What Actually Happened Inside Iran When the US Bombs Started Falling on February 28

Six weeks since the war began, here is the firsthand account of what Iranian civilians experienced on February 28 and how life has changed since.

The 28-year-old Iranian writer in Tehran whose diary entries have been shared with NPR over the past six weeks provides the most specific and credible account available of what it has been like inside Iran since the US-Israeli campaign began on February 28, 2026. Her dispatches — translated and shared with permission — offer a specific corrective to both the official Iranian narrative (heroic resistance) and the official US narrative (precision degradation of military capability).

On February 28 itself, she describes an initial period of confusion rather than panic: the sound of distant explosions, the social media messages that quickly outpaced state media in speed if not accuracy, and the specific disorientation of waking to discover that the scenario that had been discussed theoretically for years had actually begun. 'It was like a dream in the sense that you know it is real but your brain won't accept the category it belongs to,' she wrote.

What followed — and her diary entries across six weeks capture this — is the specific atmosphere of a city living under intermittent threat: the routines maintained as long as possible because routine is how you stay human, the particular calculus about when to go outside and when to stay home, the social interactions both deepened (because of shared vulnerability) and strange (because the normal topics of conversation seem inadequate).

Her second dispatch expressed what she called the 'complicated emotions some Iranians have about this war' — the ambivalence between opposition to the regime that has governed Iran since 1979 and the specific violation of being bombed by foreign powers in your own country. 'I cannot simply hate the bombs,' she wrote, 'because I understand what they are trying to destroy. But I cannot welcome them, because I live here and this is my life.'

This moral complexity — present in millions of Iranians whose relationship to their own government is complicated and who nevertheless experience the war's violence as personally directed at them — is the specific human dimension of the conflict that official communications on all sides systematically absent.