Wartime Cigarettes
by Khosro Majd

Translated from Persian by Salar Abdoh

The morning it began, I had a headache, which the soft light filtering through the bedroom curtains only made worse. I was still groggy from last night’s dinner party, and would have gone back to sleep if it wasn’t for my thirst. In the backyard, the chirping of the birds was silenced by the thud of the explosions. I knew exactly what was happening. We had been waiting for it. My first instinct: get out of bed and move away from the window.

The culprit for my hangover was the two-year-old homemade wine that we’d shared with four of my closest friends. None of us had seen each other since the massacres of early January, when the regime opened fire on countrywide protests, which were then followed by a 20-day internet outage. My main concern had been our friend N. We had hardly heard from her since riot police shot her brother in front of his own house. (That was in Khorramabad, several hours south-west of Tehran.) She had spent most of her time with the family since then. After the memorial, on the 40th day, she’d decided to bring her brother’s 14-year-old daughter to Tehran to live with her. She still wore black. The night of the dinner was slated to be a night of recovery; we’d warned everyone not to ask N any questions or make references to the killing. My job had been to do what I do best at times like this: clown around, pour the wine and tell tales.

Staying true to Persian tradition and our classical poetry, we drank wine well past dinner and talked and talked. But no matter how hard we tried, every time I stopped with the jokes, the conversation turned back to the January massacres and the inescapable war that loomed on the horizon. We were all in agreement about the past and the present, but about the future, near or far, we had absolutely not a clue – not even those of us who had conditioned ourselves over the years to remain hopeful.

Around 1,100 years ago, the blind Persian poet Rudaki had written of how in wine there is “an abundance of art”. In grief too, I think. That night, N and I drank more than anyone else. As she was finally leaving, she promised to resume her routine of jogging in Pardisan Park the very next day. Seven hours later, the war began.

The war’s begun. Go home. Be careful.

That was my last post in the little Telegram group we have for the staff at the small research foundation I run. It was Saturday, the beginning of the work week in Iran. But no one had bothered to wait for my message – on hearing the explosions, they’d all hurried home. From their responses, I learnt that commuters in the metro were already wishing loudly that the regime would fall.

An hour later, the internet went dark. No more messages or photos. The only way left to communicate was via landline or cellular calls. Soon we took to standing on rooftops – as if we’d been doing it for months or years – to watch the strikes land. If we knew someone in the targeted area, we sometimes called to offer comfort and ask about the force of the explosion. Friends in other cities began calling late at night and kept up until the early morning hours – everyone wanted to know what they should do, where they should go. For more than 40 years, this regime had been promising at its Friday sermons that such a war was on the way, that it was inevitable, and indeed desirable. And yet there was no crisis training, no shelters, no alarms or public announcements of any kind.

We had visitors at the office on the day before the war. Our conversations had nothing at all to do with the January massacres, even though they were still ever-present, lurking beneath our collective despair. Instead, we spoke about literature and books and the art of translation, and even funny social media rumours. Chet Baker, a favourite of the staff, was playing on the stereo when a tremendous crash reverberated throughout the walls. Memories of last June’s 12-Day War seemed to descend on our visitors – the crushed buildings and smoke, the infernal buzz of drones, the broken bodies – until I quickly explained that a building was being demolished next door. Besides, there was no time to fixate on our worries, because it was a Friday, after all, and there was a dinner party to prepare for. I left the plates, teacups, ashtrays and even the Armenian pastries on the conference table, not knowing that by this time tomorrow the war would have started, and it would be a while until anyone could get back to the office to clean up.

War. It had been hovering over us for days and weeks. How were we to know whether it would happen tomorrow or the next day or the next month? Despite all our expectations, it still managed to arrive unexpectedly. In fact, one of our friends, rushing to pick his daughter up from school after he heard the first explosions, ended up crashing his motorbike before he got to her. He and would spend the first few days of the war between life and death at the hospital.

News of the death of the Supreme Leader was announced on 1 March, the day after he was killed. Everyday life, nevertheless, had to go on. I eventually returned to the office and began to make phone calls. There were a few people I was especially worried about, including an elderly, much-beloved poet whose collected works I had been editing. I learnt that his wife and daughter were keeping him from visiting his library, which was located in a dilapidated old house he had inherited from his mother some decades ago; a place that just about every literary personage of note in Iran has sat in to drink tea and coffee and smoke and discuss the great Persian classics.

