I’ve been talking to people in Iran. They face an impossible choice.

There is a photograph on Instagram of a girl who shares almost my exact name — Roya Rastegar. She is 33 years old. She is from Isfahan, my grandfather’s city. Security forces raided her home in January and arrested her. No one has heard from her since. 

Every morning, I wake up too early and reach for my phone to check Signal and Telegram. It has been just over two weeks since bombs began falling on Iran. To understand what this period has meant to people inside the country, you have to understand what happened in the weeks before, and the 47 years before that. The American and Israeli strikes in Iran began as Iranians inside and outside the country were still reeling from the largest ever uprising against the Islamic Republic’s theocratic dictatorship — and from the massacres the regime carried out to crush it on January 8 and 9. Conservative estimates put the death toll from those two days at around 30,000. 

Ever since the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic has waged a sustained war against its own population: against women and girls, against journalists and artists who speak openly, against labor organizers, students, religious and ethnic minorities, and anyone who challenges its rule. In January, that war reached a horrifying peak when security forces killed thousands of people in the streets, and then raided hospitals where wounded protesters had sought treatment to give them a final shot in the head. 

As cofounder of the Iranian Diaspora Collective, a pro-democracy group, I have spent these weeks in constant contact with Iranians inside and outside the country, relying on voice notes that come through intermittently during the regime’s ongoing internet blackout. For the last 22 months, I have also been in production for a documentary following six young dancers across different cities in Iran. Through their eyes, I’ve watched Iranians stare down death and torture to protest the regime.

The war has forced many Iranians into an agonizing calculation, with no clean answer.  The wrong response is to allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to continue its nearly half-century reign of terror. But how to challenge it is the question causing vicious disagreements.

For Iranians inside the country, it is not a theoretical debate, but an immediate question of which violence they are more likely to survive. People — especially protestors who took to the streets — say that they cannot overthrow this highly militarized regime barehanded. Those calling for intervention also understand that war accelerates the mass destruction of their beloved homeland and will have an unbearable civilian cost. The bombing of a girls’ school has already made that clear and further divided Iranians. 

It is like watching your family being killed and tortured inside a house, and coming to the conclusion that the only way to save them is to set the house on fire. Or having your house infested with termites, with your family trapped inside, and fumigating anyway. 

A few weeks after the massacres, I remember my conversation with Bita, 21. I’d heard from a mental health professional working with people in Iran, as well as from people on the ground, that suicide had dramatically risen once the internet came back on in the weeks after the January 8 and 9 massacres. Bita told me that many of her friends are suicidal — not because they have a hormonal imbalance or are depressed, and not because they might want to make their death a display of protest, but because they are afraid of how the regime kills. She had heard reports of what the regime was doing to the bodies of those killed: the torture, the specific violence done to women.

“I am not afraid of death,” she said. “I am afraid of them.”

Early hopes and grim reality

After the strikes began, the first messages from inside Iran were people confirming they were safe. Then, within hours, something shifted — a quality in the voice notes I had not heard in months. Relief. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day, friends sent small moments of celebration.

One message read: “It is ironic that a man who dedicated his life to war with Israel and the U.S. dies on day one.” It was a strong, promising start.

Then the regime, cornered and enraged, began to lash out. Shirin, a 28-year-old dancer in southern Iran and one of the subjects of the documentary, described the past several days where she lives. “A lot of people were beaten. The night before last, they attacked people — right in front of my brother’s eyes, they completely slammed someone against a car’s bumper just because he had been celebrating,” she said. Café owners were attacked and their businesses shut down. “Yesterday, they beat another person just because music was playing. Saying it was ‘celebration.’”

“For now, I think for one or two weeks everything will be completely in their hands,” she added. “It’s like they have a scab and they keep picking it open — acting out some kind of pent-up resentment.”

Martial law descended on Tehran. The internet was severed again. People found themselves back in the dark — but now with bombs falling above them too.

Videos circulate on social media: curtains billowing through an open window — not from a spring breeze, but from the pressure of a bomb detonating nearby. It is the kind of image that makes the scale of what is happening visceral in a way that casualty numbers cannot. What strikes me, watching these videos and the people in them, is the nerves of steel it takes simply to remain. To keep filming. To keep sending voice notes. To keep going to the corner store.

But the early moral clarity quickly passed with the strike on the elementary school near Minab Navy Base. At least 175 people were killed, according to Iranian officials, many of them schoolchildren.  The source of the strike was immediately contested — misinformation moving faster than facts, as it always does now — but independent reports indicate it was an errant US strike. 

That moment cracked the Iranian diaspora, which was already split between factions supporting Western intervention to lead to a transitional democratic government, and those who vehemently opposed American and Israeli involvement, particularly after the flattening of Gaza, along entirely new lines. When the Iranian Diaspora Collective posted the girls’ names and photographs, the activists that the Iranian Diaspora Collective collaborated with on the post faced hateful attacks for even acknowledging the dead. They took down the post. The girls are still dead.

