Dancing While the Bombs Fall

Some people inside Iran say they feel anxious when the bombs stop for more than six hours.

That detail — quietly devastating — arrived via a fragmented Signal message, routed through a neighbor's neighbor's VPN, before the sender went offline again. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make it into military briefings or budget hearings. But it may tell us more about what this war actually is than almost anything else.

The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran enters its fourth week on Saturday. The Pentagon is reportedly requesting $200 billion to fund ongoing operations. Global markets remain unsettled. And in densely populated Iranian cities, residents say the airstrikes are growing louder and more intense.

But there is a layer of this war that is almost impossible to see from the outside — because the Iranian government has made it that way.

The Blackout Within the War

Since the strikes began, Iran has imposed a near-total internet shutdown on its 90 million citizens. Roya Rastegar — a documentary filmmaker, writer, and co-founder of the Iranian Diaspora Collective, a pro-democracy organization — has been piecing together the picture from inside through a network of contacts on the ground.

What she describes is not a wartime technical failure. It is, she says, a deliberate political choice. "This internet blackout isn't a technical, wartime issue," Rastegar told Vox this week. "It is a deliberate, political choice to cut off 90 million Iranians from the global conversation."

Messages arrive in bursts. A friend gets a few minutes of access through a borrowed VPN, fires off a voice note or a Signal message, then disappears again. Even those brief windows are shaped by fear — there is a widespread sense that calls are being monitored, so people self-censor even when they can get through.

The single most consistent message coming out, Rastegar says, is not about the bombs. It's: turn the internet back on.

Life Under Bombardment — and Under the Regime

The streets of Tehran are empty. Bakeries are open but have no customers. Gasoline is being rationed. The majority of businesses have been shuttered for more than two weeks. People who were middle-class before the war are struggling to afford basic necessities.

Nights are the hardest. People wake to explosions and the sound of aircraft overhead. At the slightest noise, they run to windows or rooftops to figure out whether it was a strike.

But here is what complicates the simple narrative of airstrikes-versus-civilians: Rastegar says the people she speaks with are more afraid of the regime's security forces than of the bombs. Plainclothes Basij officers are stopping people on the street, checking phones, making arrests. The regime's surveillance apparatus hasn't stood down — it has intensified.

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This is the context that often gets lost in Western coverage: for many Iranians, the war didn't start when the first US or Israeli strike hit. It has been going on for 47 years. "The regime has been waging a one-sided war against Iranian civilians for 47 years," Rastegar says. "Women, religious and ethnic minorities, poor and working-class people are the ones who are the most targeted by the regime."

The massacres of January 8 and 9 — when the government killed tens of thousands of protesters — were, for many, the point of no return. Since then, the state has continued executing prisoners. Just this week, three young men were put to death for participating in the January protests.

The Impossible Moral Calculus

This is where the emotional reality inside Iran becomes genuinely difficult to hold. The war has produced what Rastegar calls an "impossible moral dilemma" — and the binary of pro-war versus anti-war doesn't capture it.

Some Iranians felt something close to relief when the strikes began, hoping the regime would finally fall. That relief was complicated — and for many, shattered — when a US strike killed 168 people, many of them children, at a girls' school more than two weeks ago. "Of course, there are also those who oppose the regime and also do not believe this war will bring freedom," Rastegar acknowledges. "Those voices are real and deserve to be heard."

And yet, even those who are horrified by civilian deaths often find themselves unable to simply call for the strikes to stop — because stopping the strikes, for them, means the Islamic Republic survives. "How psychotic is this regime," Rastegar asks, "that they would rather see the whole country burn down before giving up?"

The psychological toll of this calculus is something Rastegar returns to more than once. "I am becoming increasingly aware of the psychological toll this moral calculus is playing on us as a people."

On Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed Ali Larijani, the top Iranian security official believed to have been running the country since the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Rastegar says the reaction inside Iran was like "Christmas morning" — Larijani is seen as one of the architects of the regime's repression.

The same morning, despite a regime order to stay indoors, thousands of Iranians poured into the streets to celebrate Chaharshanbe Suri — an ancient Zoroastrian fire ritual that precedes Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. People jumped over flames, sang, and danced. Basij forces fired on them and chased them away.

The Dancers Who Won't Stop Filming

Rastegar has been working on a documentary about six young dancers in Iran. Production wrapped in December. Then the war started.

After the January massacres — when the streets were, in her cinematographer's words, still covered in blood — she assumed the dancers would go quiet, would stay hidden. Instead, some of them insisted on continuing to film.

As a director, her instinct was to tell them to stay inside. But they refused. "They are young and they are brave, and they refuse to live on the terms the regime sets out for them," she says. "At this point, our film has become almost an existential assertion for them: that they exist, that they matter, and that they demand to be seen."

What started as a documentary about dance has become something else entirely — a record of a generation that doesn't want to merely survive. They want to assert life, beauty, and presence in the face of constant threat of annihilation.

That impulse — to dance, to film, to jump over fire in a street where you could be arrested or shot — is not easily explained by the frameworks we usually apply to war coverage. It doesn't fit neatly into geopolitical analysis or casualty statistics.

But it may be the most important thing to understand about what is happening in Iran right now.