Listen to Ali Araghi read an excerpt from “How I Became ‘War Stricken’ in Four Days.”

On May 16, 2025, I boarded a plane at Washington’s Dulles airport and landed some sixteen hours later in a dusty Tehran. I wanted to see my family and friends. I wanted to walk in the streets of my city and sit in cafés. I was going to get inspiration for more stories. Even though we had traveled to our hometown a short while before, my wife, Idée, and I soon discovered many new cafés where young, artsy people hung out in a city buzzing with life. My mother, a retired nurse, now thin and old but still active and borderline workaholic, served me home-­cooked food and fresh fruits even when I didn’t want them. I took pictures of cats that lay on top of parked cars as though the whole city was their territory, and I ran for my life crossing the street. Tehran enchanted me even with its sweltering sunny days.

About a month later, on the morning of June 13, before I even unlocked my phone, I saw notifications. One said, Are you okay? How are things “on the ground”?

I opened a news website and saw a map of Iran with eight little red stars on it, each with nine rays, representing bombings. Three were in the center of the country, two in the west and northwest, and two in Tehran. Israel had struck Iran. I never thought Tehran would be hit, especially on the first day of whatever this was. Vast expanses of land lie between the capital and the western borders. What had happened to the negotiations? Even if they had failed, they were about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and the main nuclear facilities were located far from Tehran. Still barely awake, I could hardly process the information. Sliding out of the bed, I tiptoed over to the living room of the little apartment Idée and I had rented for our trip. I sat on the sofa and scrolled on my phone.

Aerial attacks had killed several authorities including military commanders, nuclear scientists, and a university president. Videos showed buildings with a story or two taken out, others pulverized. The first responders walked in debris. In photos, columns of black smoke rose in both urban and rural areas. The war I thought wouldn’t happen had started, even though war is not what anyone near me was calling it then.

Hearsay and rumors flashed through phone calls and messages. By the time I was ready to leave the apartment I had heard a few. Some said the attacks had come from missiles and fighter jets; others claimed drones had been launched from inside Tehran toward their targets. Despite the shock (or maybe even because of it), the stoic writer in me packed up for a day of writing.

So many seats were free on the metro on that first day that it felt like a late-­night train on a weekend or the New Year’s holiday. When I climbed out of the station, the usually crowded boulevard was so empty that it seemed I was seeing the pavement for the first time. It was midday, but all the stores on both sides were closed. I thought I might not find a café open, even in that central Haft-­e Tir neighborhood that some had described as Tehran’s Latin Quarter.

After walking on quiet sidewalks past shuttered storefronts, I finally found a clean and hip café on a side street: a repurposed apartment on the second floor of a two-­story brick building with a ’70s feel to it. The main color was a very subdued green accentuated by an energetic cherry red. Almost everyone was in their twenties. None of the women wore a hijab. The pink napkins were neatly placed on the tables next to small vases with real, if slightly withered, flowers. The Doors’ “People Are Strange” filled the small area, a little too loud for my ears. If it were not for the Farsi I heard around me, the complexion on the faces, and the noses hooked like mine, I could have imagined myself in Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, or Istanbul. Nothing in that café would indicate that Israel had attacked the city about twelve hours before. It was there, as I typed on my laptop, that I felt a new connection with Tehran forming within me.

That evening, in Idée’s uncle’s apartment, dinner was served as always on the kitchen island which doubled as a dining table. The spotless china plates and sparkling silverware silently whispered that nothing had changed; the take-­out kebabs and chicken were still warm on the table and little bowls of yogurt and giardiniera held the same familiar taste as ever. I heard the shots for the first time after we moved over to the comfortable couches in the sitting area. The rattle of the Iranian air defense, ostensibly fighting Israeli drones, came in through the open window in random successions.

Five of us had lived through the Iran-­Iraq war some forty years before: Idée’s mother, her brother, her uncle, her aunt, and I. I was the youngest of the five, a baby when the war started, yet the memories of those times were still present in the recesses of my body. We were the veterans, playing down the gravity of the situation or brooding in silence. With his hands clasped on his round belly, Idée’s uncle threw glances at the television and offered an occasional commentary. Her older brother could not stop talking. He kept scrolling on his phone and filled the apartment with his sonorous voice as he read aloud various snippets of news, mostly rumors.

