On the afternoon of 6 January, as protests over the collapse of Iran’s currency kept up around the country, I went to meet my friend Q. When I asked him where, he said, “the Den of Spies” – as the real estate around the American embassy in central Tehran is still known. A documentary filmmaker, Q has a prefab studio space inside the old embassy grounds, which are now ringed by murals taunting the US. Across Taleghani Boulevard, the Hotel Mashhad had a forlorn look. In its glory days, before the revolution, embassy security escorted American diplomats’ wives and their guests there for afternoon gatherings. Or so I’ve been told, more than once, by relatives who own the place. Disgruntled members of the ancien régime, they are now absentee landlords, living abroad.

Q specialises in films about war and conflict, but with his long, neatly-trimmed beard, he looks more like a conservative type than an artist. We had recently collaborated on a project, and he now wanted to discuss his new documentary, about the previous summer’s war with Israel, which in his opinion had unexpectedly brought the country together.

“The Islamic Republic had a window of time after the 12-Day war,” he said. “There was a sense of unity. Everyone got a glimpse of the common enemy, of what it could do to us.”

He had a point. No matter how much we talked about Israel, it used to be a vague threat, more than 1500 clicks away. But during the war Israeli planes had flown over Iran unhindered and dropped their bombs. In the West the war was regarded as a setback for the Islamic Republic, which may well have been the case. But Q was more interested in how the regime’s resilience had galvanized people from all walks of life, including many who staunchly opposed it. The military had restored its command structure within a day and, according to reports, pierced the vaunted Iron Dome to strike both military and intelligence targets in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

“This unity lasted a month,” Q went on. “Maybe two. Then ‘the gentlemen’ at the top went back to harping on about their favourite issue, hijab. The Israelis and Americans have killed our scientists, assassinated our top generals, destroyed years and years of research and labour. Yet parliament still goes on about hijab.” He gestured to the street, heavy with afternoon traffic but otherwise quiet. “Salar, you know I believe in women wearing hijab. I believe in men with beards. Long beards. But since the war most of those women out there no longer wear a headscarf. Did anything change? Did the sky come falling down? No.” He offered me tea. The next morning, I left for the south of the country, while Q stayed in Tehran.

Two days after our chat, the sky did come falling down. The protests over the economy suddenly blew up into the most violent confrontations ever between Iranian citizens and the security apparatus. Q and I would find ourselves squarely in the middle of it all, him in the capital and me on the north side of the Persian Gulf. Both places had gone up in flames (as had much of the rest of the country), and in ways that neither one of us could have imagined.

When I met Q again, after the protests had been brutally suppressed, he was starting to wonder if the regime might collapse after all. As long as I’d known him, Q had always been critical of the regime but never against it. Nor did he precisely oppose it now. But he sensed that the foundations of the system had been seriously shaken, and that there might not be a way back. In the past year, ever since Iran’s sphere of influence in Syria and Lebanon had been radically diminished, I had heard similar murmurs among other men who, like Q, were in one way or another within the orbits of the official order.

Q lives in Narmak, a densely populated, poor-to-middle-class neighbourhood that stretches into the Tehranpars district at the city’s eastern edge. I had read reports of large crowds protesting on the streets there. In those two days, Q had witnessed dozens of scorched banks and buses, flaming rubbish bins blocking every road, street signals and traffic lights wrenched from the earth, and the building that houses the Department of Taxation and Finance on fire.

“In the space of a few city blocks in my neighbourhood, I counted ten burned buses,” he told me. “How much hatred do you have to have to burn that many buses in such a small space? Or else …”

Q didn’t finish his sentence, but I knew where he was going with it. “Do you think foreign hands are involved?” I asked.

“Weren’t they during the 12-Day war?”

Since the conflict last summer ended in a stalemate, my friends have been waiting for what they called “chapter two” of the war with Israel. But nobody expected that the next war would emerge from within – exploding with an unexpected ferocity from the discontent that has long simmered beneath the surface of daily life, before being crushed with an even greater ferocity by the state. Two weeks later, the sheer scale of that repression is undeniable, and the future of the Islamic Republic has never looked more uncertain.

