I turned onto the street and saw two guys standing there with Kalashnikovs in their hands. I had never seen traffic cops with Kalashnikovs before.
When the war started, a lot of things changed. We were about three or four days in, around the time the Israelis issued a warning to evacuate Tehran. I don’t remember exactly, it might have been the fifth day. Many people started leaving the city.
The lines at the gas station were insane. My aunt’s neighbor went and queued from 5 or 6 in the morning, and came back at 9 a.m.
Then they (regime) set a limit; they wouldn’t give you more than 20-25 liters with your fuel card and without it 15 liters. Under normal circumstances, every 24 hours you could get 40 liters, but during the war, it dropped to 25.
This is a very small amount, and a lot of people fleeing Tehran would get stranded on the way to Shomal (northern Iran), and their cars would just die.
One of my friends wanted to head to Hamadan to his family home, but he couldn’t find gas.
There are some websites that are for home services. Like, they come to your house, check your car, I don’t know, check your plumbing, paint your house, things like that. But they also provide other services like on-site gasoline delivery. They have special vehicles that come with a fuel nozzle, and you can fill up your car with them. Before the war, you could get as much as you wanted, no limit, and it would cost, like, 5k tomans [per liter] (1.19 USD). It was especially useful for people whose cars were far from a gas station, and situations like that. It was fine back then.
So, anyway, my friend found one of these websites and told me there is such an option and they are selling 10 liters for, I think, 400k or 500k tomans, and 20 liters for 600k tomans. Well, when there are no other options, you pay what you have to pay. You are going to have to pay 50k toman per liter for 10 liters, and if you get 20 liters, they will charge you 30k tomans per liter.
My friend put in a request for them to gas up his car, but no one accepted the job. There just wasn’t any gasoline available. Later that night, when I checked, they had completely removed this service from their website, and weren’t offering it anymore. It was a really bizarre situation. Really bizarre.
I was looking for a place up north for us, my mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, my brother and his wife. We only had one car, so I had to find another car as well. We ended up finding everything — both the place and the car — but we didn’t go.
With small cars like the Peugeot 206 and similar models that don’t have much trunk space, people had to get barband (roof carriers) installed on their cars. They’d strap on a roof rack up top.
I have a Peugeot 206 hatchback, so basically nothing fits in my car. My brother told me to get a roof rack installed just in case. He said, ‘Sort out your gas, and get the roof rack.’ I said okay.
I went to a street nearby where they sell spare parts and stuff, and asked about installing a rack. He said, ‘If you can find it, you’ll find it on Mellat Street.’ Mellat Street is …you know where the Bazaar is, right? It’s about two or three streets above the Bazaar, below Toopkhaneh Square — roughly thereabouts. Do you know Masoudieh Mansion? Emarat Masoudieh is right by Ekbatan Street and Mellat Street — that area.
I got in the car and drove there. Normally, Mellat Street is a madhouse! When you go there, all the shops are open, cars lined up out front. One guy is getting his car customized, another’s getting a sound system put in, another one’s getting his windows tinted. It’s just chaos. It’s really hard to pass through it.
So I go there, and everything is closed. I went all the way down one street, and nothing was open. I turned onto another street, and again, all the shops were closed except for two. I thought, let me ask anyway, maybe they have something.
I went up to one of the shops and saw they were actually installing roof racks. There were six cars lined up in front, waiting for their turn to get a rack.
I went in and the guy says, ‘I don’t know if we’ll have time for you or not. Wait, though, maybe we can get to you. There are already five or six cars waiting, and I only have two installers.’
I said, ‘Okay, I’ll wait,’ because I had no other choice.
So I waited, and about a half an hour before closing time, it was finally my turn.
The guy asks, ‘Okay, what color is your car?’
I said, ‘It’s white.’
He says, ‘Okay, you want a white one then.’
I said, ‘Yeah, logically.’
He goes in and comes back out and says, ‘We’re out of white ones.’
I said, ‘So what do you have?’
He says, ‘Just black.’