Friendships ended. People blocked each other. People who had marched together for Woman, Life, Freedom in Los Angeles and London and Toronto were calling each other delusional warmongers and leftist regime apologists. The people being called warmongers are often the same people whose family members are inside Iran right now, living under the bombs. The people being called naive are often those who have watched every previous moment of apparent hope collapse. An Instagram photo circulates of a wall with writing that says, in big block letters: “I hope you never know the sheer desperation of a people begging to be bombed.”

“It’s like an open surgery”

Inside Iran, people describe a different kind of unity — forged not from agreement but from proximity to gunfire. As one young woman put it in a voice note shared on Instagram: “When you are all running from the police shooting at you, you don’t stop to ask whether the person next to you is a monarchist or a leftist. You just run.”

But the unity is tested by the question of whether the bombings should end immediately, whether foreign ground troops should be sent in, or whether the war should continue indefinitely until the regime is gone.   

Abbas, a 42-year-old painter in Tehran who has been sending me voice notes throughout, described walking past a bombed site in his neighborhood on Tuesday, with people covered in ash looking up at the sky shouting: “Thank you, Uncle Trump. Thank you for saving us.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” he said. “People have lost their minds. War changes people. People are losing their humanity on all sides.”

Southern cities — Bushehr, Bandar Abbas — are sustaining significant damage, according to multiple accounts. In Tehran, fires from petroleum leaking through damaged infrastructure have spread across entire streets. The ancient mirrored glass of Golestan Palace shattered. Historic buildings gone. 

The city is suffocating in smoke so thick that Abbas looks up and cannot tell whether it is going to rain or whether Tehran itself is burning. His most recent voice notes have a different quality from those at the start of the week. A woman he knows jumped from her 12th-floor apartment, leaving a young family to clean her body from their patio below. He describes a maddening buzzing in the air, a collective helplessness, the unknowing pushing people past what they can hold.

“One thing people forget,” he said, “is that we haven’t even reached the PTSD part yet. We’re still in the trauma part.”

The regime is not collapsing cleanly. Abbas describes the internal power struggle as something out of Game of Thrones — reformists, hardliners, extreme hardliners all fighting for control. What he calls the baby snakes — the most violent factions, ascending in the chaos — are what frightens him most. “When the head of a snake is cut off,” he said, “the smaller snakes become more dangerous. They don’t know how to control their venom.” 

The government has already announced Khamenei’s hardliner son will replace him. Abbas worries that more war will only empower the “snakes” further. 

“It’s gone too far,” he told me. 

Nor does he expect most of the people he knows who went into the streets in January to ever go out again. “They say: I hate this regime and I want to change it, but I’m not sacrificing my life if they are just going to blindly and mercilessly kill everyone,” he told me. 

Others see the strikes as the first real pressure the regime has ever faced — and perhaps their only window for regime change. If the regime survives, it will become even more monstrous, and all the destruction and killings of the past two months will all be for naught. 

Sepanta, a 30-year-old entrepreneur in Tehran who participated in the protests, wrote to me from Tehran on Wednesday: “The city is almost empty. Stores are mainly closed. Lots of checkpoints — Basij armed with AK-47s, patrolling on motorcycles, openly displaying their weapons. Last night, they had supporters drive through the streets, chanting and waving regime flags, escorted by the same bikers. The internet is still down.”

But while Abbas is shaken and demoralized, Sepanta is unnervingly energetic on Day 6 of the bombardment. He talks to me about air support logistics, about cutting off the regime’s broadcasting infrastructure, about what a coordinated uprising could look like with actual cover from above. “Give us a date and a time,” he said. “We will not leave the streets this time.” 

While he remains more resolute, the gap between his position and Abbas’s — a decade between them — tells its own story. Sepanta wants his future. 

“I don’t want to talk about politics or military strategy; I don’t want to be an activist,” Sepanta said. “I just want a girlfriend. I want to get married. I want to have a life. I just want to build my business. But I can’t do any of this with this regime in power.”

He cannot see a way to that life without military intervention.

“If you halt it now,” he said, “it is like an open surgery. You cannot leave the patient on the table.”

But the fear beneath every conversation now is the same: that the country absorbs all of this destruction, all of these deaths, and the regime survives anyway. 

“Iran has survived sanctions for decades,” Abbas said. “People are already used to living in terrible conditions. They can hold out longer than people think. And the regime still has enough guns to control the population.”

Someday, people may look back on this moment the way students study classic ethical thought experiments — impossible questions designed to expose what happens when core values collide. What defines those dilemmas is that no outcome leaves you morally intact. Even the least terrible choice leaves behind what philosophers call moral residue: a grief, a guilt, an unease that cannot be resolved, only carried.

For people inside Iran, the question is what is more terrifying — the uncertainty of what foreign military intervention may produce, or the certainty of what the Islamic Republic has already demonstrated it will do? They are not naive about foreign powers or geopolitical interests. They understand the history. They know that no outcome leaves them whole.