Between Bombs and Basij: Daily Life in Wartime Tehran

She stands in the hallway with her phone in one hand and her bag in the other. The bag contains insulin for her mother, or rather the hope of insulin, because the pharmacy on Enghelab Street has been out for a week. The phone contains something more dangerous: three months of conversations. She swipes through them, deleting methodically. A voice message from her cousin in Cologne. A photo someone forwarded from a protest in 2022, still buried in a group chat she forgot to leave. A joke about the Supreme Leader that arrived at two in the morning from a number she does not recognize.

Outside, the muffled percussion of anti-aircraft fire has become part of the city's rhythm, something between weather and traffic. She is not deleting because of the bombs. She is deleting because of the checkpoint on Valiasr Street, where three young men in Basij uniforms spent yesterday afternoon scrolling through a stranger's phone while the stranger stood with his arms at his sides and his face carefully empty.

The walk to the pharmacy is nine minutes. The preparation takes twenty.

The Morning Ritual

Every day begins with subtraction. Residents of wartime Tehran describe a choreography so practiced it has become automatic: clear the Telegram cache, log out of Instagram, uninstall the VPN, check that the approved apps are visible on the home screen. Choose clothes that signal nothing. For women, this means an additional calculus that predates the war by decades but has sharpened since the airstrikes began, because checkpoints have multiplied and the personnel staffing them have expanded authority and shortened patience.

The Basij, the paramilitary volunteer force that functions as the Islamic Republic's capillary system, operates street-level checkpoints across Tehran. Before the war, these were concentrated around universities, metro stations, and public gatherings. Since the onset of hostilities, they have spread to residential neighborhoods, pharmacy queues, bread lines. The rationale offered by state media is counter-sabotage. The effect is total: there is no errand that does not pass through the possibility of inspection.

Phone inspections are not random. Officers look for specific things. VPN applications, particularly those that surged during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests. Telegram channels affiliated with opposition groups or exile-based media outlets. Signal, WhatsApp, or any encrypted messenger that resists state monitoring. Photos from protests, even years old. Contact with phone numbers registered abroad. The search is efficient because the criteria are broad, and because almost everyone in Tehran has, at some point, used a VPN to access a blocked website or received a forwarded message they should not have kept.

The internet itself has become unreliable. Since the nationwide shutdowns during the 2022 uprising, Iran's connectivity has existed in a state of managed deterioration. Speeds throttled to make video calls impossible. Access to international platforms intermittent. The National Information Network, the state-controlled domestic intranet, functions as a kind of approved corridor through which citizens may communicate, shop, and be surveilled. During airstrikes, even this corridor narrows or closes entirely. The phone in your pocket becomes a brick, then a liability, then a brick again.

Two Sirens

There are air raid sirens, and there are other warnings. The first are official, broadcast through civil defense systems when missile strikes are detected or expected. Tehran's metro stations double as shelters. Families crowd onto platforms with blankets and thermoses, children sleeping against tile walls. The Khatam al-Anbiya Air Defense headquarters coordinates the military response while civilians wait underground for the all-clear.

The second kind of warning travels through informal channels that the Islamic Republic has never managed to fully suppress. A neighbor knocks and says the Basij are sweeping Sadeghiyeh district. A WhatsApp message, barely legible through the throttled connection, warns that plainclothes officers are checking phones at Tajrish Square. A car idling on the corner that everyone on the block recognizes without speaking about it. These warnings carry a different kind of urgency, because the threat they signal does not end when the all-clear sounds.

The overlap between these two warning systems is where ordinary life fractures. During and immediately after airstrikes, when streets are chaotic with displaced residents and damaged infrastructure, Basij patrols intensify rather than recede. Reports from Iranian citizen journalists describe checkpoints appearing within hours of strikes, positioned not to assist evacuees but to intercept them. The logic is legible once you see it: disruption creates movement, movement creates opportunity for inspection, inspection produces arrests.

When you hear footsteps behind you on a dark street, are you afraid of what falls from the sky or what stands on the ground?

The Checkpoint

The checkpoint on Valiasr Street is unremarkable. Three young men, a folding table, a car with tinted windows parked at the curb. One man checks identification cards. A second has the assignment that matters: he takes your phone.

What follows has been documented by Iran Human Rights, Amnesty International, and dozens of anonymous accounts relayed through exile-based journalists. The officer scrolls through your photo gallery. He opens your messaging apps. He checks your installed applications list. He may ask you to unlock specific folders or enter passwords. Refusal is not a practical option, because refusal is itself evidence of something to hide, and the car with the tinted windows is right there.

The inspection takes between two and fifteen minutes. During this time, you stand. You do not speak unless spoken to. You keep your face in the expression that millions of Iranians have perfected across four decades of street-level encounters with state authority: attentive, respectful, neither too calm nor too anxious. An affect of cooperative boredom that takes years of practice to sustain while a stranger reads your private messages.