At least since 2009, when the Green Movement protests erupted after a contested presidential election, Iranians have periodically taken to the streets in anger. The causes are many: election fraud, corruption and state mismanagement, the oppression of women (especially the imposition of the hijab), and not least the Islamic Republic’s intractability on the world stage, which has made it a pariah and the target of draconian economic sanctions. In recent years, the currency has consistently depreciated, breaking the middle class and pushing legions into poverty. I see evidence of this outside my living room window, where a large municipal rubbish bin receives visitors around the clock. The young and the old, the homeless and the well-dressed, jostle to find anything valuable enough for resale.

My apartment sits smack in the middle of the old city, two metro stops away from The Den of Spies, in an area known as the Intersection of Faiths. Haim Synagogue is just across the street. There is only one mosque in the vicinity, but multiple churches, as well as an old Zoroastrian Fire Temple and a Zoroastrian high school. Surrounding all of this are the imposing Russian and British embassy grounds. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, much of the Great Game, the imperial contest for the domination of Asia, was played out right here.

The Intersection of Faiths is where trouble often begins, before spreading to the rest of the country. This is because the Grand Bazaar lies just to the south, and the University of Tehran just to the west. When the mercantile class wants to show its disapproval of the government, shop shutters go down – as happened during the 1979 revolution. And the university, the country’s premier institution of higher learning, has a celebrated and bloody history of student activism.

Since protests so often originate in my neighbourhood, it’s an ideal location to gauge the degree of disinformation beamed into Iran by opposition TV channels. After news of violence on the streets outside my flat, it’s not uncommon for my sister to call me from the wealthier northern suburbs, or a friend from overseas. “No such thing,” is my usual reply. “Bullshit news.” So on 6 January, when a friend worriedly messaged to ask what was happening here, I stepped outside with the usual scepticism.

I walked around the corner to the intersection of Hafez and Jomhuri, a chaotic stretch of small shops, street-vendors and electronic goods. The seven-story Charsou mall was shuttered and people had blocked off the streets. I could not distinguish one chant from another, but the atmosphere was free of violence. Down the road, the Grand Bazaar had also called for a shutdown. With the currency heading for outright collapse, the merchants had finally had enough.

When anti-riot forces showed up on motorcycles, I decided to return to my apartment – though not because I was afraid something would happen. Rather, I expected a stand-off, boring and predictable, and I did not want to squeeze past the bodies that would soon congregate there. Barely fifty meters gone, I heard shouts and the unmistakable pop of incendiary devices. As tear gas rained down on Jomhuri, men ran onto my street coughing, their eyes streaming. These were not the owners of the butcher shops and fruit stands and corner markets, but their workers, young and angry. I watched as they retreated into the places from where they’d emerged. Their bosses, who had not bothered going out to protest, now rubbed wet towels on their faces or blew cigarette smoke into their eyes to counter the effects of tear gas. All part of the usual protest routine.

I continued walking, not back to my apartment but to the Grand Bazaar. On the way sits City Park, one of Tehran’s oldest public spaces. Here, just below Imam Khomeini Avenue, barely a kilometre from where the tear gas was released, it was just another day, peaceful and cold. Having received a few more worried messages from outside the country, I decided to take a picture of the mini Ferris wheel in the children’s playground, and of the old men chatting in a huddle nearby. I wanted to show my friends that it wasn’t all that bad.

Most of the shops in the Grand Bazaar were shuttered, and the riot police were present. But there were as yet no pitched battles. A group of women went from shop to shop, and if they were still trading, chanted and shamed them into closing – which they did. Here and there, young men made “meow, meow” sounds at passing riot police, more in jest than anger. This cat-and-mouse game was decades old, and everyone knew their role.

The next day, tear gas rained down on the neighbourhood again. This time, I was in the ridiculous position of taking a pair of sweatpants to my local tailor for mending. Making a sudden cartoon-like change in direction, sweatpants now pressed to my head, I told the friend I’d been on the phone with: “Gotta go, slight situation here.”

