The author of this piece remains anonymous for safety reasons. Their identity is verified and known to the editorial team.
On the morning of February 28, Tehran woke to explosions. Airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel hit multiple sites across the capital, including Bit-e Rahbari – the compound associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By midnight on March 1, state media confirmed his death at the age of 86.
For decades, Khamenei’s image had defined the political skyline of Iran. By dawn, that skyline was in smoke.
In videos circulating online, groups of people could be seen cheering from rooftops or honking car horns in brief bursts of celebration. But it is difficult to mark the end of a dictatorship amidst the sound of air raid sirens.
On the same day, in the southern city of Minab, an elementary school for girls was struck. More than 150 young students were killed. The following day, three hospitals were hit.
Iran now stands in an unstable interval, between the end of one man’s rule and the uncertainty of what replaces it; between relief for some and irreparable loss for others.
In January, an internet shutdown erased my country from my phone screen. I wrote down what came next, as I didn't want the memory of those days to be forgotten.
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Winter in Vilnius is not so much cold as it is long. The light comes late and the city shuts down early. I have grown used to this darkness, to the empty streets, to the sound of snow under my shoes, to a silence that for a migrant woman coming from a city of more than twelve million people, is not a sign of loneliness but of order and calm. But as 2025 was ending, another kind of darkness arrived – the darkness coming out of my home country.
What happened in Iran this January was not just a protest – it was the collapse of communication. A time when an entire country went out of reach and those of us beyond its borders were forced to guess whether our loved ones were alive or dead, free or detained.
The economy ignited the street
For someone who has never lived in Iran, checking the dollar exchange rate every day may seem meaningless. But for Iranians, the exchange rate is a unit of measurement for life itself. In the final days of December 2025, data from price-monitoring websites showed the U.S. dollar reaching around 145,000 tomans. This meant that you will soon become poorer. Rents will rise, medicine will become more scarce, and the value of your income will shrink even further.
This round of protests did not begin in a political square or at a university. It began around Tehran’s Republic Street, where the Aladdin and Charsou malls, major centers for buying and selling mobile phones and digital goods, are located. Here, changes in the dollar are reflected in prices the very same day, the very same hour.
Soheil, a long-time vendor at Aladdin Mall, recounts those days. I reached him from Vilnius when the connection was finally restored, days later: “When I arrived in the morning, I saw prices had jumped again. If I sold, I wouldn’t be able to restock tomorrow. If I didn’t sell, I’d fall behind on rent. I didn’t pull up the shutter. A few others did the same. Someone said: ‘How long?’ That shout came out of the mall and spilled onto the sidewalk.”
An hour later, someone shouted, “The dollar is 145,000 tomans, how are we supposed to buy stock?” The crowd answered. The protest emerged from the heart of everyday economics – leaderless, unplanned, but in a language everyone understood.
“Whenever the internet is cut, it means something bad has happened or is happening. It means scenarios are about to be constructed that the presence of the internet would prevent.”
From Vilnius, I knew that Tehran functions like a loudspeaker: when the sound rises from Republic Street, other cities understand they are not alone. Soon, the people in other cities joined: Mashhad, the religious capital of Shiism; Qom, the political–religious centre; and then Ahvaz, Sanandaj, Ilam, Rasht and smaller towns.
The government and state media diminished the protests as public hysteria. People said, “The value of our money has collapsed.” Officials responded, “Goods are available; the problem is psychological.” When one senior official said, “There is no problem,” I sat in Vilnius and thought that no sentence could be more infuriating.
For many, this denial recalled autumn 2022, when the name Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being detained by the so-called ‘morality police’, became a nationwide cry. In those days, the official media also failed to hear the voices of the street.
The protests continued throughout the final days of December and the beginning of January. The slogans were no longer only about rising prices. Among all the chants, one singular demand was voiced across Iran: “The regime must go. The people no longer want the Islamic Republic.”
January 6, 2026. The 8 pm call
Protests continued across Iran until January 6, when Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last Shah and representative of a protest group based in the U.S., issued a call urging people to take to the streets at 8 pm for two consecutive nights (January 8-9). For me, one word stood out: “night.”
In my own lived experience of protest in Iran, from the days of the Green Movement from 2009-2022, the pattern was usually streets by day and home by night. In a country where repression has a particular relationship with darkness, night gives the advantage to security forces. I asked myself: “Why night?” I still don’t know the answer.
Later, Maryam, a university friend who joined the protests during the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, wrote to me from Tehran: “I wish the call hadn’t been for nighttime. I wish face-to-face visibility might have made some hands tremble on the trigger.”