Long terrorised by their own repressive theocracy, under attack from Israel and facing the prospect of the US joining the war, Iranians turned en masse to social media this week to express their fears about what lies ahead.
As the Islamic regime began shutting down the internet, many in Tehran posted nostalgic pictures of their homes as they prepared to flee Iran’s cosmopolitan capital, unsure of when they would return in the wake of warnings from Israel and US President Donald Trump to “immediately evacuate”.
“We left. I hope there is something to return to,” one social media user, who asked to be known only as BarD, wrote under a picture of himself taken from the shoulders down, an unimpressed Persian cat tucked under his arm.
“We’ve been stuck in traffic since 4am. We packed our lives into a suitcase, put the kids in a box and with a sad heart we kissed each other and left our lovely home,” another wrote in a caption under a photograph of her modern, stylish living room.
Millions more with neither the money nor the means to brave the 14-hour traffic jams and fuel queues to flee Tehran had no choice but to shelter in place and wait for what comes next.
“How are our 9 million people – without fuel, often without enough savings to relocate, and with no second home in another city – supposed to evacuate Tehran?” dissident rap artist Toomaj Salehi fumed.
In a post seemingly addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who repeatedly has called on Iranians this week to overthrow their oppressors, he added: “Your war is not with the people of Iran. If you attack them, you are, in truth, killing hostages.”
Right now, inside Iran “optimism and dread wrestle for the soul of the people”, Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-born British actor and activist whose father fled Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, wrote this week of the conflicting emotions long-suffering Iranians are battling.
As the first Israeli air strikes hammered military targets in Tehran last Friday, “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the Dictator” rang out across rooftops of the capital, turning on its head the Islamic Republic’s “death to America” mantra forced on generations of Iranian schoolkids.
In a city famed for its restaurant and night-life scene, in defiance of the regime’s violent enforcers, spontaneous gatherings celebrated the assassination of loathed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and military commanders whose brutal crackdowns on rights protests in 2009, 2019 and 2022 resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.
Some posted mocking emojis of barbecued meat online.
During the months-long 2022 protests – sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested by morality police for not properly covering her hair – millions of Iranians from every socio-economic class and ethnic group turned out online and in the streets to demand democracy, gender equality and an end to Islamic authoritarianism. Tens of thousands of those protesters – men, women, children, the elderly – were consequently thrown in prison and subjected to torture, rape and summary executions.
Little wonder, then, that few Iranian tears were shed this week for the military commanders targeted in Israeli strikes, even if by the end of the week the shell-shocked regime had sufficiently collected itself to bus in supporters for anti-Israel and anti-America photo opportunities.
Eighty per cent of Iranians are estimated to oppose the Islamic Republic leadership that has subjugated the population and run the economy into the ground, says Karim Sadjadpour from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But they are unarmed and leaderless while the 15 to 20 per cent who support the regime “are highly armed, highly organised and at the moment probably calculating that it’s kill or be killed”, Sadjadpour told US network MSNBC.
As Israel’s bombardments have continued this week and civilian casualties mount, the existential dilemma for the majority of Iranians who want the regime to fall but don’t want to die in the process has quickly crystallised.
From his home in exile in Paris, Iranian political analyst Mehran Haghirian has anxiously monitored the war since the first Israeli bombs rained down on his parents’ Tehran neighbourhood and shook the family home where his mother sheltered alone.
While his father struggled for days to make his way back to his stranded wife from an island in the Persian Gulf, their neighbours and friends flooded out of the city.
“When my mother was alone during the bombardments that broke me in a sense,” Haghirian, a director with the London-based Bourse & Bazaar Foundation for economic diplomacy, tells Inquirer.
After one aborted attempt to leave the capital, foiled by kilometres-long traffic jams and closed roads, his parents reached Iran’s marginally safer north late this week, though with the internet now throttled nationwide communications has become nearly impossible.
Haghirian says he believes the Islamic Republic is finished and that many Iranians share that view.