I finally got through to the poet on the phone. He complained of boredom. Nearly all his books were in that formidable library; he hardly kept any at home. At the library he could smoke his one cigarette a day; at home, he was forbidden to do so. He said that the assassination of the Supreme Leader had got him thinking about an old friend, a writer, who left home one day in 1997 and never returned. That was during the grimmest period of what came to be known as the ‘chain murders’, when dozens of Iranian intellectuals and writers disappeared or were killed. The poet observed that the Supreme Leader, his late friend and he himself all hailed from Mashhad in north-east Iran. If that had any meaning or significance, neither of us knew what it was. He asked me if I could get him a translated copy of Goethe’s Faust. He said he’d like to have it at hand during the war. I couldn’t find Faust anywhere in the office. But I picked up several other books that I thought might keep him occupied.

A friend took me on a ride around the city, which was deserted. The sky seemed unable to make up its mind whether to be cloudy or sunny. We drove to see the newly ruined buildings, and also past the designated “mourning” procession for the Supreme Leader, while making sure to stay away from any military sites that might be bombed. Our day’s mission ended successfully. We handed the books, minus Faust, to the aged poet. No shrapnel found its way to us, we verified that the ruins were real, and that the planned mourning for the Supreme Leader appeared half-hearted at best, at least to me, not least because it was being performed under the threat of incoming missiles.

Before calling it a night, my friend and I decided to have a coffee in Tajrish Square, in the far north of the city, which had been blown up on the third day of the 12-Day war. Usually, with less than three weeks left until Nowruz, the Persian new year, holiday shoppers would have been thronging Tajrish Bazaar. But it was quiet and tranquil now. The scene was like something you might see in an old photo of Tajrish from half a century ago. The cafes were closed and soldiers were slowly shuffling around to take up their stations. People passed each other in silence, occasionally looking up at the sky with worry or curiosity. This far north in Tehran, the trees were not yet in bloom and a chill wind blew. I’d never felt the air in the square so crisp, surrounded by the snow-capped mountains just up the road.

We could hear the sound of distant explosions, like thunder coming from far away. A conscript dozed next to his mounted machine gun on the back of a pickup truck. I had been craving my pipe and tobacco, but then I thought, wartime cigarettes taste just fine.

Khosro Majd is a pseudonym.

‘My Home is Burning’
by Lina Mounzer

Only a few hours before war came back to Lebanon, I was certain that it was still some way off. “Hezbollah would never,” I insisted, visiting a friend across the street and sharing what seemed like the general consensus. “They have too little to gain and too much to lose. Lebanon will be sitting out this war.”

How wrong we were. In the pre-dawn hours on 2 March, that sudden and familiar lurch out of sleep, jolted into awareness by the sound of one, two, three explosions. Shortly after midnight, Hezbollah had fired six rockets into northern Israel, in what they described as retaliation for the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel responded with characteristic ferocity, declaring all-out war once again.

Waking up to an airstrike is one of the most horrific things you can experience. It’s not just the surprise and terror: when you hear the concussions echoing, with their frightful violence, you feel surrounded by the malevolence of whoever has unleashed them. I don’t know how to describe it except as suddenly being thrust into an intimate knowledge of evil.

I thought immediately of my friend A, whose parents were murdered by an Israeli airstrike on the last day of the last war, two years ago. I wondered whether they’d heard anything, or had time to experience this same feeling before they’d been killed, or if their awareness had been simply snuffed out in an instant.

If you hear it, you’ve survived it. This was a lesson I learned growing up in Beirut, in a country whose entire existence seems to consist of anticipating the next round of violence. And since Lebanon gained its independence in 1943, few of these violent episodes have not involved Israel in some capacity. During the Nakba of 1948, more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees were driven into Lebanon, which became a natural base for the activities of the Palestinian resistance.

Lebanon has always been divided by an existential question: is the country part of a greater Arab nation, and thus beholden to its travails, or is it an independent, sovereign state with the closed borders and narrow self-interest such a project requires? This became a matter of life and death in the civil war, which started in 1975 with the (mostly Christian) nationalist forces pitted against militias aligned with the Palestinian resistance, and ended fifteen years later with internecine fighting so fierce and muddled that it has since provided fodder for a thousand PhDs.

But when Israel invaded Lebanon to eliminate Palestinian militants in 1978 and 1982 – the first two of six formal invasions – the Lebanese state was drawn into direct conflict with Israel. After a failed attempt at regime change in 1982 and global outrage at the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Israel withdrew to a ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon, which it occupied for eighteen years. What ended that occupation was the rise of Hezbollah.