On Thursday, 8 January, I took an early morning flight to the port city of Bushehr, which sits on the Persian Gulf across from Kuwait. I planned to help a scholar friend with their research on pre-colonial maritime relations with the Indian subcontinent. Quietly, I was also glad to be leaving Tehran, where tensions were mounting.

Bushehr is best known for the nuclear power plant on its outskirts. But I was staying in the charming old town, which has a laid-back southern Mediterranean feel, with its mix of alleyways and rotting British colonial edifices. That evening, at exactly 8 PM, the city, like many others in Iran, erupted. The call came from an assortment of social media accounts, but primarily from Reza Pahlavi, whose father, the Shah of Iran, was deposed and went into exile during the 1979 revolution. Reza appears to have spent the last 46 years waiting for his day in the sun. And as the IR has squashed all opposition voices, including those from within its own ranks, his prayers seem to have finally been answered.

A small portion of the Iranian population, mostly in the diaspora, has always wanted the Pahlavis to return to power. But in recent years, as the political situation has gone from bad to worse, this minority position has found much wider traction, thanks in part to two anti-regime satellite TV channels, Manoto and Iran International – the latter reportedly funded by Saudi Arabia – plus an array of bot armies. The transformation has been remarkable. Many people who even a few years ago would have contemptuously dismissed the former crown prince are now willing to accept him as a price for dismantling the IR.

In Bushehr’s old town, the bazaar merchants began closing up shop well before 8 PM. Around this time, my friend and I walked with a few others from our hotel to the beach to get the best view of the main coastal road, where protestors had begun to gather. Anti-riot units were stationed at intervals along the street – and, I assumed, along all the main arteries of the relatively narrow peninsula. Right at 8 PM, the sound of live rounds seemed to come from all directions. It did not take long for the fireworks to dramatically intensify. The men in uniform, armed to the teeth, began making wide sweeps of the area, getting into one melee after another.

In the mazy old town, groups of people, mostly young, emerged from the back alleys while squads of police circled back onto the coastal road in pursuit. Later, returning to our hotel during what appeared to be a lull in the fighting, we ran smack into a company of about two dozen anti-riot police marching in formation. We stepped out of their way; they seemed quite uninterested, as if committed to more immediate quarry.

Next to the hotel stood a building still under construction. At some point I could only gape as a man, dressed head to foot in black, approached the impossibly tall wall and scaled it as if he had sticky webs on his hands. This happened so fast that at first I doubted what I had seen. But the man had been there. I’d seen him. And he had then disappeared. One of the hotel staff later told me that pretty much everyone knew one another in town, and that he’d noticed many people from outlying areas, as well as total strangers.

The next morning, Friday, we woke to find the main thoroughfare around the corner from the hotel choked with debris. Banks had been torched and stores looted. The sickly smell of burnt plastic permeated everything and the spent remains of shotgun shells littered the ground. I found varieties of ammunition, pellets and slugs, some as large as walnuts. Anyone familiar with such weapons knows how devastating they can be at close range.

We spent the day meeting various professors and guides and museum directors, all the while knowing that, when evening arrived, everything around us could explode. Many of our interlocutors remarked on this strangeness; it seemed emblematic of what the whole country was experiencing.

Just like the previous night, the fireworks began at 8 PM sharp. From the hotel roof, the protestors seemed mostly young. They were fearless. If tear gas fell at their feet, they were quick to pick it up and throw it back. The night manager, beside himself with fear, kept coming up to tell me to go back inside. Eventually, I went down to the reception area, where a glance was enough to see a good cross-section of Iranian society holding its breath. Staff and guests, the well-off and working class, sat together or stood around in a state of anxiety, neither able to give comfort to one another nor complain too much.