I said, ‘Fine, put on the black one. There are no other choices right now.’
There really wasn’t. While I was there, three more people pulled up.
The shopkeeper was throwing jabs at them, saying, ‘You’re all getting ready to leave, huh?’
They said, ‘No, not me.’
The guy says, ‘Yeah, right, it’s obvious. All of you are planning to leave, otherwise why would so many cars be coming in?’ He says, ‘Since this morning, we’ve installed roof racks on 200 cars! Everyone’s coming to get a roof rack just so they can take a couple of extra things with them.’
Be Omid Didar
After they installed the rack, I went to get in line for gas. The line was about 500 meters long, give or take. This gas station was huge, you know, it had six lanes, and each lane had two pumps. So basically, every three minutes, they’d fill up 12 cars. They were moving cars through really fast. The gas station itself had a kind of security vibe. There were a few armed police officers standing around while people came to get gas.
I ended up waiting in line for about 30 to 40 minutes before I got to fill up. Honestly, I thought that was really good, because some people were waiting two to three hours in other places. I got my 25 liters. I wanted to be ready to get out of Tehran quickly if we had to, just in case things really went sideways.
One of my friends had just recently received his car. And when I say ‘recently,’ I mean they delivered it like three or five months ago, but they still haven’t given him his fuel card.
His car is one of those gas guzzler SUVs, a tired Chinese model. He told me, ‘I waited in line for seven hours and never got my turn because they were only giving gas if you had a card. They wouldn’t let you fill up without it.’
When he couldn’t get gas, he went to his brother’s bagh (garden) in the outskirts of Tehran, to be safe. The next day, I called him, and he said he had been in line since 10 a.m. He would get gas, then go to the back of the line and wait to fill up again because he could only get 15 liters per turn, and his tank holds around 70 liters. He said he went to the back of the line five times and left around 6 or 7 in the evening.
It was an absolute mess, just a really, really terrible situation.
Today, I did something — I know it’s really unsafe, but I got one of those 20-liter gas cans. I filled it up separately, sealed it, and put it in the corner of the garage, so that if something like this happens again, I’ll have 15-20 liters on hand to hit the road.
Because when things get really bad, and you’re on the road for 17-18 hours, you’ll definitely run out of gas. The lines at gas stations will be long, and you’ll run out of gas on the road. That’s why I have the gas can now so if it ever comes to it, I can pour it in and at least keep driving for a few more kilometers.
To tell you the truth, during those 12 days, I didn’t want to leave Tehran. Not really… I had a few reasons. One was that I have a lot of assets. Like, I have two monitors, a laptop, and a dedicated keyboard that I use, so just packing all of this up, moving somewhere else, and setting it up again is hard—plus there’s no room in the car at all. I have my mom and dad [with me], and you also need to bring food supplies, rice, and stuff to sustain you for at least a period of time, plus you need clothes and other things… there’s just no space in the car to move all of that.
I kept holding off, just waiting, wanting to wait until things got to a point where things became critical. Like, if they hit infrastructure, if water got cut off, if gas got cut off, and it became impossible to stay, then at that point I’d say, ‘Okay, fine, I’ll leave for a month,’ and I’d figure out some way to take everything, take my laptop and mouse somehow, and hit the road because Tehran would no longer be a place you could stay. But up until that point, no.
They (Israelis) did hit infrastructure, you know, one of my friends who lives in Zaferanieh — after what happened in Tajrish, I think their water was cut off for 72 hours.
In those 12 days, I only went out for the roof rack and gas. The rest of the time I was at home. I had made a timeline of when the attacks were happening, and usually by around 12 or 1, they would stop. Then there wouldn’t be any more attacks until around 4. During the war, this three-hour window was safe.
So on one Saturday, during that three-hour entr’acte, I picked up one of my friends, and we drove around the city for a bit. The city was practically empty. In terms of shops, only a few supermarkets were open here or there. There was this one ice cream shop that was open, so we went in and got ice cream. There was no one else inside.
