his internet connection had stopped working. Eventually, a privileged neighbor shared their Starlink satellite internet access with my cousin. When the war ended, the Iranian authorities banned its use.

“Anyone using Starlink is suspected of collaborating with the ‘enemy’ — meaning Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad. People are arrested and might even be executed,” Ahmad told me back then, his voice tense.

Today, I rarely hear Ahmad’s voice. Every few hours, I grab my phone to check if he is online. But since the United States and Israel illegally attacked Iran at the end of February, beginning a large-scale bombing campaign all over the country, another internet blackout is haunting Iran. The Iranian state has plunged the country into a near-total digital blackout, and millions of people remain without any connection to the outside world.

The only thing that I know is that my relatives left Tehran for a calmer region far away from the city. After they left, their civilian neighborhood in Tehran was heavily bombed. The building next to their apartment was hit by airstrikes and reduced to rubble.

While people try to reach loved ones amid the digital blackout, news of some dystopian scenes is making its way out of the country. On the very first day of its war, the United States bombed a girls’ school in the city of Minab with Tomahawk missiles and killed at least 175 children. What also shocked many people around the world was the occurrence of what experts call “black rain” — toxic, acidic precipitation that fell across large parts of Tehran, a city of about 10 million people, after U.S. and Israeli strikes on oil refineries belonging to the Iranian regime.

Europe Offers Little Hope for People in Iran Trying to Flee US and Israeli Bombs

The U.S. and Israel also extrajudicially killed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s authoritarian supreme leader, turning him into a martyr for millions of his followers.

From Refugees to “Mossad Spies”

Almost two years ago, my cousin Ahmad took his mother and sister and fled from Kabul to Tehran. He reconnected with former university friends and hoped to find work with the United Nations or the International Organization for Migration. “There are many Afghan refugees here. I heard they needed qualified staff,” he said. In the end, nothing came of it. He was not able to find work.

Then the bombs started falling.

When Israel launched its attacks on Iran last summer, my relatives and millions of other Afghans suddenly found themselves trapped in yet another war. Like the more than 4 million Afghan refugees estimated by the UNHCR to be living in Iran, Ahmad became part of a population that was quickly turned into a convenient scapegoat.

“We came here because we were no longer safe in Afghanistan.”

“We came here because we were no longer safe in Afghanistan.”

Shortly after the Israeli strikes began, Iran’s leadership began to blame Afghan refugees for their own........

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