Tales from Iran: Nowruz under the Bombs—a Requiem for the Short Sighted

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 30 Mar 2026

Raïs Neza Boneza – TRANSCEND Media Service

23 Mar 2026 – Imagine, for a single, brutal moment, a man who loses his father, his mother, and his wife in a single flash of US and Israeli bombs. This is not the opening scene of a gritty political thriller. It is the reality of Iran’s new leadership. And in that instant, Washington and Tel Aviv did not simply eliminate a foe. They took a man and turned him into a monument. They killed a political adversary and, in the same breath, handed his successor a crown forged from personal tragedy. Now, they must contend not with one man, but with seven—seven men who have just had the most profound lesson in mistrust seared into their souls.

This is the geometry of the short-sighted. When those who lack vision rush headlong into war, they never calculate the full equation. They forget that the region, and sometimes the world, pays the price in compound interest—with blood.

Washington and Tel Aviv may believe they have removed an adversary. But history—annoyingly, stubbornly—does not work like that. It metabolizes the dead. It turns them into symbols. And symbols, unlike bodies, do not stay buried.

And this leads to a question that seems to baffle the Western observer: Why are there women in Iran—women who deliberately let their hijab slip, who chafe under the domestic policies of the Islamic Republic—weeping for the death of a man they supposedly opposed? Why isn’t Tehran dancing in the streets?

The question is legitimate, but it is built on a foundation of lazy assumption. The Iranian society is not a monolith; it is a labyrinth. To understand the tears, you must first understand two ghosts that haunt every Iranian home: the ghost of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the fierce, ancient spirit of Persian nationalism.

That war left behind a landscape of orphans, amputees, and lungs scarred by Saddam’s chemical weapons. It is not a chapter in a history book; it is a living memory, meticulously curated by the state—via murals of martyrs, streets named after the dead, football stadiums built next to cemeteries. The children of those veterans may not be pious. They may drink, they may date, they may wear nail polish and let their hair curl defiantly under their headscarves. We have seen women praying in Tehran’s mosques with mèches rebelles and lacquered nails. To the outside eye, this is a contradiction but it is merely humanity.

In Iran, religious identity, political identity, and national identity do not stack neatly into a perfect grid. A woman can despise the morality police while harboring a visceral, ancestral refusal to see her country carved up by foreign bombs. The chador—that black cloth the West loves to fixate on—is sometimes a religious choice, sometimes social conformity, and sometimes simply a cultural habit passed down like an heirloom. You do not need to love the regime to love the watan (the homeland). You can hate the political system with every fiber of your being and still refuse to applaud when a foreign power assassinates a figurehead, because you know, with the grim certainty of experience, that he will simply be replaced by someone angrier—or worse, by a vacuum that swallows the country whole.

This is where the West, in its infinite arrogance, miscalculates again. They tried this before. They tried it with a man named Mohammad Mossadegh.

Here was a democratically elected prime minister in the 1950s. A jurist. A man with a doctorate from Switzerland. He nationalized Iranian oil, because he believed the wealth of his nation belonged to its people, not to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). For that audacity, the CIA and British intelligence (Operation Ajax) orchestrated a coup in 1953. They overthrew him, imprisoned him, and reinstalled the Shah, a monarch who would plunge the country into authoritarianism. Mossadegh died in isolation in 1967. The West got its oil for another two decades. And then, in 1979, they got the Revolution. The blowback was biblical.

They never learn. They keep adding personal vendettas to strategic rivalries. They kill Qasem Soleimani; they make him a martyr. They kill Ali Khamenei; they leave behind a successor with a personal score to settle and a political system that now has a unified, emotional rallying cry.

And let’s be clear about the mechanism of this cruelty: the sanctions. It is a sanitized word for a slow, methodical suffocation. Under the pretense of squeezing the government, the West squeezes the people. Iran cannot sell its pistachios, its gas, its oil. It watches Saudi and Qatari competitors scoop up its market share.

