Back to Iran

This time it seems I am the only Western journalist in town and my translator is nervous. He keeps getting phone calls from someone who wants to know where I’m going and with whom I’m speaking. And every night he must send a detailed report on my work. Tension in Tehran has grown.

In just a few months, the so called “axis of resistance” has crumbled. The ayatollahs’ main ally, Assad’s Syria, is now in the hands of Turkey and Al-Jolani’s Sunni militias. Israel, after decimating Hamas in Gaza, has beheaded the Lebanese Hezbollah’ leadership and holds Yemen’s Houthis at gunpoint.

Iran is facing its weakest and most isolated period since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and the bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s. The nuclear deal looks unlikely to be revived. The economic crisis has deepened. Prices of unsubsidized consumer goods are out of reach for many Iranians. A pound of meat costs more than a full tank of gasoline. The local currency is in free fall and the gap between civil society and the clerical regime now seems unbridgeable.

With US sanctions preventing hard currency transactions and no tourists in sight, the Grand Bazar has seen its business slowing down significantly and most of the products on sale are low quality goods from China.

I drive up Vali Asr boulevard, from the congested suburbs of South Tehran to the luxurious residences of the wealthy in Shemiran and Niavaran: a journey through the contradictions of Iranian society, from the squalid dormitories of Afghan immigrants to the neighborhoods of the upper middle class and nomenklatura, where Porsches and Maseratis circulate, boutiques sell designer Italian clothes and supermarkets stock European products smuggled in from Dubai.

There are also positive signs. Most girls are no longer afraid to show themselves in public without the veil. The Bassiji, the people’s militia, are no longer seen around. And a new law “on hijab and chastity” has been shelved, at least for the time being.

Social changes, led especially by women, are now irreversible. This does not mean, however, that the regime is close to collapse. At least as long as 85-year-old Ali Khamenei, the Guide of the Revolution, can rely on the support of the armed forces, which control the war arsenal, much of the country’s economy and the nuclear program.

On my last day in Iran I meet with retired general Hossein Kanani Moghaddam, a founding member of the all-powerful Pasdaran, the revolutionary Guards, and a close associate of the late Imam Ruhollah Khomeini. The general is pleased to show me his photo album: a journey through time and the wars of recent decades. Here he is in Afghanistan with Mullah Omar during the anti-Soviet resistance. On the Iraqi front with 16-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, the future leader of Hezbollah. In Lebanon as he trains the first groups of Shiite fighters in the Bekaa Valley. In Damascus with Bashar Assad. In Baghdad with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of the Popular Mobilization Forces.

The general is still defiant. He tells me that the army has sophisticated weapons systems that are not shown during military drills. He claims that Iran is capable to deploy tactic nuclear warheads in a matter of days if attacked by Israel.

As I leave his house and his bellicose speeches, I cannot help but think of the belief in change that I sensed in my Iranian friends and the young people I met at the university and in the cafes of Tehran. I am also reminded of the words heard from the voice of Catholic Cardinal Dominique Mathieu and from the Jewish faithful gathered at dawn in the Yusef Abad synagogue: “We need peace! We need peace in Iran, in Gaza, in Lebanon!”

Unfortunately, peace will not come soon to this part of the world.