When we were leaving, I said, ‘Thank you, take care, goodbye.’ And the guy there, with a really sad expression, said, ‘Be Omid Didar (Hope to see you again),’ in this really sad way, “Come see us again.” It was kind of funny but also sad. That was the only place open; there was really nothing else.
“In some places like Moniriyeh Square, I saw a checkpoint with a bunch of kids… All of a sudden, it was just kids running the show.”
Kids with Kalashnikovs
There were a lot of IRGC checkpoints at that time. The cars had ‘IRGC Patrol’ written on them. They weren’t the police or Basij; these guys were wearing IRGC uniforms, and the cars were heavy-duty IRGC vehicles. These big black cars that you’d normally only see during protests or anti-government situations — one of those big black cars that NOPO (Counter-terrorism Special Force/riot police) uses as well. They also had signs out that said ‘IRGC Patrol’.
Because there were so few cars in the city, traffic would just be like five or six cars, so it (checkpoints) didn’t really cause traffic jams. But let me tell you, when IRGC patrols show up in some areas now, it causes crazy traffic because the city has gotten busy again, like how it used to be, so it can’t handle those kinds of checkpoints anymore.
The way they (IRGC) set up their blockades is different. Regular patrols will just narrow the lane so one car can pass through, but these guys set up a zigzag path. Like, you have to go left, then turn right, making a full zigzag so a car going straight can’t just easily pass through. That’s why it causes more traffic.
Yesterday, on Andarzgoo, they had a checkpoint, and it was the IRGC again. They were mostly stopping SUVs there, cars with big trunks you can hide something in the back of.
Let me tell you a funny story about the Saturday before the ceasefire. Even the traffic police at Jahan Koodak, on Gandhi and those areas — they were carrying Kalashes (Kalashnikovs)!
I had never seen traffic cops with Kalashnikovs before. I mean, they wouldn’t trust traffic police with anything, [not even pepper spray], just a whistle, that’s it.
I turned onto the street and saw two guys standing there with Kalashnikovs in their hands. And they looked totally normal, too — very neat, clean with trimmed beards, really normal and proper looking.
From what I have observed there is a mix of young kids, trained forces, and IRGC guys at checkpoints. In some places like Moniriyeh Square, I saw a checkpoint with a bunch of kids, and I saw the same thing in Mirdamad too. All of a sudden, it was just kids running the show.
In Mirdamad, one of them told me to [hit the switch and] lower the window , and I said, ‘It doesn’t work like that, I have to roll it down with a handle. If you want, I can just open the door.’ So I unlocked it, and he shined his flashlight inside… There were just a few grocery bags. Then I heard his superior say, ‘Look at Agha Majid. You don’t need to open every single car door.’
The other night I got a Snapp (Iranian Uber) to come home from the gym, wherever there was a checkpoint there was crazy traffic and this guy would turn around and go from another route. He didn’t go through a single checkpoint. I wanted to tell the guy “Bro, if you’re with Mossad tell me, I can handle it!” I mean, a bunch of clueless idiots run these checkpoints. It’s honestly ridiculous.
“Check if they’re okay”
During the war, phones were extremely unstable. I’d call my friends, and the call would drop after one or two seconds—mobile calls. A lot of people don’t have landlines in their homes anymore because landlines have become just a pointless monthly fee for something you don’t even use.
There was also making contact between families and people outside the country. People would tell me, ‘Can you give so-and-so a call and let me know if they’re okay?’ or ‘Check on this person for me.’ That was happening too.
Landlines were restricted, so no one from outside the country could call us here. There are two sisters, and I’m friends with the sister who’s here. The other sister lives in London. There was a strike near my friend’s house and the London sister hadn’t slept all night, crying and sobbing and everything. She sent me message after message.
When I woke up in the morning, I told her, “Wait, let me call.” I called, and they were fine, so I messaged her, ‘They’re fine, don’t worry.’ Then she told me, “Can you ask my sister to call my husband’s family so we can make sure they’re okay too?” So it was like that — I had to call her sister and tell her, “Call your brother-in-law’s family to check if they’re okay or not.”
