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Tehran no longer looks like Tehran.
It looks like a capital held at gunpoint.
Trump has the Islamic Republic surrounded from the outside. The terrorist Islamic Regime occupying Iran has the people of Iran surrounded from within. With Kalashnikovs, DShKs, checkpoints, Hashd al Shaabi, Fatemiyoun, and mercenary loyalists, it has laid siege to a nation inside its own home.
The streets are filled with Toyota Hilux trucks mounted with DShKs. Special units are stationed in parks, schools, and mosques. Most major intersections are under the watch of suppression forces. Beneath nearly every highway bridge, checkpoints stand under the flags of the Islamic Republic, Zeynabiyoun, Fatemiyoun, and Hashd al Shaabi, creating deliberate traffic, harassing civilians, and turning the capital into a barracks for foreign and proxy militias under IRGC command. In too many places, the face of Tehran now resembles Raqqa or Mosul under ISIS more than the city its people once knew.
Private companies still push through the day, but the state itself is barely breathing. Offices that were supposed to run at half staff are, at best, functioning at around thirty percent. Even those who show up often disappear by midday. Call a government office late in the day and almost nobody answers. Public transportation has fallen to less than half of what it was before the war. Many city buses are now being used by Basij and special units to rest and change clothes.
There is no real government left. Everything is in the grip of the IRGC and the security apparatus. The so called state has become a hollow shell for the IRGC’s financial, social, and military ambitions. Government bodies no longer function like parts of one living order. They sit like severed outposts, cut off from one another, cut off from their supposed superiors, cut off from the people they claim to rule.
Education has nearly stopped. Platforms like Shad are inactive. School is effectively suspended. Universities have been moved online, but with what internet, with what infrastructure. None worth the name. State systems, service systems, and banking systems work one minute and fail the next. ATMs are mostly empty. Cash is scarce. Daily life has been broken into fragments.
The old Tehran was movement, noise, ambition, collision, hunger, life. That pulse has been buried under armed patrols, armored vehicles, and the dead discipline of occupation. Do not be fooled by staged images of parks and cafés. They are trying to sell the image of a living capital while smothering the real one under checkpoints and militia boots.
If someone could film Tehran as it truly is today, the title would be simple:
Tehran, buried alive under occupation.
And still, the people have not surrendered.
For most of us, the collapse of the Islamabad talks was great news, because people still believe the fate of this savage regime can be settled once and for all.
People fear war and it's horrors, yes. But they fear something else even more: that after all this ruin, the Islamic Republic might claw its way back into strength.
That is the dread hanging over Iran now.
Not only more violence.
Not only more blood.
But the possibility that the occupier survives again.
The lives of the people of Iran are in greater danger now than ever before.
Level the playing field, create a real chance for us and we will finish the job.
Payande Iran.
Javid Shah.
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