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What everyday life is like for Iranians right now

Iranians are still trying to work, study, and parent under the constant threat of both airstrikes and regime violence.

The war in Iran will enter its fourth week on Saturday, with no real end in sight. The Pentagon is reportedly requesting $200 billion to fund the ongoing military operation, even as it unsettles the world economy. Meanwhile, Iranians say that airstrikes are growing louder and more intense as the US and Israel pursue high-ranking officials, infrastructure and other targets in densely populated cities.

Today, I want to focus on that latter perspective — the view from inside Iran. The country has been under a near-total internet blackout since attacks started, making it difficult for Western media to fully capture the mood inside the country or the scale of the damage.

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But Roya Rastegar — a producer, writer and co-founder of Iranian Diaspora Collective, a pro-democracy group — is in touch with a network of people on the ground in Iran. In a piece for Vox this week, she shared their experiences of the ongoing war, as well as their hopes for the country’s eventual democratic transition.

Today, Roya and I discuss the internet blackout, the political atmosphere in Iran and daily life in a warzone. (This conversation has been edited for length and flow.)

In a piece for Vox earlier this week — “This war is putting Iranians in an impossible moral dilemma” — you share the stories of a number of Iranians living through the war. What is communication and internet connectivity like inside Iran now? How are people getting messages out to you?

Communication inside Iran right now is fragmented, unstable, and politically controlled by the regime. This internet blackout isn’t a technical, wartime issue — it is a deliberate, political choice to cut off 90 million Iranians from the global conversation.

The blackout makes it almost impossible to hear about conditions on the ground in real time. Messages are coming out in bursts, not in any steady or reliable way. A friend gets access for a few minutes through a VPN that belongs to a friend of a friend of a neighbor, they send a voice note, or Signal chat — something before going offline again. There is also a distinct sense that calls are being monitored. So even when you are able to talk with people, conversations are constrained by fear.

People are not just dealing with the constant fear and anxiety of bombs dropping — they are also dealing with an information siege. They don’t know what has been hit or where, who is dead or alive, or what is state propaganda and what is real.

So the message we keep getting from people on the ground is: Turn the internet back on. The blackout is isolating people psychologically as much as physically.

What is daily life like for the people you’re in communication with? I was really struck by a collection of translated posts that the Iranian Diaspora Collective........

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