The internet was also completely messed up; people couldn’t use it. Literally the night before they shut down the internet, it crossed my mind, “What if they switch to the national internet, what if everything gets cut off?” So I thought, let me set up a chat page so I can at least check in with people, see if they’re okay or not.
I used ChatGPT because I just wanted to build something fast, and I had an internal VM too, but when the internet goes national, you can’t even access your internal stuff anymore. I had shared this chat page with people abroad, but then we got cut off and couldn’t talk anymore.
I built this emergency chat in the dumbest, most basic form, just so it would work. You couldn’t even send pictures, just plain text. I didn’t even have time to make it systematic or add a database, everything was just JSON files. I made clones and gave one to my brother, one to a friend, another to another friend, and told them, “This is your chat page. If something happens, let’s notify each other about what’s going on, if we’re okay, if everyone is safe and sound.”
And during the first five nights of the war, we were seriously using this chat. I would write to my brother, “Is everything okay? Do you have water? Do you have electricity?” and he would write back, “What’s going on there?”
I’d tell him, “Everything’s fine, we have everything here.” Because there was no internet, that chat was our only communication channel. It was actually kind of funny.
I’ve been thinking about building it out a bit more, making it more complete, in case something like this happens again. I need to make it a bit more responsive, add the ability to send files and things like that.
Even now, our internet isn’t normal—it still has serious disruptions.
My work depends on the internet, and the situation has become extremely complicated. I had to take Thursday and Friday off because I couldn’t work at all. In the first two or three days, I managed to set up a connection—but that’s a really complex story… It’s been really hard for me to work.
Right now, I’ve rented a VPS in Europe, but I don’t connect to it regularly so it doesn’t get blocked. I only connect to it when I really need to get some work done, and then I disconnect immediately.
They even blocked Google! Google eventually started working again. From around day six or seven of the war, they whitelisted it because people were basically going crazy since the internet was practically gone.
During that blackout, a lot of people moved over to Bale and Rubika (Iranian social media platforms and messengers), and I know many people started using them—using their web-based versions. Look, it’s not about [people] trusting these apps; it’s about the anxiety levels of the people outside the country, because they were seeing the news, seeing how f*@ked up everything was, and realizing they had no way to contact their families. That’s why so many people moved there; even friends of mine did it because it was the only way they could connect with their families. But I am not the type to install such apps.
One of my friends said to me, “I can’t log in, can I use your phone number?” and I told them, “No, I won’t even let you register my number there.”
The whole situation has become really complicated.
As for Starlink, the entire narrative has now shifted to: “Drones are using Starlink.” So, if you go near Starlink, you’re a spy, and it’s basically impossible to go near it now. They’ve put really heavy penalties on Starlink.
Shrapnel in the rooftops
It was really bad when the Israeli military would issue warnings telling people to evacuate certain areas. On the last night, they told District 7 to evacuate, Enghelab and Pich-e Shemroon, which was exactly to the left of my brother’s place, right in the targeted zone.
Fortunately, they weren’t home. If they had been home, I would’ve had to rush over there to get them, and bring them here, because apparently the strike was very close to them.
Actually, the windows of their fourth-floor neighbors shattered. They had a budgie that died of shock because the blast wave was so strong. The explosion was on the other side of the street, but the shockwave shattered all the windows on this side. It was really close.
Thankfully, they were on the second floor, and before leaving, my brother had taped all the windows, so their windows didn’t shatter.
I don’t know exactly how much damage there was because they [the regime] don’t report anything accurately. But a clear example of the destruction that everyone can see is that Babak Zanjani building, the tall tower at the start of Gandhi Street — actually, not Gandhi, it’s Africa Street. They hit the top of it, and even now, it’s still in ruins.
Over by Bokharest Street, where my gym is, around Fourth and Sixth Streets, I saw two buildings that were completely destroyed, nothing was left of them.
