‘I haven’t slept for days’: Iranians describe mounting desperation after a month of war. 16 hours ago. Fergal KeaneSpecial correspondent. EPA. Warning: this article contains details which some readers may find distressing.. Until that moment the war was something happening in other parts of Tehran.. It had not touched the lives of “Setareh” and her colleagues. Then she heard an ominous noise and vibrations reached into the office.. She called out to her workmates: “I think it’s a bomb.” They left their desks and climbed the stairs to the roof of the building.. “We saw smoke rising into the sky, but we didn’t know what place had been targeted,” she recalls.. “After that, everyone working in the company panicked. People were shouting and screaming and running away. For one to two hours the situation stayed like that complete chaos.” That same day her boss shut the business and laid off his staff.. Iranians mark their New Year with anger, fear, and defiance. Total repression and air strikes bring unrelenting dread for Iranians. Despite strict state censorship, the BBC has been able to use trusted sources on the ground to obtain testimony from a range of Iranians in different parts of the country.. We cannot give Setareh’s real name or say what kind of work she does – no detail that might possibly identify her to the regime’s secret police. But we can say that she is a young woman from Tehran who loved going to work, where she could meet her friends, share stories of their lives and, of course, there was the guarantee of weekly wages.. Now the nightly bombing has stolen her ability to sleep naturally. She lies awake worrying about the present, and the future.. “I can honestly say I haven’t slept for several nights and days in a row. I try to relax by taking very strong painkillers so I can sleep. The anxiety is so intense that it has affected my body. When I think about the future and imagine those conditions, I truly don’t know what to do.”. By “those conditions” she means economic hardship and her fear of future street fighting between the regime and its enemies. The war has cost Setareh her job and she is running out of money.. Millions of Iranians are in a similar position. Even before the war, the economy was in deep crisis, with food prices rising by 60% in the previous year. Setareh describes mounting desperation as people run out of resources to survive.. “We cannot afford even basic food. What’s in our pockets does not match market prices… Iran has also been under sanctions for years, and the problems created by the Islamic Republic means that during this time we couldn’t build any savings, at least enough to survive now or depend on something. To put it simply, the people I thought might have money to lend also don’t have anything.”. Economic hardship spurred the huge nationwide protests of late 2025 and early 2026, and Setareh believes it will happen again.. “I don’t know how this massive wave of unemployment will be handled. There is no