For Idée and her cousin—six and fifteen years younger than me, respectively—the sounds were unbearable. Hugging each other in the small space between the couch and the kitchen island, they asked, “Was that a fighter jet? Was that air defense?” Having seen the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and scarcely surviving a shot mistakenly fired by a friend to his jaw, Idée’s uncle consoled his daughter and niece with the assurance that the successive staccato was indeed Iranian air defense. Dessert was left out on the coffee table—a box of good confectionery that Idée had bought on her way over—but outside the window the war was unfurling with nervous rattles blindly aiming at invisible objects in the night sky.

Israel announced that the reason for the attacks was that Iran was closer than ever to making nuclear weapons. Iran had repeatedly denied the accusations and declared that it had no intentions of doing so. Years of tension and negotiations had revolved around the same accusation and denial. Up until a few days before, I thought diplomacy had prevailed. That was why the attacks were such a surprise.

On the second day, we heard from friends and acquaintances who had tried to leave the city only to get stuck in traffic jams. A three-­hour drive had taken eight. A neighbor set out but soon had to turn back because they were running out of gas. It was starting to feel like we were trapped in that 290-­square-­mile city, even though I had no intention of leaving it. But what would I do if I could not take my flight back to Washington, DC, in four weeks? What would happen to my job, which I had started six months before, or the life I’d been making in the US for the past fourteen years? These thoughts were soon replaced by an angry calm. Let anything that had to happen happen. I could be a writer anywhere. My future had vanished, replaced by a throbbing and expectant Tehran: life at 100 percent present. This was my home and it would not be so bad to witness its story. If I did not write the story of my city under attack, then what would being a writer even mean?

That evening, Idée and I went to Taleghani Forest Park with two friends who we’d known for decades, along with their partners. Adults walked or sat on metal benches. Children ran around and rode their bikes. Kids didn’t know what had happened, or if they did, they suppressed it beneath their excitement for their games. Unlike them, we discussed politics and war as we hiked up and down the hilly paths.

Opinions varied from the very first day, as they did that evening among our tiny group: some welcomed the attacks on the heads of the state. If those in power ran a decades-­long dictatorship without care for their people, then anything to eliminate them was okay. Others were less positive about the strikes. I was among those who thought two things could be wrong at the same time: oppressive domestic policies and foreign military strikes. Two wrongs could oppose each other without one justifying another.

We discussed, exchanged opinions, and took pictures near a small pond where some little frogs, the color of the earth, had left the water and lingered on the path. When dusk fell, we bought cheese puffs and nonalcoholic beer and sat on plastic chairs. I scanned the open skies where a boom, a bang, or a flare could emerge any moment. Later we went back to Shayan’s apartment, where he and his girlfriend served pasta with mushrooms. Shayan poured sour-­cherry-­infused homemade vodka and played a few tunes on his upright piano, as Idée and I sang along. Then around midnight more attacks began. We suspected that they came from the eastern hills, as they rumbled over the city and washed through Shayan’s apartment in the west.

After we bantered and nervously scrolled some more, Shayan read a news report on his phone: Israel had targeted one of three oil depots in Tehran. That could cause a gas shortage. For Idée, that meant not being able to go around the city or leave it, if need be. For me, it was another invitation to stay and watch. I had planned to finish my novel that summer, but now Tehran was asking me to open my eyes. Maybe now I would have to write something other than fiction.

On the third day, I put my laptop in my backpack and set out to write at the library. The subway was busy with passengers, mostly men, standing in the aisle and grasping at the bars, heads bent and eyes pinned to screens. I changed trains, then got off and took an escalator up to the ground. As I reached the entrance, I saw people on the street rushing to enter the subway station. I slowed my pace and cautiously walked against the stream, toward the sunny street where traffic had come to a standstill and passersby looked up at the sky.