As the skirmishes outside escalated, gas made its way into the hotel’s courtyard. Three young guests, caught outside, ran into the lobby, coughing and pressing their hands to their faces. Some of the hotel staff cursed the demonstrators for wanting to turn the country into another Syria. Others stared at the security cameras showing flashbangs and people running every which way. When one of the kitchen staff announced she was going to brave the street to reach her daughter, a co-worker told her in no uncertain terms to stay put. Soon, gas began to bleed through the lobby’s poorly-insulated door. And then, slowly, the sourness and sting retreated, as if some wild creature had come just close enough to bare its fangs.

I flew back to Tehran on Saturday. As alarming accounts filtered in, I tried to compare what I had witnessed in the south with the things I was being told had occurred in the capital. The information was confusing and contradictory and the usual blame game was making the rounds. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the protests had begun organically and were a long time coming. There was also no doubt that the IR had severely crushed the protests. The regime, weakened by the 12-day war and the blows to its allies in Lebanon and Syria, had taken new and previously unimaginable measures to preserve itself.

In the meantime, conspiracy theories abounded. A Mossad operation. An American one. Perhaps the Iranian deep state was plotting a power grab? Some friends had witnessed men, apparently well-trained, taking industrial saws to pedestrian bridges and trees. Others had heard of protestors pulling out side-arms and knee-capping fellow demonstrators before disappearing into the crowd. The disconnect between who really saw what and who heard it from a source once or twice removed was in direct contrast with the 12-Day war, when the destruction was incontestable.

In the next few days a pall fell over the country. The quiet was chilling. We all knew that a bloodbath had taken place, though as yet we didn’t know its true magnitude and perhaps never will. Yet the illusion of a return to normal life began as early as that Saturday. As before, I sat in cafes and chatted. I ordered my double shot cortados, I made plans about future projects and visits to other towns. The whole time it was as if we were in the middle of some make-believe, and that when we woke up the next day, none of what was around us would belong to our world.

From Sunday evening, as communication became close to impossible, and only domestic internet and TV remained available, I watched – obsessively – local official news that did not, for a change, hesitate to show all manner of dead and wounded, including members of the security forces. The number of casualties was too great to deny and the state broadcasters didn’t try. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been shot at or injured or killed. That there were fatalities on both sides gave the broadcasters an out. They blurred the lines of the dead, speaking abstractly of “martyrs”, as if the regime was itself the victim of an evil conspiracy.

Eventually I decided to go out and speak to friends. V, a journalist who lives near the 7th-Tir metro stop, told me of at least two neighbours who, at dawn on Saturday, donned their best Friday suits and ties and went up to their roofs where, in all seriousness, they held up the Lion and Sun flag of the Pahlavi regime and simply waited. And waited. As devoted watchers of Iran International, they were convinced that Reza, escorted by President Trump, was on his way to announce the end of the Islamic Republic. They wished to be among the first to welcome the liberators.

H, a fireman, told me that unknown assailants had shot at several colleagues of his friend, a police detective, who needed to get rid of his uniform and don regular clothes.

“Did you take him the clothes?” I asked.

“I jumped on the motorbike with a shirt, jacket and pants and met him in the Sadeqiyah district. I felt bad. I was the one who had convinced him to leave his cushy desk job at headquarters and get back into uniform and pursue homicide cases. The man’s blood would have been on my head if he got killed.” After a pause, he added, “I heard the bastards set fire to a fireman.”

“Which bastards?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know which bastards anymore.”

It had been a while since I last saw my old friend P. During the massive but far less violent protests of 2009, she had accompanied me to several major demonstrations. She was riding on the back of my motorbike when a policeman clipped me hard on the shoulder with a baton. The intense pain lasted for days. We’d travelled a long distance since then, in opposite directions – much of it had to do with politics. P wanted to topple the Islamic Republic at any cost, preferably taking maximum measures, and could not accept my attempts to understand it and, if possible, push it toward reform. To her milieu, I was a vasat-baz, somebody who plays the middle and does not take hard sides.

When we met at her house she appeared exhausted; she’d been to all the protests over the last few days. At Laleh Park, she had bought me a pair of socks stitched with the word gomrah – ‘misguided’. A young man there had shown her a video of his posse sticking a broom up a plainclothes government agent’s anus. Her tired eyes seemed to glow for an instant when she reported this. She wanted me to know how she loved Donald Trump and wished he would hurry up already and get here. Or at least send in the Israelis to finish the job.

