Night Falls on Tehran: Inside Iran’s Deadliest Week of Unrest

The Spark That Lit the Fuse

Tehran—The air tasted of smoke and tear gas when 23-year-old DonyaRad slipped her phone into her pocket and stepped into the night. By sunrise, the medical student would become another name on a growing list: 47 dead, hundreds wounded, cities under curfew. What began as a whisper against compulsory hijab rules has mushroomed into the most sustained uprising Iran has seen since 2019.

‘We Are Not Backing Down’

In the capital’s Nazi-Abad district, residents used overturned dumpsters as barricades. Young women yanked scarves from their heads and waved them like flags. A 17-year-old boy, voice cracking, told me,

‘They shot my cousin in the back. He was carrying bread.’

Within minutes, the crack of live ammunition echoed; protesters scattered into alleyways where satellite dishes hung like silent witnesses.

State TV’s Counter-Story

Authorities blame ‘foreign agents’ and ‘rioters’. Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi claimed security forces showed ‘maximum restraint’. Yet hospital corridors tell a different tale: 8mm bullets extracted from torsos, medics overwhelmed, blood banks emptied by dusk.

Digital Cat-and-Mouse

Every evening at 8 p.m. local time, the regime hits the kill-switch on mobile data. Iranians pivot to VPNs and Starlink signals smuggled over the Armenian border. One coder in Tabriz boasted he can get 60 seconds of footage out before the blackout—enough for the world to see a 12-second clip of a girl standing atop a burned-out police car, hair whipping in the wind.

What the West Isn’t Seeing

• Strikes at the Abadan and Bandar Abbas oil terminals have cut crude exports by an estimated 11%, traders in Dubai say.
• Bazaar merchants in Isfahan shut shops for three consecutive days, a move reminiscent of the 1979 revolution.
• Cyber-attacks on state servers briefly took down the gas-station subsidy network, causing mile-long queues and public anger at the government.

Voices From the Ground

I reached Sara, a schoolteacher in Shiraz, via WhatsApp voice note. She whispered:

‘They raided our dormitory, looking for banners. We hid them inside piano benches.’

Her voice trembled—not of fear, she insists, but of fatigue after six nights of street battles.

What Happens Next

Analysts inside Tehran’s diplomatic circles say Supreme Leader Khamenei faces a stark choice: escalate ruthlessly and risk nationwide labor strikes that could choke the economy, or offer a cosmetic concession that might embolden protesters. Either path carries the scent of more blood.

As I boarded the 2 a.m. flight out of Imam Khomeini Airport, the city below flickered—streetlights off, phones held aloft like candles. Somewhere amid that darkness, DonyaRad’s mother was still searching the morgues. The story is far from over; in Iran, the night is long and full of sirens.