An Iranian acquaintance of mine living in Istanbul has barely turned her phone off in recent months. She has internet access. Her daughter and son-in-law, still in Iran, do not. They fled from Tehran to the north of the country. She would do anything for a few seconds of connection. One question is constantly on her mind: Are they okay? Has something happened to them?
Her heart is full of anxiety, her tongue full of curses, her eyes full of tears.
She wishes she could talk to them, if only for a moment, to determine if they’re safe. But the deeper problem is not something a few seconds can answer. The real issue is that neither she nor any Iranian truly knows what will happen next. And perhaps the hardest part is this: no one is sure whether this war will actually change anything. Although a fragile ceasefire is now in effect, the uncertainty shaping daily life in Iran has not. For different reasons, both Washington and Tehran seem to need this fragile pause. Trump is already framing the conflict as a concluded chapter, while Iran, despite its defiant rhetoric, needs time to recover from the economic and political damage caused by the war.
In Western political circles, a recurring view has been that the war in Iran could create a rupture; that pressure and chaos could weaken the regime and pave the way for a new order. Indeed, in recent years, analyses by various think tanks and talking heads have described the Iranian regime as a “zombie regime,” arguing that the system now survives only through its coercive apparatus and that this fragility could evolve into a “Gorbachev moment.” The protests and economic collapse at the beginning of 2026 were widely seen to provide Israel and the United States with a “strategic window of opportunity.”
The US-Israeli assault of February 28 was interpreted within this framework as an attempt to accelerate a “rupture moment.” By targeting the upper echelons of the regime, the aim was to create a command vacuum…
Auteur: Dora Mengüç
