In Iran, a war-weary population met with cautious relief the news of diplomatic progress between their government and the Trump administration as an initial agreement took shape.
Even as their government, and President Donald Trump, vie to hold up the agreement as evidence of victory, many ordinary Iranians say the war has yielded nothing but devastation. Over five weeks of active combat, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes hit more than 13,000 military, industrial and political targets in Iran, damaging or destroying thousands of structures and killing more than 1,700 civilians, including more than 150 children at a school on the war’s first day.
While the onslaught failed to topple the Iranian government, it did compound the country’s economic crisis, punishing a civilian population already mired in years of hardship. Inflation has grown to more than 70 percent and the country’s currency, the rial, is trading at over 1.8 million to the U.S. dollar, one of multiple record lows set in recent years.
The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen Iranians, using voice notes shared on messaging apps, about the impact of the war and their hopes for peace. Heavy restrictions on the internet and security concerns make it difficult to reach people inside Iran. Those who agreed to speak did so on the condition that they only be identified by their first name.
“When I heard the news of the signing of the memorandum, my first feeling was relief, though not joy,” said Nima, 45, who owns a small stationery business in Tehran.
Nima said he doesn’t believe either side, his government or its foreign opponents, are “trustworthy,” so the fragile peace could “fall apart.” Nonetheless, he said he’s hopeful.
“I want my child to live in a country with a predictable future, not one where we wake up every day to a new crisis,” he said.
Parichehr, 32, a primary school teacher in Isfahan, in central Iran, said she is skeptical of the preliminary peace arrangement. “To be honest, this memorandum did not make me feel anything special. I was neither happy nor sad,” she said.
Anahita, a 24-year-old political science student in Shiraz, in the country’s south, said she was feeling “cautious hope.”
“I am neither so optimistic that I think everything will suddenly change, nor so pessimistic that I say it doesn’t matter,” she said.
As details of a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran began to emerge, Iranian officials were quick to make the case for the initial agreement.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian took to X to assure the public that Iran would not “submit to humiliation.”
“What has been agreed upon is an important step toward stopping the war and beginning negotiations, and a final agreement has yet to take shape,” he said. “The government’s focus — with or without an agreement — is sincere service to the people.”
But support for the agreement in Iran is not universal. Protests broke out in Tehran, where demonstrators blasted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the deal’s lead negotiator, Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. An ultra-hardline minority in Iran opposes any kind of engagement with the United States, arguing instead for continued war with the country that killed Iran’s supreme leader.
Since the declaration of a ceasefire in April, many Iranians reached by The Post said the Iranian government and its security forces appeared to emerge from the conflict with the U.S. stronger and more powerful. There are more paramilitary forces on city streets, arrests are up and so are executions. At night, state television broadcasts forced confessions of Iranians arrested on charges of espionage.
Desperate for change from a system of government she views as oppressive, Reera, a 32-year-old sociology teacher in Tehran, began to gain sympathy for the view that outside military force could perhaps accomplish what successive protest movements, such as the one suppressed in a mass-scale violent crackdown earlier this year, failed to achieve, and sweep the repressive government out of power. Instead, she said, the war appears to have supercharged the state.
“Patrols, armed men, street stops, arrests” are everywhere, she said. “Part of society thought that if Khamenei were gone the entire system would collapse immediately, but the system is not just one person,” she said. “This has caused a new despair.”
Since the initial ceasefire mostly paused the war in April, human rights monitors say Iran’s crackdown on dissent that began during the protests has only escalated. Amnesty International tallied 39 political executions since the war began on Feb. 28, many the result of “accelerated, grossly unfair judicial proceedings.” Conducted undercover of what the Iranian government calls “wartime conditions,” an Amnesty report last month described the crackdown as an “all-out assault on the people of Iran.”
Elnaz, a 35-year-old marketing manager based in Karaj, just west of Tehran, said since the war she has noticed that people are more fearful about speaking out.
“This war has actually caused everyone to be silent,” she said, predicting the conflict will eventually lead to “a spiral of silence” and in a few years “the Islamic republic will rule without any voices of protest.”
An Iran analyst with extensive contacts among Iranian leadership — Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates foreign policy restraint — said the war has “been a disaster for the democratization of Iran.”
In December and January, nationwide protests in Iran and the government’s brutal response that killed thousands of people in the space of a few days were the central domestic and international focus. Since the war began, attention has completely shifted.
“Trump’s war saved the Islamic Republic at a moment when it was facing the greatest legitimacy crisis that it had in the last 20 years,” Parsi said.
Ultimately, Parsi said he believes that sanctions relief will encourage the Iranian government to roll back some of its repressive policies and improve the lives of the Iranian people. But he cautioned “it is not a quick fix.”
“In the long run, if you have an open economy in which the middle class is strengthened and society is strengthened vis-à-vis the state, the path we have seen in almost every other country is a movement towards democracy,” he said.
The primary school teacher in Isfahan, Parichehr, said she would welcome the kind of economic relief and change that would allow Iran to open its economy up, to more resemble those of other counties in the region such as the United Arab Emirates. But she said she fears that any deal that lacks steps to ensure greater accountability from the Iranian government.
“Many people worry that even if more financial resources come into the country, the impact will not necessarily reach the lives of citizens in a fair way,” she said.
Regardless of the deal’s terms, many fear a resumption of war is inevitable. After the 12-day war with Israel, Iran was gripped by similar fears and this time people say little has changed. Elnaz, the marketing manager, said because Iran sees its conflict with the U.S. as existential, there is no room for the kinds of compromises that lead to true peace. “There is no middle ground,” she said.
Reera, the sociology teacher, said some people still believe a return to war will ultimately free the Iranian people from their leadership. She said some Iranians still call for the U.S. and Israel to “finish the job.”
But for herself, after experiencing war she said she could never support military intervention again.
“The war that some people promised would save us only made us more miserable,” she said.
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