The blast wave was so strong, and there was so much shrapnel that on the other side of the street, about 40-50 meters away, the facades of two banks were heavily damaged. The windows of another building were shattered, and in some of these older houses, the window frames had been ripped out — that’s how strong the shockwave was.
There was shrapnel embedded in the roofs of some homes. I personally saw two places where there was shrapnel stuck in the roof.
They had completely leveled two buildings to the ground; it was something unbelievable. I don’t know the exact address numbers, but it was between Fourth and Sixth Streets, where there are these attached buildings, and they had completely destroyed them. It’s right at the beginning of the street, like three or four buildings from Fourth Street. We don’t even know what these buildings were.
As for the rest of the areas, like Kamraniyeh, I don’t really go that way, so I haven’t seen it myself. And I haven’t seen much in other areas either. It’s not like the damage is super visible everywhere, except for these few places that I actually pass by.
It was honestly such a strange, and intense week.
It wasn’t like the old war days when Saddam would just randomly launch missiles wherever. Now, they [the Israelis] actually have a target, and they hit it.
I was talking with my mom about the Iran-Iraq war, and she was saying that back then, you genuinely didn’t know if you’d survive the next attack. The entire concept of going to the shelter was because we understood we needed to get inside, that it was possible we wouldn’t make it through the next strike.
But now, there’s a huge group of people who feel completely at ease, saying, “Okay, there’s no scientist living on our street, there’s no IRGC guy here,” so they truly don’t care at all.
That’s the difference with these precision strikes. It’s not like they’re just randomly firing missiles.
I mean, it’s possible that next to your building, there’s, for example, a Ministry of Defense building on one side, and an IRGC site on the other, so there’s a chance you might get hurt because they’re hitting that specific spot, and you just happen to be in the vicinity.
There are places where IRGC guys go, and, of course, they love living in those fancy uptown areas. But if you’re in some random, remote area where no IRGC people or highly protected scientists ever go, you can assume you’re probably safe.
It’s not like the eight-year war, when planes would just come in and drop whatever load they had, even dumping their extra fuel tanks before turning around and saying, ‘Well, that’s all folks, goodbye.’
That’s one of the reasons why people didn’t have that same intense stress no — they say noghte zani [precision strikes], and honestly, it really was.
Look, there were casualties. At the end of the day, it’s war. No one has promised not to kill. In the end, civilians also get killed.
But it was very different from the previous war. If you didn’t have IRGC people or scientists near you, there was a good chance they wouldn’t hit your street or your neighborhood.
Something really strange was that they didn’t hit Tehran’s District 12 at all, or District 11 either, even though the Supreme Leader’s compound is right above District 11. The compound was definitely empty, and they probably thought, ‘Why would we hit it?’ Instead, they hit places where there really would be casualties.
The closest hit to us was near where my brother lives, and even then, we never fully figured out what exactly happened there.
My friend’s dayi (maternal uncle) lives on Araqi Street in Pasdaran, and they were getting hit non-stop around there. That whole area was really unsafe. You know, these [regime] people have big appetites, they always pick the nicest places to live.
When [Ali] Shamkhani did his interview, he did it at J Café , which just opened in Arjantin Square. You know who owns it? It belongs to Admiral Group, which you probably know is owned by his son. 1
There’s this guy at my gym who works at Admiral. He was telling me Shamkhani went to this café to do his interview. There were people there and when Shamkhani walked in people freaked out. Everyone ran out.
Shamkhani went there deliberately because they thought that they (Israelis) wouldn’t hit a public café, because there would be a lot of civilian casualties. But people quickly cleared out of the area.
The reporter said to him, “You’ve come to a public place, aren’t you worried?” He (Shamkhani) says, “No, they already hit my house, they hit my office, there’s nothing left, I don’t have anywhere else!”
Even though Admiral has around seven or eight buildings right in the Arjantin area — above the square, below the square, on 15th Street, 14th Street. They have seven or eight really massive buildings there, and in one of them, which is just their HR building, for example, they have a gym on level minus six.
