Sameneh Moafi & Omid Montazeri
www.versobooks.com / July 28, 2026
The bloody winter of 2026 in Iran began with a mass uprising and its brutal repression, claiming thousands of lives. It ended in a war that devastated the conditions of life, destroying homes, schools, and hospitals. As such, an entire people found themselves trapped in a historical echo of the revolution of 1979 and its subsequent eight-year war.
“The Revolution of 1979 was defeated one day after its victory.” This was among the most provocative positions articulated by Rah-e Kargar, a small but intellectually influential communist organisation on the Iranian revolutionary left. In their writings, accepting defeat was not a means to disrupt a movement’s trajectory. Rather, it was a way to reckon with the limitations that had been present from the outset.
For the fifth anniversary of the revolution, and at the midst of Iran’s war with Iraq, Rah-e Kargar asserted that the revolution (or the February revolution as they would refer to it) could not be repeated. They explained that the moment of populist equality had passed and social contradictions could not be resolved through a blanket solidarity; fraternal on the surface but devoid of political form and content. The Iran of their time held an amorphous population of millions, fractured by competing interests and antagonisms of different and differing social classes. The new ruling block led by Khomeini had suppressed the revolutionary forces and it was no longer conceivable to seize political power overnight. They turned this diagnosis into a single slogan, printed prominently on the front page of one of their early publications:
The revolution is dead, Life to the revolution.
It would not have been easy for them to write these words. The revolution had generated an intense utopian energy and a profound sense of possibility. Yet their position embodied an escape from that euphoria. It showed a recognition of what had been lost and repressed and a return to that site of collective trauma. It involved inhabiting contradiction without seeking premature closure. It was also an act of inheritance: recovering the abandoned legacies of the revolution and staying with its troubles and contradictions.
The ‘day after’ the revolution has been a temporal distortion: a prolonged present bent back toward the past. Events have appeared less as ruptures than as echoes. Instead of discrete moments of dissent, the protests of 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026 have repeatedly reinterpreted the excesses and losses of the 1979 revolution. Likewise, the debris of the wars of 2025 and 2026 has lingered as re-inscriptions of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. In between these echoes, Iranians have found themselves in a contradictory condition, between wounds and dreams, hopes and fears, caught in a negative dialectic of origin and destiny, where both life and death are delayed.
The war of the bloody winter of 2026 broke at the Strait of Hormuz, the very site where the war with Iraq had ended. The attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, echoed the downing of an Iranian passenger airliner nearby, 38 years earlier. For the deadly strike on the school, preliminary reports suggested that the US military was responsible and that it was likely the result of a targeting mistake by their planners. Independent investigations used satellite imagery to show that, at the time of the attack, the building was a school and had served that purpose for over a decade. Forensic Architecture (FA) went further and used photographs and videos published on the school’s website, to reconstruct its building as a navigable 3D model. Their digital model went into as much detail as interior finishes, the decorations on the walls, and the bright paint on the staircase that connected the boys’ school on the ground floor, to the girls’ school on the first floor. The impact crater from the strike had landed on the assembly hall of the building and at least 121 schoolchildren aged 6 to 13 were killed.
In 1988, too, the last year of the Iran-Iraq war, as the United States escalated its military operations against Iranian oil infrastructure and naval bases, the shooting down of an Iranian passenger flight by the Strait of Hormuz was officially attributed to a fatal misidentification. Iran Air Flight 655 had been flying its routine route when it was struck by two surface-to-air missiles fired from a US Navy warship. All 290 people on board were killed. The United States later claimed that the cruiser had mistaken the aircraft for an F-14 Tomcat, a US-made fighter jet still in Iran’s inventory, that it had repeatedly attempted to contact the aircraft but received no response, and that the flight had departed from a joint civilian and military airport. In fact, CIA documentation produced around this time also referred to a possible military support facility in Minab, laying the ground for future target identifications.
The bloody winter had a different beginning. A euphoric energy, reminiscent of the day after the revolution, had swept throughout Iran, from major urban centres to peripheral towns. It was triggered by a deepening economic crisis shaped by decades of Western sanctions, predatory accumulation by state elites, and abrupt policy shifts imposed across the country. In collective acts of defiance, people staged sit-ins in bazaars, confronted anti-riot police, and occupied the streets. In Abdanan, a small town in Ilam Province, protesters had managed to seize control of the town. Some broke into a chain store affiliated with the military, smashed the CCTV cameras, and ripped open bags of rice. They tossed the grain into the air, a commodity many of them could scarcely afford to buy, as an act of defiance and a symbolic reclaiming of their dignity. The security forces were left with no option but to retreat. For a brief moment, hope for radical change appeared on the horizon. But history repeated itself, bringing back a familiar trap.
At least in its initial phase, the protests appeared to follow the peculiar historical pattern of revolutions that follow wars. Kurdish-Iranian scholar in International Relations, Kamran Matin had explained in a post: “French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions all followed wars that bankrupted the state, leading to general impoverishment and popular insurrections that overthrew the ancient régime.”
Less than a year had passed from the war of the summer of 2025. Brief though it was, that war had accompanied a monstrous intimacy. As documented in the Citizen Lab investigation We Say You Want a Revolution, a sophisticated information campaign was directed at Iranian audiences, using fake social media accounts, AI-generated content, and coordinated messaging to encourage anti-regime mobilisation inside Iran. Its most dramatic episode was the circulation of a fabricated video purporting to show a strike on the gates of Evin Prison, seemingly signalling the beginning of a prison break. Then, FA’s analysis showed that at least six strikes had landed within the perimeters of Evin. The targeted buildings included the visitation hall where families would come to meet their loved ones, as well as wards 4, 240 and 209, where prisoners were held behind bars and had no means to escape. Seventy-two were killed in these strikes. The so-called “symbolic” attack on Evin redefined foreign intervention, fused war with revolt, labelled precision targeting as a means to separate the state from the people and invited the latter to take to the streets and bring regime change.
As the days passed, however, it became increasingly clear that history unfolded with the cunning of reason. There was no simple pattern to events. The uprising did not emerge in the aftermath of war but was taking shape in anticipation of it. In an unforeseen turn, the son of the deposed Shah advanced a restorative vision of regime change, one grounded in a return not to the future but to the day before the 1979 revolution. Through a series of consecutive public appeals, he called on Iranians to chant at specified dates and times, then urged them to take to the streets, occupy urban centres, and prepare for his return. Finally, he linked the nationwide uprising to the prospect of foreign intervention, echoing a message from the US president as he declared: “help is on its way.”
Samaneh Moafi is Assistant Director of Research at Forensic Architecture (FA)
Omid Montazeri is an essayist, journalist, and former political prisoner