What was there to say to that? While her stance was not pervasive, neither was it uncommon. I had heard variations of this wish for deliverance from a number of people, sometimes out of sheer frustration and sometimes with a blind single-mindedness and total disregard for what would happen on the day after.

When I got home, my downstairs neighbour was at the door – a young Azeri Turk who dealt drugs to support his mother and sister. More than once he’d been arrested and beaten for the sin of drinking alcohol. He often sought my advice as to the best way to leave the country.

“The bastards shot my car, Agha Salar,” he told me, pointing to the gaping hole in his fender. “Can you believe what would have happened if we’d been on foot!”

“You’re all your mother and sister have got. Don’t go out there to protest anymore.”

“You bet I won’t. The other day at a demonstration a girl not two meters away from me was shot right in the head. Saw it myself. Blood everywhere. She wasn’t doing anything. These people got evil inside them, Agha Salar. I’m telling you. All my life I could do nothing. No drinking, no dancing, no fun. Nothing. Everything is: not allowed, not allowed, not allowed. I wish I could leave. Why do you keep coming back here anyway?”

In some northern towns, such as Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, the reports of bloodshed had been sickening. An acquaintance there described opening his door to strangers bleeding from head to foot and virtually falling into his arms. In just about every conversation in the immediate aftermath, I heard similar descriptions of pellets fired on protestors. A lot was hearsay, but the scenes at the morgue, shown on national TV, did not lie. At the same time, the numbers of the dead had become a source of passionate contestation – nobody knew the true figures, and in the absence of facts there was a competition to produce the biggest sums. After a while, I stopped focusing on the numbers. It hardly made sense to debate whether sixty thousand or six thousand had been killed.

This crisis had been a long time in the making. How else to explain the reappearance over the years of so many anti-riot forces in neighbourhoods such as mine? Yes, the numbers were shocking. There was no denying their scale. You can slaughter and claim it was in self-defence, but no one has to believe you. And no one does.

Increasingly, Iranians live in two realities: one for the regime’s opponents, broadcast by the satellite channels, and another for those who still believe the system is legitimate. I have always been struck by the IR’s ability to produce a counternarrative for its own audience, the sort of people who not so long ago gathered in their millions for the funeral of Qasem Soleimani, and to do so – if not necessarily with style – compellingly and abundantly. 10 January was relatively quiet, 11 January even more so. Then the avalanche of propaganda began and on 12 January, the government organized a march and ceremony for the recent “martyrs”. As always, it passed through my neighbourhood.

The crowd was thick and bore flags. The women were dressed in long black chadors and the men were bearded and solemn, many wearing kaffiyehs and turning prayer beads. I joined the sea of mourners as they made their way south. Security was heavy. Still, several times older women on the sidewalks screamed at the marchers: You have the blood of Iran’s children on your hands! The marchers would stop, looking almost mystified for a moment, then shout something back about fifth columns and traitors. At Hasanabad Square, I turned left on Imam Khomeini Avenue to return home. The stores here were doing business, entirely indifferent to the procession on Hafez.

Later that week I met S at a café near his apartment in the university area. (During the 12-Day War, an Israeli missile had hit his office building, by mistake apparently. No one was inside at the time and in any case the missile failed to detonate.) A plainclothes fellow came in and sat at the table behind us – you can always tell by how they go out of their way not to look directly at you. He seemed quite busy with his mobile phone, even though the internet was still down.

S rolled a cigarette and asked the man for a light. He looked up, slightly surprised, then reached for his lighter and handed it over. It was a reminder – perhaps a rather too facile reminder – that we were all in this together. But together in what exactly? I didn’t know. For years I had imagined there was a way out for all of us. A way to remake the Islamic Republic in the image of Iranian society, to remodel it. That dream ended with the killings of January 2026 and for me, I doubt another dream will replace it any time soon.