A column of white smoke went up behind the buildings in front of me. A target had been hit a few moments before very close to my library. Since the beginning of the war, that was the first time an attack had happened during the day. It was as though the sun could no longer offer any protection to the city. I called Idée, then my mother, then my brother. Everyone was alive and safe. Each handled worry differently: my mother forcing a cheerful and unconcerned tone into the phone, Idée slightly panicking and asking me to stay inside the station, and my brother exuding a performative calm, telling me to avoid the library for now. Standing on the black steps of Shariati Metro Station, I watched the people and the train of cars, the vibrating tension on that street, the stores standing shoulder to shoulder, the interrupted rhythm of life. I did not listen to Idée, but I took my brother’s advice. I walked in the direction opposite the library to find a café, and on my way bought a stuffed soccer ball for him in remembrance of the one we played with when we were kids. I had not been a good brother when I was young. Now, I was trying to make it up to him.

In a tiny café with one narrow ledge table and two stools, I tried to concentrate despite the harsh metal music. After serving me my coffee, the only attendant sat outside at one of the café’s sidewalk tables talking and laughing with his friends. He would step in to serve an occasional take-­out drink when a customer showed up, then went back to his friends. Two hours later, when the attendant was working behind the counter, one young man from the group came in and sat on a stool to charge his phone. He swiped up and down a little, then said to the attendant, “Man, they hit Qods Square.” People had been killed. A main water and sewage pipe had burst, and parts of the city were now without water. Weeks later, video footage would come out of the moment of impact. It showed the intersection, with some sixteen cars waiting at the red light. The next moment the cars were somersaulting in the air as a small volcano of dirt erupted from the street. Another video showed farther down the square where a sloping sidewalk had turned into a stream from the broken main. The water was what scared Idée.

That evening, I had tense arguments with her about leaving Tehran. “Israel is striking infrastructures,” she said. “We will die if they carpet-­bomb the city.” I did not believe that would happen. It seemed to me that both Iran and Israel were choosing their targets with some degree of restraint and consideration for civilian lives, although I did not have a good justification for the striking of a public square as crowded as Qods with its metro station, shops, taxi stands, and pedestrians. “They wouldn’t carpet-­bomb Tehran!” I told her as I tried to convince myself that my assessment of the situation was correct. There were indeed moments when I really doubted I would survive the war.

Why did I want to stay, then? Why couldn’t I spend a few days by the Caspian Sea until this war calmed down, or came to an end? What if Idée’s fears became real and soon food disappeared from supermarket shelves? What if water drained from the pipes? For me, the answer was simple: I would do as those who stayed did. Yes, a large number had left, perhaps tens if not hundreds of thousands. But Tehran was a city of about ten million. If millions stayed, so could I. Safety was not my concern. Identity was.

I was a fiction writer with some success; it was still unsatisfactory to me but I was hopeful and ambitious. During years of writing, I had occasionally questioned the value of what I did. Why did it matter that I write a speculative short story or a magical realistic novel about revolution and cats? I believed that so much good fiction had already been written that if every author stopped working that day, there would still be enough for readers to last a lifetime. On my hopeless days, I thought that picking up some litter from the sidewalk would have more positive effect than anything I wrote. But now I had found a purpose. A larger-­than-­life story was unfolding in front of my eyes. It had an urgency that none of my other writing had until that day. If I left, how could I justify the past fourteen years of my life: immigration to study writing in an American university, adopting a language I had no lullabies in, starting an online journal, submitting stories to magazines, and numbing myself against the barrage of rejections?

On the fourth day, Idée and I discussed where to go for the night. Being with friends and family lessened the fear of the invisible killing machines in the sky. It took a few hours to decide. She wanted to be near her mother, brother, and me at the same time. My mother wanted to be with me, my brother, and both of her daughters-­in-­law. My brother invited everyone over. My brother-­in-­law did not want to go anywhere, and my mother-­in-­law decided to stay with him. Idée and I had an argument, and she repeated that we had to leave. In the heat of the conversation, she said that other people’s decisions depended on mine and I would be responsible for their lives if something were to happen.