But it goes deeper. Sanctions are lethal. They create a black market for life-saving drugs. Imagine your child has asthma or diabetes. The medicine exists in the world, but it cannot pass the financial blockade because the U.S. controls the banking system. You must buy it at four times the price on the black market. During COVID, Iran was left to choke without oxygen tanks. One euro is now 1.5 million Iranian rials. People are struggling to buy basic food such as meat, or to pay rent. This is not warfare; it is a siege. It is the systematic starvation of a civilization to force a political concession. And the West wonders why national pride hardens into defiance? It is a predictable, tragic irony. Sanctions are warfare with better vocabulary.

To understand the Iranian mind, you need three words: Jang (war), Shahid (martyr), and Defa-ye Moghaddas (Sacred Defense). The sacred defense is the ideological shield forged during the war with Iraq. It is the idea that when the nation is attacked, the fight transcends politics. It becomes existential.

And yet, even within this hard shell, life bursts through. It is Nowruz. While the war drums beat in Washington and the bombs fall in the region, the Persian New Year arrives. It is a celebration 3,000 years old. It predates Islam. It predates the Republic. It is the new year of the spring equinox, a tradition so ancient that even the Romans copied it before Caesar moved the date to January.

For weeks, families perform Khaneh Tekouni—shaking the house, a spring cleaning that is ritualistic, a sweeping out of the old year’s sorrow. They set the Haft-Seen table: seven items beginning with the letter S in Persian—apples for beauty, garlic for health, vinegar for patience. At the exact moment of the equinox, families gather, embrace, and the elders give gifts to the young. For two weeks, the country stops. They visit relatives. They picnic on the 13th day, Sizdah Bedar, to banish bad luck into nature.

This is what is at stake. This is what the architects of perpetual war in Tel Aviv and Washington are threatening. Not just a political system, but a civilization. A people who, despite trauma, despite sanctions, despite the brutality of their own internal politics, still know how to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness.

The West has created a narrative: Iran is a black-and-white movie of oppressed women and fanatical men. But the reality is a 4K Technicolor masterpiece of complexity. The women who don’t wear the “correct” hijab are not necessarily secular liberals. They are simply Iranian. The men who mourn the slain leader may have voted against him. They are simply Iranian. They understand that when you bomb a country, you are not bombing a government; you are bombing the floor of a cancer ward, the kitchen of a grandmother preparing for Nowruz, and the soul of a civilization that refuses to be a colony.

So, yes, the Americans and Israelis have a new adversary. They have seven men now. But they have also unleashed something far more dangerous than a political faction: a unified national identity, sharpened by grief, hardened by a century of foreign intervention, and tired of being a pawn in a game they did not ask to play.

If there is hope, it lies in that resilience. It lies in the fact that Norouz comes every year, regardless of who sits in the presidential palace or who issues the fatwas. The flowers will open. The light will win. But the warning is this: you cannot bomb a people into loving you. You cannot sanction a nation into submission without radicalizing the next generation. And when you strike a man’s family out of existence, you do not break the movement. You just give it a new, more dangerous name.

Solemo Mubarak. May the new year bring wisdom to the foolish, mercy to the vengeful, and peace to the mothers who have wept enough.

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Raïs Neza Boneza is the author of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry books and articles. He was born in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaïre). He is also an activist and peace practitioner. Raïs is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee and a convener of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment for Central and African Great Lakes. He uses his work to promote artistic expressions as a means to deal with conflicts and maintaining mental wellbeing, spiritual growth and healing. Raïs has travelled extensively in Africa and around the world as a lecturer, educator and consultant for various NGOs and institutions. His work is premised on art, healing, solidarity, peace, conflict transformation and human dignity issues and works also as freelance journalist. You can reach him at rais.boneza@gmail.com – http://www.raisnezaboneza.no

Go to Original – rboneza.substack.com

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