Voices inside Iran: Residents break internet blackout to describe life during ceasefire
Zahra* woke up in the middle of the night at around 3:30am on 8 April just before the ceasefire was announced. She could hear the hum of electricity. “Thank god,” she said. “The power hasn’t gone out.”
The buzz of devices and appliances in her home in Iran were a sign that the country hadn’t been bombed as promised by President Donald Trump, when hours earlier, he had made the unprecedented threat to completely destroy the entirety of Iranian civilisation.
But the relief was short-lived and was immediately followed by dread.
“On the one hand, I was happy they hadn’t hit the power plants, but immediately after that happiness there was a strange fear. A kind of freezing feeling took over me,” she told The Independent. “What is going to happen to us now in their [the Islamic Republic’s] hands? It felt like that fear quickly erased the joy.”
As a fragile US-Iran ceasefire nears its end and talk moves to opening the Strait of Hormuz, Iranians are entering the 50th day of an internet blackout that has cut the country off from the rest of the world. News trickles into the west through smuggled messages, voice notes and coded communications that are sent at great personal risk.
The Independent has collected a number of these rare testimonies of life under the shutdown. All while the Iranian government enforces a brutal crackdown on dissent, executing dissidents and arresting thousands amid the most hostile climate of suspicion the country has seen in years.
Voice notes and stories were shared with the publication under the threat of surveillance by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and fear of reprisals.
Within the accounts, a vivid picture emerges of the everyday lives of ordinary Iranians, exhausted by economic crisis and vicious conflict, confused and fearful of the future.
“In the beginning, connecting to the internet was something we did with fear and trembling, buying small amounts — around one or two gigabytes,” continues Zahra, a mother in Iran.
“The three of us [in our family] would connect together… enough for just one or two text messages on Telegram and reading a few tweets, and then that connection link would be cut off.
“All of us received messages from the IRGC Intelligence Organization saying that you are under surveillance because you have gone online.”
When a 14-day Pakistan-brokered ceasefire was announced, feelings across Iran were mixed. Grateful for a break from the anxiety of constant shelling, many people’s thoughts inevitably turned to the terror of an unchanged future.
Zahra says her sister “felt so bad and her body became so cold that she didn’t know what to do until she could come to terms with herself” upon the announcement of the ceasefire. But their 73-year-old mother was “extremely happy” and celebrated the event by congratulating her family.
Even among the Islamic Republic’s supporters, feelings are mixed about the ceasefire. One supporter who has children in the notorious Basij paramilitary group and is very close to the IRGC is said to have been “very happy” about the ceasefire”, according to Zahra. Meanwhile, over 100 members of the woman’s extended family were described as remaining frightened.