For women, the checkpoint compounds. The same pause that allows an officer to inspect your phone allows a second officer to assess your hijab compliance. Since Iran's Guardian Council finalized the Hijab and Chastity Law in September 2024, after parliament passed it the previous year, penalties for noncompliance escalated sharply. Women who participated in the 2022 Jina movement, the wave of protests that erupted after Mahsa Jina Amini's death in morality police custody, now face the particular danger that charges once classified as civil offenses risk being upgraded to national security violations under wartime provisions. The punishment for showing your hair has changed. The act has not.

The Pharmacy Queue

The pharmacy on Enghelab Street, when it has stock at all, opens at eight. By seven-fifteen, the queue stretches past the shuttered bookshop next door. People bring folding chairs. They bring documentation: prescriptions, insurance cards, identification, letters from doctors explaining why this particular medication cannot be substituted. Much of this paperwork is performative, because the pharmacist knows what she has and what she does not have, and no letter changes the arithmetic.

Iran's medicine supply chain was already strained by decades of international sanctions that, despite formal humanitarian exemptions, effectively blocked banking channels needed to purchase pharmaceutical raw materials and finished drugs. The war has added direct damage: strikes on infrastructure, disrupted transportation routes, and a further collapse of the Rial that has made imported medications unaffordable even when available. The Iranian Rial has lost over 97 percent of its value against the dollar since 2018, falling from roughly 42,000 to the dollar to over 1.6 million by early 2026. A vial of insulin that cost the equivalent of a day's wages five years ago now costs a week's.

Fuel rationing compounds the misery. Power outages, already chronic before the war due to aging infrastructure and mismanagement, have become severe as airstrikes damage electrical grids and natural gas pipelines. Hospitals operate on generators when they can secure diesel. Dialysis patients, cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, diabetics dependent on refrigerated insulin face a cascading failure in which each broken link in the supply chain magnifies the others.

Healthcare workers inhabit their own version of the dual threat. They treat war casualties alongside routine patients in facilities lacking supplies, while navigating regime-imposed restrictions on reporting civilian injury data. The numbers that leave Iran's hospitals do not match the numbers that arrive, because the gap between them has been classified as a matter of national security.

The Neighbor's Eyes

In the apartment building on Keshavarz Boulevard, everyone knows that the family on the third floor reports to the local Basij Paygah, the neighborhood base that has functioned as a capillary intelligence node since the early years of the Islamic Republic. The Paygah system predates the war, predates the protests, predates the internet. It is older than many of the residents it monitors. Its members are drawn from the same community they observe, which gives it an intimacy that no surveillance camera can replicate.

What has changed during the war is the scope of reportable behavior. Before, the Paygah tracked political activity, moral infractions, suspicious visitors. Now, the list includes economic crimes, because wartime scarcity has made hoarding, informal trading, and price-setting into acts that the judiciary prosecutes under the same framework as sedition. Buying an extra bag of rice because you heard the supply trucks are not coming this week is, from a certain angle, indistinguishable from undermining the war effort. The regime's legal architecture permits this conflation, and the neighbor on the third floor does not need to understand the distinction to file a report.

The IRGC's intelligence arm, Sazman-e Ettelaat-e Sepah, operates parallel to VAJA, the Ministry of Intelligence. This redundancy is not inefficiency. It is design. Overlapping surveillance means that avoiding one network does not guarantee avoiding the other. It means that two agencies may be watching the same person for different reasons, producing a kind of ambient suspicion that functions even when no specific operation is underway.

Trust erodes from the inside. Not dramatically, not in a single betrayal, but in the slow accumulation of caution: you stop telling your neighbor when you are traveling, you stop asking why their son was absent for three days, you stop sharing food when you have extra because generosity requires explanation and explanation requires trust you no longer extend. The war did not create this dynamic. It accelerated it, the way wind accelerates a fire that was already burning.

Women, Twice Over

A woman in wartime Tehran occupies a particular coordinate in the threat matrix. She is bombed from above, policed for her appearance from below, and surveilled for her opinions in between. The Mahsa Amini movement did not win its immediate demands, but it accomplished something the regime cannot undo: it made every uncovered head legible as a political act. Before September 2022, a loose hijab might have been carelessness or fashion. After it, the regime reads it as defiance, and reads defiance as a security threat.

The Hijab and Chastity Law, passed by parliament in 2023 and approved by the Guardian Council in September 2024, codified this escalation. Repeat offenses now carry prison sentences, fines calibrated to be ruinous for working-class women, and restrictions on access to public services including education and banking. The enforcement apparatus, once primarily the Gasht-e Ershad morality patrols, has been absorbed into the broader checkpoint infrastructure, meaning that hijab compliance is now checked at the same stops where phones are inspected and identification is verified. The system has become efficient.

