At 9:40 am on Saturday morning, an English teacher (40) in Tehran wakes up from a low-flying fighter jet. Shortly afterwards she feels the earth shaking. First light, then heavier. “My windows started shaking,” she tells NRC via a recorded message.
After a short silence, a new series of explosions follows. “When the Ministry of Intelligence was hit, the windows shook again. Every now and then you still hear shelling, as if it continues.”
Saturday is the first day of the Iranian working week. Offices were open, children were in school. The attack started just as the country was just waking up and moving.
‘This is a form of revenge for us’
In Shiraz, about 900 kilometers south of the capital, a 33-year-old project manager heard a distant explosion on Saturday morning. The city remained quiet. Few cars, quiet streets. Yet that morning he felt something he describes as relief, and more than that. “We have been waiting for this for half a century,” he tells NRC. “This is a form of revenge for us. I went out early this morning, and everyone on the street was smiling.”
That mood – a mixture of euphoria and disbelief – was reflected in several conversations that NRC held on Saturday with Iranians spread across the country. A hospital worker (28) from Rasht says: “We are relieved, not afraid – we know that no civilian targets will be hit.” Her mother, 53 and old enough to have lived through the Islamic Revolution, also welcomed the attack. She says: “We are more than willing to die. If that means the next generation could live in freedom.”
Leila, a 46-year-old Iranian-Dutch woman, called her aunt in Tehran, who is now retired and previously worked in the blood transfusion department of a hospital. That aunt had barely been able to follow the news due to the faltering internet, and first heard about the scale of the attack from Leila. She responded in tears: “Please let them bomb everything. This is our only chance. If we don’t make it through this, we will never make it.”
Chaos on the road, then: silence
Chaos broke out on the roads in Tehran. Everyone was trying to get home and pick up kids from school. A teacher’s friend normally took fifteen minutes to drive from the east of the city to the center, but was now stuck in traffic for two hours.
Then the silence returned—a different silence than usual. “The sound of the cars is completely gone,” says the teacher. “No matter how hard I listen: almost no car noise anymore. People have gone home.”
In addition to joy, there is also concern about practical matters. Due to hyperinflation, many Iranians do not have enough money to stock up on non-perishable food for several days, says the project manager from Shiraz. Buying canned goods or extra gasoline is not a precaution for most, but a luxury.
Also read
Running from bullets, Iranian demonstrators flee into a bazaar. It burns down
A 43-year-old market trader in Mashhad’s bazaar has other priorities than food supplies. He thinks of his friends in prison, who were arrested during the recent protests because of a social media post or because they were recognized on surveillance footage. He hopes that the security services will now be so preoccupied with the attack that the prisons will be less closely guarded. Together with a group of friends, he thinks about how he can help them get free.
Not everyone dares to completely surrender to the euphoria. The English teacher in the north of Tehran puts it more cautiously: “We are afraid of the consequences of the war. But deep down I am hopeful and happy.”
The interviewees have not been identified by full name for security reasons.
