“We’re still alive.” That was the first thing Ilias Hoshyar heard on Saturday morning when he woke up in his house in Assen. A fleeting voice message in WhatsApp from his mother in Iran. Because while the morning started quietly in Assen, thousands of kilometers away the windows at his parents’ home were shaking.
“I wasn’t fully awake yet,” the hairdresser, who is originally from Iran, reflects on Saturday morning. “I thought, what is all this?” It wasn’t until he opened Instagram that he realized what was happening in his native country: rocket attacks from the United States and Israel. According to US President Donald Trump, it was intended to suppress Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Hoshyar follows the developments via Instagram and Telegram and speaks to his parents via Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite network. “It continues to do a good job so far. Last night when I spoke to my mother on the phone, a military post was hit quite close. She said that the windows were just shaking from the impact of those missiles.”
Hoshyar was not surprised that there would be an attack on Iran. “If you see how many ships have been moved in the past month, you could set the clock that something was going to happen. You don’t just do that.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among others, was killed in the bombings. He was the face of decades of oppression in Iran.
“On the one hand, I am very happy about it. We have seen how bloody previous protests in Iran have been,” says Hoshyar about Khamenei’s influence. “But on the other hand, it is a foreign military operation taking place in your country.” His parents, he says, are remarkably positive. “If you gauge that on Instagram, if you see what the average Iranian thinks about it: we can actually be a bit happy with it too.”
For Hoshyar, the conflict is bigger than just Iran. He sees it as a matter of security for the West. “We should be grateful to the Americans and Israelis, they are doing the dirty work. You should not imagine that those ayatollahs will get their hands on an atomic bomb.”