Women who were arrested during the 2022 protests face a particular temporal trap. Their cases, some of which were initially processed as misdemeanors, risk escalation under wartime security provisions that carry far heavier sentences. A woman who threw a stone at a police car in October 2022 may now face charges of moharebeh, waging war against God, a crime that carries the death penalty. The war did not create the charge. It changed the calendar under which the charge is filed.

Female heads of household, estimated at roughly 12 to 13 percent of Iranian households, navigate the compounded pressures of economic provider and regime target simultaneously. They queue for bread, negotiate with landlords, manage children's schooling disrupted by strikes and shutdowns, and do all of this while presenting, at every checkpoint, the appearance of compliance. The performance is exhausting. The cost of a single failure is not a fine. It is a family without its anchor.

The Night That Belongs to No One

Aerial strikes tend to come at night. This is not unique to Iran. Military operations favor darkness for tactical reasons that have nothing to do with the people sleeping below. But the consequence is that nighttime in Tehran has become a space without ownership. It does not belong to sleep, because the sirens come. It does not belong to the state, because the state's infrastructure goes dark with the power grid. It does not belong to the residents, because the residents lie in half-consciousness, dressed, phones charged, bags near the door.

What the bag contains depends on what you fear more. Some pack for the shelter: water, blankets, documents, medication. Others pack for the door: cash, a change of clothes, the phone you did not fully clean. Reports from human rights organizations document that security forces conduct raids in the hours between midnight and dawn, a timing that exploits disorientation and the absence of witnesses. When the electricity fails during a strike and the neighborhood goes black, there is no way to distinguish between the sound of a military jet and the sound of a car pulling up to your building.

People describe a specific quality of fear that belongs to this in-between hour. It is not the fear of death, which the bombs represent, though that fear is real. It is the fear of disappearance, which the security forces represent, and which carries its own particular weight because disappearance is not an event but a process. A person who dies in an airstrike is mourned. A person who is taken in a night raid enters a system designed to make their absence ambiguous: perhaps they are in Evin Prison, perhaps in a provincial detention facility, perhaps in one of the IRGC's unofficial holding sites. The family does not know, because not knowing is the point.

What the Government Calls Protection

The Islamic Republic's narrative is not without internal logic. External enemies are attacking the nation. Internal enemies collaborate with them. The checkpoints protect you. The phone inspections identify spies. The restrictions on movement prevent sabotage. This framing is delivered through state media, through Friday sermons, through the Basij Paygah network, and through the simple repetition of wartime iconography in which resistance to foreign aggression and obedience to the state are the same thing.

This is not a framing that all Iranians reject. The rally-around-the-flag effect is documented across authoritarian and democratic states alike: external attacks produce a measurable, if often temporary, surge in support for the incumbent government. Some Tehranis who despise the regime's domestic policies genuinely fear the foreign bombs and genuinely believe that internal cohesion is necessary for survival. They are not wrong that the bombs are real. They are not wrong that disunity during bombardment carries risk. The regime exploits this reasonable fear, but the fear itself is not manufactured.

The Basij mobilizes volunteers for both civil defense and neighborhood security, and the ambiguity is the point. The same young man who helps carry an elderly woman to the metro shelter during an airstrike will, two hours later, check a student's phone at a checkpoint. The same institution distributes emergency food packages and collects intelligence. The same uniform that signals help signals danger, depending on the hour and the context and the contents of your phone.

The regime learned this integration during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, when the same fusion of civil defense and ideological enforcement was used to suppress internal dissent while fighting Saddam Hussein's army. The language has not changed. The technology has. The Islamic Republic of 1983 could monitor its citizens through informants and mail interception. The Islamic Republic of 2026 can read every message you have sent since you bought the phone.

The Chat She Did Not Delete

She stands in the hallway. The phone is lighter now, emptied of most of what made it hers. The conversations with her cousin in Cologne are gone. The group chats are gone. The jokes, the rumors, the forwarded news clips that she watched at one in the morning with the volume turned to its lowest setting while her mother slept in the next room.

But one message remains. She has looked at it three times this morning, each time with her thumb hovering over the delete icon. It is a voice note from a friend who left Tehran in 2023, recorded on a winter night in Istanbul, three minutes of someone talking about the rain and the smell of tea and how strange it is to feel safe and how she is not sure she feels safe at all, just differently afraid.

The message is not political. It contains no names, no plans, no slogans. But it was sent on an encrypted app that the checkpoint officers know how to find. Its existence on her phone is a fact that could generate questions, and questions at a checkpoint do not have good answers, only less bad ones.

She keeps it. She puts the phone in her pocket, picks up her bag, and opens the door. Outside, the morning sounds of a city that is being simultaneously bombed and policed fill the street like a frequency just below the range of ordinary hearing: generators humming, a distant siren winding down, the engine of a car that might be anyone's.

The walk to the pharmacy is nine minutes. She begins.