Though the agreement to end the Lebanese civil war stipulated that all militias would be disarmed, Hezbollah was permitted to keep its weapons because of its role fighting to free South Lebanon from Israeli occupation. Since 2000, when the Israelis were finally ousted, withdrawing behind the Blue Line, there have been many resolutions and initiatives to disarm Hezbollah, but this has never come to pass.

All this history is unfortunately essential to understanding the current moment. Lebanon is not only facing the terror of Israeli bombing raids, but the bitter internal strife of a divided population, fed up with the constant threat of violence and still reeling from a series of government-engineered economic catastrophes that pushed more than half the country into poverty overnight while the currency collapsed.

During the last war on Lebanon, which lasted two months, Israel killed nearly 3000 people, and assassinated much of Hezbollah’s leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed when more than 80 bombs targeted the group’s headquarters in Dahieh, the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut.

But after the ‘ceasefire’ in November 2024, Israel continued to strike targets in Lebanon, assassinating Hezbollah operatives and killing civilians over the course of fifteen months. There was continuous shelling of south Lebanon and occasionally even Dahieh, while Israel threatened that it would establish another ‘security zone’ by occupying South Lebanon once again.

Since the war began again, the days have blurred into one another. When you are focused on the minute-by-minute question of survival, time itself becomes distorted and diffuse.

It has been eleven days now since I was woken by airstrikes, and since then all I can remember is periods of acute panic, which punctuate the long, strange hours of waiting for the next moment of panic.

On 5 March, I woke up at 4 AM to dozens of messages on my family WhatsApp group, with a photo from my aunt of a building on fire. “My home is burning,” she wrote.

This house has been our family home since the early 1960s, when my paternal grandparents moved to Ghobeiri, a neighbourhood in Dahieh. After my grandmother’s passing, my aunt inherited the house. It was the house where I’d spent nearly every Sunday for three decades, gathered around the lunch table with my extended family; it was where my youngest aunt had gotten engaged; where my grandfather had passed, surrounded by his children, and where we’d held countless baby showers and family celebrations. No one was home: my aunt was visiting her daughter in Qatar, of all places. But entire lifetimes of our family history were burning.

For all the bombs that have been dropped on Beirut’s southern suburbs in all Israel’s wars on Lebanon, somehow our house had never been directly hit, though the windows had been broken by nearby explosions more than once.

The usual consolations poured into the family groupchat: “kello byet’awad” (everything is replaceable) and “ma fi shi ghali illa el-arwah” (souls are the only thing of value). But we all know that homes and neighbourhoods and towns are in their own way irreplaceable; they have their own souls. And when Israel targets “Hezbollah strongholds” it is also targeting the people who live in those places, collectively punishing Lebanon’s Shia population – and ensuring that the rest of the country considers them guilty by association.

This idea has been enshrined as Israeli military strategy in documents such as the ‘Dahieh doctrine’, an official policy of targeting civilian areas to retaliate against Hezbollah, whose ostensible logic is that local populations will turn on the militants when subject to collective punishment by Israel. This tactic has been evident in the latest round of destruction, which has now displaced nearly a million people.

In the early afternoon of 5 March, still reeling from the shock of our burning family home, my phone began to beep with another awful update: Israel sent out forced evacuation orders for the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs – an unprecedented move borrowed straight from the Gaza playbook – and also indicated which roads people should take out of the area, sending them off into the Christian areas of Mount Lebanon or the Sunni and Christian towns of the northern coast.

Much as in Gaza, fleeing your home is no guarantee of safety. In the very early morning hours of 12 March, an airstrike hit Ramlet el Bayda beach in Beirut, well outside the area identified for evacuation, targeting people who’d been taking refuge in tents after fleeing the south. At least twelve people were killed and nearly thirty injured.

Only this morning, 13 March, there was an attack on an apartment building in Borj Hammoud, a Christian-Armenian neighbourhood in the city’s northern suburbs. As I was filing this piece later in the afternoon, central Beirut was shaken by the sound of a loud explosion. I rushed to the doorway of the cafe in Hamra where I was working with the other shocked patrons: above us in the sky there was a strange, swirling dark cloud that broke up into pieces. It took me a minute to realise this was not smoke from an airstrike or pigeons scattering from an explosion, but thousands of flyers floating down over the city. One of them urged us to disarm Hezbollah. The other promised that the Israelis’ “great success” in Gaza would be repeated in Lebanon.