“I can’t be responsible for someone else’s decision,” I said without a moment’s pause. Idée and I were adults and so were our families. They were able to decide for themselves and logically they had to accept the consequences.

It was getting dark and we had to hurry because the city shut down at dusk. Idée told me to pack for a few days, but I did not want to stay at my brother’s for more than one night. I crammed one change of clothes into my backpack for the next morning and I was ready.

Idée tried to find a ride with Snapp, the equivalent of Uber. The plan was to pick up my mother and then head north to my brother’s, but no driver accepted our request for the long, two-­leg trip. I told Idée to change the request to my mother’s place, which was closer. Someone accepted with a hiked price. Once we got there, we still couldn’t find a ride to my brother’s. To reach his apartment, we had to drive near Qods Square, which had been struck just the day before. That could have been one reason. Another was the gas shortage.

As Idée and my mother tried to secure a ride on their apps, I walked over to the main street to flag a taxi. In a haze of polluted air, and roasting under the sun, the street was quiet as it had been the first day. Few cars passed by, and their drivers glanced at me, the only person standing out on the street. Finally, one yellow taxi pulled over. I bent over and talked to the driver through the window. He pondered the destination and spat out a price twice the fare on a regular day. He argued that gasoline was hard to find, which was true. The day before, I had seen two gas stations with lines longer than I had ever seen in my life, probably a mile.

Next to me in the car, my mother, small and old, clasped Idée’s hand for the duration of the ride. At Qods Square a hole of two to three meters in diameter had been gouged out of the asphalt right in the middle of the intersection. The river of water and sewage had stopped, and twenty to thirty men were working around the hole to repair the damage.

The sense of urgency melted in us as soon as we reached my brother’s apartment. He lived in one of the northern neighborhoods at the foot of the Alborz Mountains. While no part of the city felt safe, the calm that emanated from the mountain and the gigantic plane tree brushing its leaves against the window soothed our nerves, as if nature would set things right.

My brother’s open-­plan apartment got a lot of light from two facing windows. The formation of the furniture, light fixtures, flowerpots, and decorative objects made it clear that two architects lived there. I gave my brother the stuffed soccer ball I had bought him the day before. He held it in his hands and smiled.

Dinner was served with a semblance of normality. Lasagna and beef cutlets, salad and yogurt, nonalcoholic beer and yogurt drinks. After that we moved to the sectional around a big bowl of fruit on the wooden coffee table. Those of us with access to the internet plowed through Instagram and Telegram news channels. At one point, my sister-­in-­law read that the Israeli army had ordered Tehran’s District 3 to be evacuated. The TV was on. I devoured sour cherries as if I needed their juice in my veins. My mother quickly washed the dishes in the kitchen. My brother and I gently passed the soccer ball back and forth in the tiny space between the chairs as we remembered how as teenagers we broke windows and porcelain figurines at home with our old stuffed ball.

After some time, when we were sitting on the sectional and the floor, a deep rumble rolled through the whole apartment and enveloped us. It must have been a fighter jet flying over. We were looking at each other with fear when the explosion boomed. We jumped to our feet, not knowing what to do. Idée shouted at me to get away from the windows. As I joined her near the dining table, the TV screen was showing a cloud of dust around an empty chair where the newscaster had sat a few moments before. The News Channel TV station had been hit. That was big. The state television was a symbol of the country’s political system being in place and working with stability. Israel’s targeting the state media conveyed the hidden message that they were aiming to dismantle the entirety of the governing body.

What should you do in such limbo? This conundrum might be resolved the next day, or it could continue to deteriorate. But for how long? Idée’s uncle said that before the eight-­year war ended, it was just “war.” No one knew it would last almost a decade. That day at my brother’s, we, too, had no idea when our war would end. How do you pass time when you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or even the next hour? You play backgammon with your brother, and you stay up until four in the morning when the night starts to dilute, as though your sleepy eyes could prevent nocturnal calamities.

