Won’t You Feel Our Anguish – Until Your Own World Is on Fire
As Israeli airstrikes hit Iran, an author on the ground documents the human cost of a war unfolding in real time – a dispatch from Tehran by Kaveh Rostamkhani.
By Kaveh Rostamkhani
It was Tuesday night when an Afghan friend of mine called me, his voice shaking.
He told me, “I was just set free. They’d followed me through the city all day and eventually stormed my apartment.” He was detained, mistreated, and interrogated for nearly five hours – for taking photos of eerily empty streets in northern Tehran, where he had been guarding a house emptied by its residents.
Due to racially discriminatory rules, Afghan migrants face unbearable bureaucratic hurdles. My friend had been using my bank card for his everyday tasks. The agents confiscated the keys to his employer’s house as well as my bank card, and had forced him to reveal its PIN code. By the time he reached me hours later, they had already begun using the card for personal purchases, as my banking records showed. To me, this level of corruption within the security apparatus is eye-opening – given that its upper ranks appear to have been infiltrated by Israeli-affiliated agents, leading to the current situation.
The situation has instilled fear, paranoia, and terror across the Iranian society. At noon on Thursday a notification pops up on my phone. “Kaveh,” reads the sole message of an acquaintance. It has been half a year or more since we were in touch. She had left Iran to continue her studies in Italy a few years ago.
“Yes?” I replied.
“Could you please call my mother?”
It has become quite a challenge to reach dear ones from abroad. Since Israeli attacks intensified, much of Tehran’s population has fled – rendering landline phones all but useless. Internet restrictions have tightened since Wednesday, June 18, 2025 –amounting to a near-total shutdown. Compared to regular times, only three percent of Iran’s regular international traffic is passing through. A move meant to hinder mass panic and limit the scope of psychological warfare.
With the sky cleared and flights cancelled, my next-door neighbour, who runs a business in Oman, is stuck in Muscat. His wife, daughter, and brother here had no way to contact him either. I’m lucky enough that my VPN connection to bypass the internet restrictions still works, and that I am not cut off. Throughout the day, I function as the contact hub, relaying messages between friends and acquaintances stretching from Oman to Italy, over Germany to Canada, and their families who are now spread all over Iran.
It is past 1:00 a.m. on Friday when Farnaz, a friend living in Berlin, writes: “Could you by God call my family?” It turns out her family is in northern Iran and there has been an evacuation notice issued by the Israeli military for the Sepidroud Industrial Town on the verge of Rasht – North Iran’s most populated city. Both her parents’ phones are turned off. I hear myself breathing louder. After a few tries, I eventually land a call at her grandmother’s phone, and she can reassure me that her parents are not in the perimeter of the intended attack. I pass on the relieving message and go to bed.
The next morning, video clips of the blasts at the industrial town have gone viral. Two heavy, deafening, dreadful blasts. As Forensic Architecture rightly points out by analysing the evacuation orders issued so far, Israel “is misusing the humanitarian principle of ‘evacuation orders’ as a tactic of psychological and political terror against the Iranian population.”
Witnessing the emotional cost of this psychological terror born by my friends and their close ones breaks my heart. By the time of writing, it has been four days since I last met a friend. It was Ali who had sought refuge overnight due to one of those evacuation notices. Less than one in ten neighbours has remained in the block. This isolation is breaking human care and supply chains, making a society under duress even more fragile.
But a week into the attacks, the megacity keeps working on a pilot flame. Bakeries make fresh bread every day. Many local grocers, dairy shops, fruit and vegetable vendors stay open despite a significant fall in demand, a challenging supply chain and a shortfall of long distance drivers citing risks and family worries. Each night, the streets are cleaned of their near-nonexistent garbage. Water, electricity and gas supply are running. The pulse of the megacity at halt feels as if it were a tiny village – at times interrupted by a blast or barrages of air flak.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. edges closer to direclty involve itself in atrocities against a sovereign nation – risking massive conflagration – Western media of record, reaching from The New York Times to The Guardian, from Der Spiegel to Le Monde prominently feature the “GBU-57”: a bunker buster bomb also known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. They are using schematic sketches and even 3D visualisations on how it could succeed at destroying Iran’s deep-lying nuclear enrichment facilities.
These articles read more like weapon fair brochures than journalism. They advertise the bunker buster and underline its power and abilities. Not one mentions that such an attack on installations containing dangerous forces such as radioactivity would be a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions. Such an act would constitute a crime against humanity and, by its severity, a war crime under the Rome Statute.
For over a century, Iran has been the test case for the Empire’s most vile methods of conflict engagement: imposed treaties, coup d’etat, economic sanctions, sabotage, extrajudicial assassinations conducted with impunity, cyber warfare, and AI-led gunnery. Now, the time seems ripe – not only for the deployment of a big bomb reportedly engineered for Iran’s nuclear facilities; but also, with the rise of fascist powers in the West, it seems public consent is being manufactured for premeditated war crimes. This time, Iran appears to be the test case for carrying them out openly – and with impunity.
As this spring comes to an end, the night sky over Tehran is full of stars, a rare sight in normal times due to the smog and light pollution. Saadi, the great Persian poet, has put it right: “Won’t you feel our anguish – until your own world is on fire”
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Kaveh Rostamkhani (b. 1989) is an independent author and documentary photographer. Currently he is in Tehran from where he started publishing a series of dispatches addressing the development of the situation since the Israeli aggressions on Iran started on 13th June 2025. This dispatch was first published on the author’s social media on the evening of 21st June, a few hours before the US entered the War on Iran by attacking Iranian nuclear facilities with bunker buster bombs. This version has been lightly edited.