People are now afraid of their neighbours, just as they were during the last war two years ago. Many Lebanese are less and less willing to accept refugees in their buildings and their neighbourhoods. A hotel I passed on my way to the cafe had a note on the door strictly prohibiting any visitors other than paying guests. I saw a video circulating of a priest from the north, yelling that nobody from outside his village should be allowed in. How long before checkpoints are set up in residential areas to control who goes in and out? How long before the bloodshed of the civil war repeats itself, with local militias policing movement and checking ID cards on the streets?

On the first or second day of the new war, I was talking to a friend about how we need to refuse to give in to this kind of fear and suspicion. If I should die because Israel wants to murder someone who has fled to a building near mine, then so be it. I cannot spend these days of war fearing the people who left everything behind and fled their homes seeking shelter in other parts of the city. Some days, after receiving news of yet another airstrike targeting an apartment in an ‘unexpected’ neighbourhood, this is easier said than done.

At a dinner the other night, another friend was saying how those who fled Dahieh or the South last time are now planning to remain; while those who remained are now fleeing for the first time. It seems that the lesson they took away from the last war is that whatever they did was unbearable – whether that was the humiliation of begging for accommodation elsewhere, or the terror of staying at home – and now they should do the opposite.

We also discussed how we felt about Hezbollah’s little “adventure,” as the Lebanese government had called it, dragging us singlehandedly, let’s face it, into all-out war.

“Oh I am enraged that they did what they did,” one friend announced. “But now that we’re in it, I know which side I’m on. Don’t you?”

Lina Mounzer is a writer and translator. She is also a senior editor at The Markaz Review.

Killing Diplomacy
by Aslı Bâli

Over the past year, Israel has repeatedly taken recourse to force at moments when diplomacy, however fragile, was progressing. In June 2025, the IDF struck Iranian targets – mainly military installations and nuclear facilities – just as Washington and Tehran were preparing for scheduled negotiations in Muscat. That September, as Palestinian negotiators met Qatari mediators in Doha to discuss a possible ceasefire, Israel struck the residential governmental complex where they were staying. And on 28 February, mere hours after Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, declared that peace between the US and Iran was “within reach”, Israeli bombs rained down on Tehran. Such episodes suggest that diplomacy can be a fatal undertaking when it comes to the US and Israel. In a region saturated with historical trauma, each strike reinforces the bleak conviction that negotiations are war by other means.

Iran has long pursued diplomacy to de-escalate tensions with rival powers. Nowhere has this been more true than in the case of the nuclear file. Since Iranian dissidents first exposed the regime’s nuclear facilities in 2002, successive governments have repeatedly entered negotiations with European powers, the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency. They have at times suspended enrichment, accepted intrusive inspections and offered to cap their programme in exchange for sanctions relief and recognition of their right to civilian nuclear energy. Analysts and intelligence agencies have consistently judged that the Islamic Regime does not want to build a nuclear weapon. In any case, it remains years away from possessing the technical capacity to do so.

Many of these diplomatic tracks collapsed when Washington or its partners shifted course. The EU-Iran negotiations of 2003-05 broke down under growing pressure from the Bush administration, which demanded that Iran end enrichment altogether. Diplomatic openings over the next few years were quickly overshadowed by an escalating pressure campaign, including expanding US-driven multilateral sanctions, the referral of Iran’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council, and increasingly explicit threats of military action. Under the Obama-brokered 2015 nuclear agreement, which was widely regarded as a breakthrough, Iran was granted sanctions relief in exchange for accepting the most stringent monitoring regime ever negotiated. Still, this was too much for Trump, who abandoned the deal in 2018, partly at the urging of his pro-Israel advisors. Throughout, Israel has insisted that Iran be denied any enrichment capability. It has killed Iranian nuclear scientists in covert actions and military strikes. The result has been a pattern in which diplomacy periodically narrowed the dispute, only for political decisions in Washington and Tel Aviv to push back towards escalation.

Iran is often presented in the Western media as a revisionist power bent on destabilising the pro-American Middle Eastern order led by the Arab Gulf states and Israel. Such threat inflation obscures the degree to which US actions have helped the Islamic Regime expand its influence in the region over the past 30 years. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq defeated two of Iran’s long-term regional adversaries. A botched intervention by America’s Gulf allies in Yemen unwittingly produced the incentives for the Houthi faction to seek Iranian support.

Now, an opportunistic and unprovoked attack on Tehran has undone the precarious balance between Iran and its Arab Gulf neighbours. Within days, Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, paralysing shipping traffic through the world’s most important oil chokepoint and jolting global energy markets. It has conducted missile and drone attacks across the region, bringing explosions, falling debris and civilian casualties to cities such as Dubai and Doha, while damaging airports, ports and other crucial infrastructure. The conflict has thus destabilised the commercial hubs and energy corridors that underpin the Gulf’s much-vaunted stability and prosperity. While American and Israeli officials seem interested only in the near term – speculating about the number of days or weeks remaining before they meet their ever-changing objectives – the consequences of their war of choice will in fact reverberate across the region for decades.

