‘What is this smoke, Mom?’ A Tehran schoolgirl discovers war.
| London
Morning had just dawned on Sunday when an inquisitive Iranian girl awakened to war.
Looking out her Tehran window, 7-year-old Tooba was amazed to see a large plume of smoke rising from a nearby neighborhood. It was the result of one of hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on Iran that began Friday, targeting nuclear and energy facilities, and decimating the top echelons of Iran’s military elite.
The schoolgirl had slept through previous Israeli barrages, or she had watched cartoons and played Minecraft during daylight raids. But on Sunday she was confronted by unmistakable evidence that war is now directly impacting Iranian civilians – for the first time in more than a generation – and she raced to her mother.
Why We Wrote This
Israeli airstrikes mark the first time in four decades that Iranian civilians have known the violence of war. How are they managing the shock?
“She woke me to ask, ‘What is this smoke, Mom?’” recalls Tooba’s mother, Elham, a painter and sculptor in Tehran, who, like other Iranians quoted in this article, asked that only their first names be used to discuss their personal experiences of the conflict.
“I told her a very simple story of battles between countries,” says Elham, who lived through Iran’s war with Iraq during the 1980s, when each side rained missiles down on the other. “And I added some of my childhood memories, the sweet parts.”
“I used to make a dolls’ house in the basement, to save my dolls,” Elham recalls.
Unsatisfied, Tooba had two questions about this war that Elham found hard to answer.
“Do they want to hurt us?” was the first. The second: “Are we losing our house? And my room?”
“We also had a sad talk about our cat, if we don’t take her with us,” says Elham.
That prospect became much more concrete on Monday afternoon, when Israel issued orders to evacuate Elham’s district within hours.
When war hits home
Iranians are reeling from Friday’s surprise attack by Israel, which has reduced some targets to Gaza-style rubble and killed 224 people, 90% of them civilians, according to official figures.
Likewise, Iran’s barrage of hundreds of retaliatory missiles has also left a trail of destruction in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities – where until now Israelis, like Iranians, had largely been spared the direct impact of the many wars their leaders have waged.
For decades, Iranian television – and the fiery anti-Israel and anti-U.S. rhetoric of Iran’s leaders – has focused on the catastrophic results of conflicts elsewhere, either wars started by its two archfoes, or wars involving Iran abroad or its well-armed regional allies.
But Iranians have not tasted war on the home front since they fought Iraqi troops, between 1980 and 1988. Now Israel’s campaign – which seems designed to sow doubts in Iranians’ minds about their leaders, as well as do damage to the country’s nuclear program – has brought war into Iranian sitting rooms.
Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project
“Hearing about such events from the media is one thing, but when you hear them from people around you, it becomes more shocking,” says a young Iranian professional and resident of Tehran, who gives the name Hossein.
His wife is still in shock, he says, after hearing from a friend that two of her daughter’s schoolmates, both around 10 years old, were killed in an Israeli strike in western Tehran. It took hours to remove their remains from beneath the rubble.
“No matter how precise and targeted these attacks are, human casualties are inevitable,” says Hossein. “Witnessing such horrible scenes is not common in Iran. I myself had no idea how it feels when a fighter jet flies above your head.”
Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, warned that all Tehran “will burn” if Iran continues to aim missile barrages at Israeli civilian targets. Iranian officials have made it clear, however, that revenge remains their top priority.
So Iranians are clogging highways out of the capital. Gas stations are besieged, and shops are emptying of essentials.
“This is the face of war. I persuaded my family to travel north so they could be in a safer place – I don’t know what will happen to me,” says a veteran Iranian journalist in Tehran who asked not to be named. “This kind of departure means letting go of everything you have and securing the bare minimum to survive.”
“Some restaurants and cafés are still operating,” says the journalist. “Overall, those who remember the 1980s war might be a bit calmer, but the younger generation, which has no memory of the sounds of war from those days, is shocked by what’s happening. Sometimes they follow the news with excitement, and other times with deep anxiety.”
Doubts about government on the rise
Iranians note a “rally-around-the-flag” effect across Iran’s usually divided political spectrum, in the face of attack from an outside enemy. Hossein Dehbashi, for example, who once made a film supporting a reformist Iranian president, had no compunction about posting a message backing the revenge response of the current conservative leadership.
“The only effective pressure is injecting fear inside Israel and triggering domestic demands there,” Mr. Dehbashi posted on X. “And that only comes with heavy Zionist casualties. Pray for our missiles!”
Still, the Israeli strikes have also made many Iranians wonder whether the unrelenting anti-Israel and anti-U.S. rhetoric since the 1979 Islamic Revolution helped pave the way for the assault.
“They had hopes that Iran’s response would reduce the intensity of the Israeli attacks, but it didn’t happen,” Hossein says.
Hossein recalls how one regime supporter, clearly frustrated, told him that “our officials underestimated this enemy. Our situation would be different if they hadn’t wasted their time with empty threats.”
Another friend marveled to Hossein that Israel could kill so many top Iranian commanders so quickly.
“It’s truly regrettable to see that people who claimed for years to be defending us couldn’t even ensure their own safety inside their homes,” the friend told Hossein. “If Israel could eliminate them this easily, then everything we’ve been told over the years was just a bunch of lies.”
“There are still people who support the regime, but when you talk to them, many no longer seem to have the same trust in the Islamic Republic that they had before,” says Hossein. “It seems they are losing their morale.”