“In the first few days of the war people would not have thought that a real regime change was possible, but after Trump tweeted those two words – “unconditional surrender” – that basically rendered any possibility of the continuation of the Islamic Republic impossible,” he says.
All the oppression, brutality and misery suffered by Iranians at the hands of their regime for close to a half-century was conditional on one quid pro quo: that it would at least provide national security. That facade has now fallen as bombs and missiles rain down on Iranian cities.
“And that means the Islamic Republic has fallen,” Haghirian says. “What Trump did was really break that perception of this regime, and despite (Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei’s most recent speech (in which he warned the US would suffer ‘irreparable damage’ if it joined the conflict) the regime’s repeated calls for diplomacy have shown its limitations. I don’t think this regime can continue the way it has.”
If that is true, what comes next is the critical question.
Haghirian insists: “Iran is not Iraq, or Libya or Syria” – all countries that faced instability and violence amid the collapse or weakening of a central authority.
But it does face similar threats to its territorial integrity, with 10 simmering secessionist movements from Sunni and ethnic minorities around its periphery.
“That’s a very clear worry for all Iranians, the majority of whom are torn between supporting targeted attacks against regime officials but are completely against attacks on civilian infrastructure.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 17, 2025
Israel’s first wave of pre-emptive strikes aimed at disrupting Iran’s progress towards nuclear weapons began before dawn on Friday, June 13, with devastating effect. Up to a dozen senior Iranian commanders have now been assassinated along with 14 nuclear scientists.
Major nuclear facilities also have been severely damaged, though Netanyahu insists he needs US “bunker-buster” bombs to pierce Iran’s most important and heavily guarded subterranean fuel enrichment facility at Fordow to deal the decisive blow.
But Israeli strikes also have killed at least 639 people in Iran, including 263 identified civilians, and injured 1329 more, according to Washington monitoring group Human Rights Activists. Retaliatory bombardments by Iran have killed at least 24 people in Israel, with around 600 injured.
Like Haghirian, Kylie Moore-Gilbert has spent the week speaking to Iranian friends, ones she met as a visiting Australian academic and those with whom she shared a cell as a political prisoner of the Iranian regime for 804 days, until her release in a negotiated prisoner swap in November 2020.
Moore-Gilbert was one of the IRGC’s many victims of hostage diplomacy, arbitrarily arrested on trumped-up charges to leverage diplomatic or financial advantage.
The 39-year-old academic says she is happy senior commanders responsible for her kidnap and torture are dead and that few Iranians will mourn the “truly evil” military and IRGC chiefs killed in the past week.
“This is a population that has made it absolutely clear they don’t support the regime and want these fanatical Islamist crazies to go,” she tells Inquirer.
“Many Iranians blame the regime for bringing this down on their heads. But even if they want the regime to fall, that doesn’t mean they’re going to cheer a foreign power bombing their beloved homeland. They don’t want the regime to be there either but don’t want to evacuate their homes and are terrified.
“They have no idea where Israel will target next. The regime is so secretive that people don’t necessarily know if there’s a secret interrogation facility in their neighbourhood or a top-ranking military dude living in some penthouse down the road.”
While in Israel sirens and text messages regularly warn citizens to get to fortified bunkers, in Iran there are no warnings and few bunkers. The only government text messages Iranians have received in recent days have been a barrage of warnings not to watch or read foreign news and to trust only state media.
A new bill introduced to parliament this week aims to impose harsh new penalties for those caught sending films or images to hostile or foreign networks.
Since Israel’s attack on Iran’s state broadcaster, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, condemned by the International Federation of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the regime has lionised its chador-wearing female newsreader, Sahar Emami, who remained on air with her index finger wagging against “evil Zionists” as dust and rubble fell around her.
A billboard of that image has been erected in central Tehran.
In the wake of that strike, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz noted huge numbers of Iranians were fleeing Tehran as the symbols of their repressive government were systematically targeted. “This is how dictatorships collapse,” Katz said.