Idée and I lay on mats in the living room where the only light came from a green LED in the corner. Before I fell asleep, I told myself that I was not keeping her here under aerial attack. I had even suggested she should leave with her mother for the north where many Tehranis fled. She could stay at her sister’s place there. But Idée did not want to go without me. In her argument, if I changed my mind, both mothers would come with us, and my brother would also leave for her in-­laws’ house outside of Tehran. Everyone would be safer. But I wanted to see how that story would end. I had to.

Two hours later, I cracked open my eyes to see someone walking near me. I tried to go back to sleep, but when I opened my eyes, I saw my brother sitting cross-­legged on the floor, his round balding head bent towards me. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Apparently, Donald Trump had warned that Tehran should be evacuated. Even though the US had not participated in the attacks up until that point, it had become obvious that Trump was supportive of them. Israel had been asking America to join the war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Trump’s warning was a signal that he might actually do it. My brother and his wife were scared. They were thinking of leaving the city and they wanted to start early, before the roads were impassable.

No, I said, that had to be the media blowing up some minor news to create chaos. How could you evacuate millions? Still lying down and barely awake, I scrolled through some English-­language news sites. The president of the US threatening a mega city like Tehran had to be somewhere on the front pages. I challenged my brother, asking where he had seen the news because I could not find it.

He told me to open BBC Persian. The first headline said that the White House had clarified that by his evacuation comment, President Trump had meant to put pressure on the Iranian authorities to accept his deal, the deal that Iran and the US were negotiating when the attacks started. To me, that was a bluff to make us pick up and leave, just to create chaos, so I tried to downplay it. My brother got up and went to his bedroom, and then I heard my sister-­in-­law saying things that I interpreted, in my half-­sleep, as mild complaint. My brother came back with an Instagram post from BBC Persian that quoted Trump’s original words from his Truth Social post: “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”

Things have changed, he said. Staying was more dangerous now. If a couple million people decided to leave, we would get stuck on the road for no one knew how many hours. I woke Idée up. Like me, she had slept a little over two hours and she was shivering. She covered her face with her palms when she heard. Like the day before, decisions depended on decisions. I did not want to go. Idée wanted to stay with me as did my mother. My brother wanted my mother to be with either me or him, and his wife wanted to be with him. What I really wished was for all of them to leave me and go somewhere safe. I asked Idée if she would stay if I decided not to go. She said she would feel trapped and scared if we stayed. “We don’t have a car,” she said.

My brother said I would not be able to just take my backpack and walk in the city. Few shops would be open. Public transportation would not work. From his description, I pictured a city under blind and relentless bombing, where building after building collapsed, debris blocked the roads, and the open routes were so jammed that you would get stuck for three days. I fought the apocalyptic phantom.

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, my brain firing at full speed to find a solution; at the same time, an indecisive silence fell over the living room. The four of them stood waiting. No one looked at me. My mother was playing with her shawl, needlessly folding it. My brother looked at the corner where the ceiling and the walls met. My sister-­in-­law said, “So let’s not go if Ali feels that way.”

I wished I could dispel the thought that I bore responsibility for the lives of those four people. If I could, I would have announced, “I’m not going, no matter what.” But seeing their nervous faces made it impossible. Finally, I decided. “Okay. Let’s go.”

They got into motion finalizing the packing and putting on the last items of clothing. My plans to record the fate of my city were unraveling before my eyes. I had lost to what I thought was an impossible, dashed-­off threat.

In a matter of minutes, we were on the road. Sitting in the back between my mother and Idée, my knees pressed into the two front seats, I felt like someone who was leaving a loved one behind, unable to speak. I was a coward, abandoning my defenseless Tehran, vulnerable to falling bombs.

When we were out of the city limits and the hot morning sun painted the hills, fields, and industrial buildings a dusty gold, I realized that something more fundamental was happening to me. I was becoming an IDP, an Internally Displaced Person. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, IDPs are people who “have been forced to flee their homes by conflict, violence, persecution or disasters, however, they remain within the borders of their own country.”

