Reports from residents of Tehran describe a city transformed since Saturday’s airstrikes. Large numbers of volunteer paramilitaries — members of the Basij, the IRGC’s domestic paramilitary wing — have taken up positions alongside armed police throughout the city. Checkpoints have been established on major roads. The atmosphere is one of tense watchfulness.
Social media activity from inside Iran offers fragmentary but suggestive glimpses of the public mood. Videos showing Iranians celebrating Khamenei’s death circulated in the immediate aftermath, though it is impossible to verify their location or scale. Other footage showed people going about daily life with an air of deliberate normalcy, apparently determined not to attract attention from security forces.
The regime’s deployment of paramilitaries signals that it is taking seriously the possibility of domestic unrest, even if organized political opposition is absent. The memory of January, when protests were met with lethal force, is presumably present in the minds of both citizens and security commanders.
Access to information is a major challenge for those inside Iran. Internet restrictions, a perennial feature of the Islamic Republic’s information control strategy, have reportedly been tightened further. Many Iranians rely on VPNs to access uncensored news, but the government’s ability to interfere with these tools has grown over the years.
For ordinary Tehranis, the immediate priorities are practical: access to food and supplies, the safety of family members, and information about what is happening. The geopolitical drama playing out in decision-making rooms is experienced at street level as uncertainty, fear, and the constant background awareness that the country is at war.
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