Israel has made it clear it is laying the foundations for regime change. But there are few signs of the sort of mass protests of 2022 or indeed any opposition movement capable of overthrowing the regime as Netanyahu appears to be urging.
“The time has come for you to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime,” the Israeli Prime Minister said in a video message beamed on Monday into Iranian homes via anti-regime network Iran International.
“Israel’s fight is not with you, the brave people of Iran whom we respect and admire. Our fight is with our common enemy, a murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) June 13, 2025
To the proud people of Iran,
We are in the midst of one of the greatest military operations in history, Operation Rising Lion.
The Islamic regime, which has oppressed you for almost 50 years threatens to destroy our country, the State of Israel. pic.twitter.com/F67bxcDitL
Israel has dubbed its military operation Rising Lion, a reference to verses in the Torah but also to the Persian symbol of kingship and the flag of the former pro-western shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Many Tehran democrats, students and intellectuals backed the revolution, believing the overthrow of the monarchy would bring a freer and more equitable society.
Instead it laid the foundations for a brutal theocracy that has systematically crushed the civil rights of its own citizens while sponsoring militant and terrorist proxies responsible for tens of thousands of deaths across the region.
With Hamas and Hezbollah – the most powerful of those proxies – decapitated by Israel in response to Hamas’s deadly October 7 attacks in 2023 and Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime overthrown, the Islamic Republic has never been weaker.
Yet that will not hinder the regime and its allied Houthi militia in Yemen from striking US bases and other assets in the Middle East should the US join Israel’s war, American intelligence reports warned on Thursday.
Amid fears of a prolonged, broader and more damaging conflagration, prominent Iranian activists and public figures jointly pleaded this week for a ceasefire, an end to Iran’s uranium enrichment program and for the country’s authoritarian regime to step down and “facilitate a peaceful transition to authentic democracy”. Iran and its people “must not be sacrificed for the nuclear or geopolitical ambitions of an authoritarian regime”, read a statement signed by Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi, filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, lawyers Sedigheh Vasmaghi and Abdolfattah Soltani, and Cannes-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was in Sydney this week.
Adding his voice to calls for regime change was Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the former shah, who is popular with some in the Iranian diaspora though less so in Iran.
“Khamenei, like a frightened rat, has gone into hiding underground,” Pahlavi said in his own video message. “What has begun is irreversible. Now is the time to stand up, the time to reclaim Iran.”
Whether enough Iranians are prepared to put their bodies on the line yet again is unclear, though it is doubtful many would want to do so at the behest of a foreign power or a self-styled prince.
“The age of foreign saviours is over,” Boniadi says. “Iran’s fate will, and should, be written by Iranians – not in foreign capitals or closed rooms.”
Analysts also are cautioning that a people’s uprising is unlikely to lead to a democratic spring.
“Even by taking out a lot of the top guys, they’re not going away. They have the guns while the people have no weapons,” Moore-Gilbert warns. “No opposition groups have ever been allowed to form. Not even trade unions.”
A likelier and riskier outcome, she says, is an internal coup where a faction of the IRGC – an immensely powerful “state within a state” with likely less concern than ageing Islamic clerics for the repercussions of nuclear warfare – seize power.
Some suggest partial regime change already may have occurred this week, with reports the ailing 86-year-old Khamenei had devolved significant powers to a Supreme Council of the Revolutionary Guards.
That should be a concern for both Trump and Netanyahu, says Moore-Gilbert, who worries that the Israelis do not have a plan for what happens the day after regime change, as in Gaza.
“There are so many worries to consider over what is going to happen when the regime falls and what future the country will be heading towards,” Haghirian says.
Still, he says, there is renewed optimism, even among those who have watched in dismay as the regime has crushed one civilian uprising after another.
“In the grand scheme of things they’re seeing this as their last hope,” Haghirian says.
For Iranians, a highly educated, largely secular population proud of their rich cultural history, “it is a national characteristic to believe there is hope and that light can prevail over this darkness”.
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