By Elham Rahmati & Sahand Saadatmandi
This article was originally published by Truthout
In a war of aggression, our people refused to disappear and earned something no diplomatic text can grant or revoke.
The United States and Iran announced a framework agreement earlier this week to end the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression on Iran. Whether or not this agreement holds, the United States has lost this war of aggression in every sense — moral, legal, political, economic, reputational, and strategic. Iran held out for 39 days against the combined military force of the United States and Israel until a temporary ceasefire was announced — more than 100 days in total — and it did so without capitulating.
A people who gathered on bridges and around power plants and in the streets when their country was being bombed and its critical infrastructure threatened; who did what they could to defend their country against the most expensive and technologically advanced military machinery in the world; who heard Trump’s threat to wipe out their civilization and still refused to disappear — these people have earned something that no diplomatic text can grant or revoke. Let us call it what it is: a victory — even if it may not yet appear so to a fraction of that very society.
That this outcome registers as a defeat for Washington is not merely a matter of symbolism. It is recorded in the oil markets. The controlled access of the Strait of Hormuz triggered what the International Energy Agency called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” driving inflation across every economy downstream of a chokepoint Washington chose to militarize and then discovered it could not control. It is recorded in Trump’s plummeting approval ratings as gas prices rose at home and one U.S. congressional representative after another began quietly calling the aggression a colossal mistake. It is recorded in the capitals of the Gulf monarchies as they came to understand, in real time, how easily their wealth and stability— built on the backs of migrant labor exploitation and genocide normalization, and secured through military cooperation with the U.S. — could be squandered for a war of choice started without their consultation.
But the announcement of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran, welcome as it is, does not resolve the conditions that have been plaguing Iranians for months. A signature is not the same thing as peace. And the situation, for people living in Iran, has a texture that no press release captures. We have been in Tehran during this war. The uncertainty we have faced with every supposed negotiation — and continue to face despite this supposed framework agreement — does not feel abstract here. It lives on in the way people pause before making plans, all made with the unspoken caveat of Inshallah, if things remain calm.
Since the so-called ceasefire that followed the February-March aggression, Donald Trump has said, by one count, at least 38 times that a deal is close. Those announcements were consistently followed with new threats, often ones that veered into eliminationism. He set deadlines that came and went. Just six days ago, Trump announced the U.S. would “be taking” Khark Island [which, thanks to transliteration errors, is more commonly known as Kharg Island in English], the terminal through which roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports move. Hours later, he said he had “cancelled the scheduled strikes” and declared a potential settlement shortly afterwards.
Over time, even those Iranians who had once called on Trump to help overthrow the Islamic Republic stopped taking him at his word. International markets followed suit, tracking Iranian negotiators’ statements rather than Trump’s Truth Social posts. Trump’s threats, for the most part, should be received as what they are: proud announcements of the establishment’s desire to commit war crimes. Notably, the U.S. and Israel have not been held to account for any of these crimes, not the ones that took place nor the ones that were threatened.
Meanwhile, Iranians continue to pay the price. Since March 2026, the cost of living has surged across the board — rent, groceries, clothes, everything. At this point, the war has eliminated an estimated 2 million jobs directly or indirectly, a figure labor groups consider an undercount. The U.S. and Israel made more than 20 attacks on Iranian healthcare facilities over the course of the war. On April 2, the United States and Israel bombed the Pasteur Institute of Iran, a 106-year-old public health institution that has been central to vaccine production, infectious disease monitoring, and pharmaceutical innovation across the entire Middle East. Also among the targets: Tofigh Daru, the largest pharmaceutical complex in Tehran, which produced treatments for cancer and multiple sclerosis. The supply chains for medications to treat chronic and life-threatening conditions were deliberately severed — not as collateral damage, but as strategy. The social fabric of a city — the informal borrowing, the extended family networks, the small reliabilities — is fraying, because everyone is stretched simultaneously, and because the infrastructure that might have absorbed some of these stresses was systematically targeted.
But to speak of this war beginning on February 28, 2026, or even on June 13, 2025, when Israel first launched direct attacks on Iran with U.S. support, is to misread the timeline. The war on Iranian life could be said to have begun with the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act signed by Bill Clinton on August 5, 1996 — the first legislation to impose secondary sanctions, penalizing any foreign company that invested in Iran’s energy sector.
What followed over the next three decades, supported by both Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations, was a slow, methodical siege: banks cut off, the assets of the central bank frozen, medical supply chains severed, currency made radioactive to international finance. Pharmaceuticals and medical devices were nominally exempt from sanctions, but the U.S.-led financial architecture meant that suppliers wouldn’t touch Iranian orders regardless of what laws said on paper. People died of treatable cancers. Children died of diseases that a functioning health system would have contained. During the 2020 pandemic alone, researchers estimated at least 13,000 excess deaths in Iran could be attributed in significant part to the sanctions’ obstruction of medical imports. The U.S. has a long history of this kind of slow and murderous violence in the region, with at least 4.5 million deaths estimated across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia since 9/11 due to wars, sanctions, and other degradations of living conditions.