When I saw Shamkhani’s interview, I thought, ‘This guy looks healthier than me…’ Mashallah, even his lung capacity was great. If your rib cage was shattered, how are you breathing so comfortably?
There wasn’t a scratch on his hands, no bruising on his face, nothing. In several parts of the video, he bangs his cane on the ground, and a lot of people were saying, ‘Come on, someone who’s actually injured couldn’t be banging a cane on the ground like that.’
Everything about it was strange. His house was definitely empty. I think they were informed beforehand. Just like that incident with the Evin prison warden’s kid, where they texted him ten minutes before and said, ‘Tell your dad to leave, we’re going to attack,’ and he (the warden) really did leave. It was exactly like that.
He (Shamkhani) literally said, “My son left the house ten minutes before [the attack].” I think they told his kid, and they emptied out the house, and went downstairs, and then they (Israelis) hit the house. It was fishy.
‘Nonsense, but they repeat it’
During the war, I read domestic news sources and foreign ones when I could. In the domestic ones, we were the absolute victors, and in the foreign ones, it was the opposite.
A funny thing in all of this is how they (regime) tell themselves a lie so many times that they actually start to believe it. Like, in the back of their minds, they’re like, ‘Yeah, this is exactly how it is. This is obviously the truth.’ They repeat the story to themselves so much that it becomes their reality.
Right now, there’s this really ridiculous thing going on where they seriously claim on TV that ‘We shot down ten F-35s.’ Like, they’re dead serious: ‘We shot down ten f*@king F-35s.’
They said it in the beginning, and then they kept repeating it, and then they made programs saying, ‘If our economy was weak, we wouldn’t have been able to shoot down F-35s, so our economy must be strong too.’ Then they were like, ‘The Supreme Leader said, if we can be so good militarily, why can’t we be good in automaking?’
They’re like, ‘If we’re shooting down F-35s, that means we’re really good. We should bring that same mindset into auto manufacturing…’ It’s such nonsense, but they repeat it so much that they actually think it really happened.
They made another program where they said, ‘People are asking, if you shot down an F-35, why aren’t you showing it to us?’ And the guy says,‘Look, the F-35 is a very valuable thing! One possibility is that we sold it to China so they can copy it, so of course there’s no wreckage for us to show.’
But the option that they didn’t shoot it down isn’t even on the table. They genuinely believe they did.
I’m telling you, it’s total nonsense, but they repeat it in so many different ways that for a moment even you start to doubt yourself and think, ‘Wait, maybe this is actually true.’
They kept repeating the F-35 lie until, Israel was finally like, ‘Okay, tell us which one you shot down, because we sent out ten aircraft and all ten of them returned, we’re seeing them right here. At least tell us who the pilot was so we know too…’
But these guys just kept going with it. One of their big talking points was that ‘We shot down the F-35 that hit the IRIB (state TV) building, in Tabriz.’ They put out tons of reports about it, made a big fuss, and in the end it turned out to be nothing.
And I don’t mean like just some random news agency reported it—no, it was on national TV. You still haven’t taken back control of your airspace and you say you shot down ten F-35s?!
We should have been convinced when Mosta’an 110 [was unveiled] that they have zero intelligence and are completely out to lunch. 2
Today, this Israeli minister was saying, “We can’t change the regime, but we’ve paved the path for you…” Dude, the smoke from this regime is getting in your eyes. Just change it and get it over with so we can all be free.
We’re on this track now, nothing we can do about it. We’ll know in a few months, tops. As that song goes, “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.”
2025
- Rear Admiral Shamkhani is an IRGC Naval commander who has previously served as Defense Minister and secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. As of 2023, he has been an advisor to Ali Khamenei and a member of the Expediency Council. At the time of the Israeili attack, he was one of the individuals overseeing Iran-US nuclear negotiations. Initial reports indicated that he had been killed in the first wave of attacks.
- Mosta’an 110 is a device designed by the Basij and unveiled in April 2020 by the IRGC, who claimed it was capable of remotely detecting COVID-19.