Alireza Iranmehr
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Translated by Salar Abdoh
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched air strikes on nuclear and military sites in Iran. Over the 12 days that followed, the Israeli campaign expanded to include energy and other infrastructure; Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes inside Israel; and the United States entered the conflict with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22. Alireza Iranmehr is a novelist and an essayist who lives in the north of Iran but returned to Tehran to witness and document the bombardment. He sent the following series of short dispatches to his translator throughout the conflict.
June 16, 8:30 p.m.
The enormous roundabout at Azadi Square was full of cars, yet still felt somehow deserted. Then it dawned on me: Humans—they were mostly missing. Where normally tens of thousands of pedestrians thronged, now there were only a scattered few. Even many of the cars sat empty.
Azadi Square is commonly the first place one sees upon arriving in Tehran and the last upon departure; several major expressways pass through it, and it is not far from Mehrabad Airport, which serves domestic flights. The airport reportedly had been bombarded a couple of days before, but I could not discern any sign of destruction from where I stood—just the smell of burned plastic cutting through the usual city smog.
Earlier that day, in Bandar Anzali, on the Caspian shore, I had been lucky to find a cab driver willing to bring me all the way to Tehran. The driver told me that he’d made the opposite trip with three young women in the middle of the night—and charged them 25 times the going rate. “You can see what’s going on,” he said. “There’s no gas. All the cars are stuck on the road. This is a five-hour trip, and it took us 15 hours.”
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