I had heard stories about IDPs during the Iran-­Iraq war. They left their cities in the west and southwest where Saddam Hussein’s attacks had been concentrated. In large numbers, the displaced hauled what they could gather of their belongings and trudged eastward toward safety. I remembered pictures of them shuffling on the roadside. I heard stories of them receiving warm welcomes in other towns but soon becoming burdens and getting mistreated. They were called “war-­stricken,” a term that had pity, contempt, and humiliation in it. Mean kids would call a boy who had taken refuge in their neighborhood “war-­stricken.”

How could I be an IDP? The “war-­stricken” of the past had lost their jobs. They had few financial resources. Their homes were destroyed and they had no family where they went. I was not any of those. I taught at a prestigious American university. I was a published author, and some very welcoming family were waiting for me in their house two hours from Tehran. The green card in my wallet promised that I could enter the US when I landed at its border. I had dollars to spend. Yet none of that had saved me from becoming displaced at one hundred kilometers an hour. The bombs had erased distinctions. The bombs that had fallen and those promised by a Truth Social post, all were equalizers, pushing architect, nurse, teacher, and taxi driver alike out of their hometown.

Once we hit the road, the city seemed more normal than my family had pictured. The roads were open, traffic fluid. Public buses were working. Many had indeed fled the city, but more had stayed. I would not have become displaced if it had not been for my family’s fears, their pressure on me, and the fact of their being my relatives. Did they have a responsibility for my decision? I stopped short of that facile conclusion. If I were to throw my own reasoning at myself, my family could not be held accountable for my decision to leave the city.

As we rode on the highway, I wondered which one I should have prioritized: myself and my purpose as a writer or what might have been my duty toward others? Did that kind of ethical obligation even exist? If so, toward whom? Where was the line? I did not have an answer to those questions. I was just happy my family was safe in that car, and I was already planning how I could take the bus and the subway to return to my beloved city.

—

It’s March 2026, and outside my seventh-­floor window, State College lies like a fictional city, surrounded by peaceful hills and mountains. For 248 days I’d written the word “ceasefire” in a spreadsheet, the same file where I keep count of my writing. I record the number of words I put on the paper (or in a file) each day so I can chart the ups and downs of my projects. When a ceasefire was announced on June 24, 2025, I first wrote the word “ceasefire” in its own column. It was a reminder of what happened on that day. The next day, I copied the word again because I wasn’t sure the war had really come to an end. I did it the next day, too, then again the day after. Soon a column of “ceasefires” began to form on my spreadsheet. Every time I decided to put an end to that column, something kept me from it. If I stopped writing the word, it meant that I had believed in its permanence, that the war had really ended.

In a way it had. It now had a name, Twelve-­Day War, and a Wikipedia page. But an uncomfortable distrust had been gnawing at me since that day, even after I left Iran and returned to the US. Then in January 2026, a new wave of protests started in Iran. They turned into a massacre on January 9 and 10. Thousands were killed on the streets: Iranian officials said somewhere around three thousand by terrorists, while the opposition groups, Western media, and human rights groups mentioned much higher numbers from six to forty thousand at the hands of the Iranian security forces. Then Iran and the US started negotiations again. It was like a déjà vu from the previous spring. And then, just as they had the previous summer, Israel attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations, but this time joined by the US. Iran’s Supreme Leader was killed and Iran launched retaliatory attacks against Israel and the US bases near the Persian Gulf.

Before I was able to bring this essay to a conclusion, another war has begun without an end in sight. Once again, my phone is flooded with pictures and videos of buildings turned to rubble, gray plumes shooting up, and faces caked in dust and ash. When I opened my word-­count file on February 28, after the 248th “ceasefire” I wrote “war.”

I am sitting outside this one, waiting, worrying, wondering. Will the airports be open when summer comes? Will I be able to return? Will my mother and brother survive the missiles? Will their apartments be still standing? When will this war end? What will be left of Tehran when it does? Maybe this essay ends with these questions, as unpredictable as the war is, as uncertain as I am. ■