The January 8 and 9 protests, which preceded the Israeli-U.S. aggression, and in which demonstrators called for the end of the Islamic Republic, were real. So were the state repression and the economic grievances that brought people into the streets: inflation, inequality, privatization, austerity politics, shock therapy measures and corruption devastating the population. These grievances were not manufactured; they’re a regular feature of Iranian life. But they did need to be directed toward a foreign-imposed regime change narrative aimed at canceling out what Iranians had achieved over four decades through grassroots organizing and movements. This regressive discourse was enabled, in significant part, by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s former shah, and a well-funded diaspora media apparatus operating across satellite television and social media. This apparatus deployed heavy pressure and bullying tactics to shape the political imagination of people both inside and outside of Iran toward an incomprehensible reality in which the monarchy was to magically be restored. But the actual outcome of their political project would have been state collapse, followed by civil war, fragmentation and occupation.
The first day of the war included the assassination of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, alongside strikes on several clearly civilian targets. In Minab, a missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, killing 120 children among a total death toll of 168. In Lamerd, a sports hall was struck while a women’s volleyball team was inside. The Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) — never before used in combat — used to carry out the attack detonated 30 to 40 meters above a sports hall, scattering hundreds of thousands of tungsten fragments across the surrounding neighborhood before impact, killing at least 21 people, including four children. As news spread of Khamenei’s killing, some factions within Iran opposed to the Islamic Republic celebrated. But by the following dawn — before official sources in Iran had confirmed his death — his supporters were already in the city squares, grieving and condemning what they named a terrorist act. The state, reading the pain and fury in those streets, channeled it: initially as a tactic against the U.S.-Israeli plan to use on-ground forces to pave the way for further instability and violence across the country, the government called people into the squares for 40 nights of public mourning. Before the 40th day arrived, a temporary ceasefire was declared. At the commemoration marking 40 days since Khamenei’s death, his successor — his son, Mojtaba Khamenei — addressed the crowds still filling the squares and asked them to remain until the war’s victorious conclusion. He (like his father) gave them a name: mardome mab’oos shodeh — the people whose divine mission has commenced.
But the people didn’t go home, even when that threat seemed neutralized. The squares became a place for finding solidarity, for grieving, and for grandstanding — for demanding the permanent defeat of the country’s enemies alongside others who felt the same outrage, no matter what they look like, which socioeconomic class they belong to, how religious they are, or how much loyalty they carry for the Islamic Republic.
In Enghelab Square in Tehran, the largest congregation point in Tehran since the war began, thousands of people, night after night (now more than 100 nights), rallying, chanting, and carrying signs. Some of those signs express support for the state and homage to the people killed by US and Israel. But many of them express something else entirely: criticism of the government’s neoliberal economics, its austerity policies, its corruption, the domestic decisions that contributed to the economic pressure people are facing. In other words, some of the same grievances that brought people into the streets in January.
This is the reality that the “two Irans” narrative — the Iran of the “regime” versus the Iran of the people — cannot accommodate: No matter the resentment they may feel toward one another, a person who joined the January protests and a person standing in Enghelab Square may want, at the most fundamental level, the same things: dignity, security, and a life that is not structured as a permanent emergency. The political divisions between them can’t be minimized. But they are being actively deepened, from the outside, by forces that have no intention of living with the consequences.
It’s essential to understand: the people inside Iran are not passive objects of a historical process. They are people with a revolution to protect. They are people with rent to pay, children to feed, aging parents to care for, work they are trying to do, grief they are carrying from the friends and family members who have died premature deaths due to the violence enacted upon them. They are people who spent days sleeping in anxiety and checking their phones for news of relatives, watching their beloved cities get bombed by fighter jets maneuvering over their skies. They are people who, through months of an internet blackout, a collapsing currency, power cuts, and the renewed threat of another round of strikes, continued to show up wherever they felt needed.
Throughout the war, the official language of the Iranian state returned again and again to one word: tabavari, or resilience. Resilience flatters suffering without interrogating it — it describes a population absorbing blow after blow and remaining upright, as though that is itself the goal. Resilience, as a political concept, is fundamentally passive. It accepts the architecture of violence as given and asks only that people survive within it — in Iran’s case often without existing structures to provide support.
What we saw in Iran during those 39 days of the Israeli-U.S. war of aggression, and what we have seen since, is something different. The people who formed human chains, gathered on bridges, and around power plants and historic sites, who picked up old Czech-made, Cold War-era Brno rifles and shot at U.S. aircraft above their own land — they were not demonstrating resilience, but instead actively standing against the terms being imposed on them. They placed their bodies in relation to the infrastructure being targeted and declared themselves as a population that would bear the consequences of its defiance. Such love and devotion for the land and for everything they have built within it — everything fought for across years of the harshest sanctions imaginable — deserves correct recognition. These people have a relationship to their country that is neither reducible to its government nor its enemies. There is only one word for this confrontation and that is resistance.
We learned this from Gaza. By watching a people defend a land that had been systematically destroyed around them, not despite the destruction but through it, we understood what it means to be ahrar al-alam, the free people of the world. Not free in the liberal sense of unencumbered individual rights. Free in the older, harder sense: A refusal to be owned.
The distinction between resilience and resistance matters because the two concepts produce different political futures. Resilience produces people who are proud of how much they have borne. Resistance produces people who ask why they were asked to bear it, who decided what was imposed upon them, and with what authority. The Iranian people have earned both descriptions. But only one of them points forward.
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