The irony is stark. The US and Israel, both states with nuclear weapons, have bombed a state without any, invoking concerns about nonproliferation that are belied by their own intelligence agencies. In an asymmetric world, the lesson is that restraint invites coercion. The Islamic Regime was struck precisely because it lacked an operational nuclear deterrent.

Nonproliferation depends on a credible belief that abstaining from nuclear weapons enhances security rather than imperilling sovereignty. This war corrodes that belief. No amount of inspections or export controls can shore up nonproliferation if states conclude that they require a nuclear shield to stave off attack. On the contrary, the rational course is to cross the nuclear threshold decisively and quickly. Proliferation, in this sense, is not defiance but prudence. At a deeper level, by shattering the infrastructure of verification and foreclosing diplomacy, the US-Israeli attacks have weakened the very epistemic foundations of the nonproliferation regime. Their actions are not just illegal and immoral, but also deeply counterproductive. By mercilessly targeting the state institutions that control Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, they have set the stage for those materials and the technical knowledge that produced them to be dispersed.

Emmanuel Macron has responded to these incentives by pledging to increase France’s nuclear warhead stockpile. He has also suggested that the French nuclear deterrent could function as a continental security guarantee for Europe. The significance of his announcement is unmistakable. Some states expand their nuclear arsenals and extend their forward deployment to gain ‘strategic depth’; others are bombed to prevent them from gaining any defensive capacity. The legal scaffolding that may once have constrained such conduct now lies in ruin. As part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty bargain, non-nuclear states accepted nonproliferation on the basis that nuclear states would pursue arms control and eventual disarmament. Now the US and Israel have invoked nonproliferation to justify an unprovoked attack on a non-nuclear rival. Nor has the United Nations Charter-based system fared better. Preventive war amid negotiations against a state that poses no threat is the very antithesis of the UN’s international security order.

The US once justified its hegemonic position in that international order by portraying itself as guarantor of peace and security against “revisionist” states. No longer. President Trump has made clear his disdain for the idea of international constraint. As Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, announced, the country is not governed by “stupid rules of engagement”.

The humanitarian toll underscores the moral bankruptcy of this approach. Iranian schoolgirls – like children in Gaza and Lebanon – have been absorbed into the strained calculus of strategic necessity. “Precision strikes” that decapitate government leaders and destroy military infrastructure cannot disguise the underlying nihilism of the US-Israeli campaign. We are beyond the point of “violating” international norms or even enshrining a regime in which “might makes right”. We rather seem to be witnessing the malign recklessness of leaders in awe of their own destructive power and impunity. Those who worry that there is no endgame are missing the point of “Epic Fury”.

Imperial overreach rarely announces itself as such. The Trump administration’s conduct is clarifying in this respect. They are happy to make their policy of raw coercion explicit, exulting publicly in threats of more and more destruction. But power wielded through bullying and bombardment alone is both costly and insecure. Allies will hedge their commitments and seek alternatives, while adversaries harden their resistance. The US no longer claims to lead through stability, and its preference for leading through coercion may yet outstrip its capacities.

These medium-term costs offer no solace in Iran. For Iranians, this war is a catastrophe that compounds the repression and hardship they have endured for decades. There can be no justification for what they are being made to suffer. States that fail to denounce the US-Israeli aggression bear a degree of responsibility for the destruction of yet another society in the Middle East. Those who countenance this war out of strategic calculation or cowardice are playing an active role in dismantling the architecture of collective security and arms control. At Davos, Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, spoke eloquently about rupture in the international order, alluding to Trump’s threatened annexation of Greenland. But when aggression was turned on Iran, he returned to the well-trodden path of complicity.

We may not know what outcome the US and Israel have in mind for their current military campaign against Iran. But the consequences they have unleashed are coming into focus. Diplomacy has become another word for misdirection, nonproliferation means little more than the absence of a deterrent, and the language of self-defence is plastic enough to accommodate any quantum of aggression. The erstwhile guarantor of the postwar multilateral order is now an arsonist bent on setting that system ablaze. The question is not just how to extinguish this fire, but whether any structure of comparable scale can ever be rebuilt from its ashes.

Aslı Ü. Bâli is Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her teaching and research focus on public international law and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East.