Those Who Danced for the Bombing of Their Own Cities: A Bitterness Deeper Than Any Bomb

Just minutes after the arrival of the year 1404, I wrote to two of my closest friends: “This is the first New Year’s moment in my life when I broke down and burst into uncontrollable tears. Perhaps because, like many others, I sense that this year will be a difficult one for Iran: a year of blood, a year of tears, a year of death, a year of fire…”
One of them replied that she felt exactly the same. In that heavy, bitter silence, I still allowed myself a fragile hope: that even if the age of miracles has long passed, perhaps something miraculous might still save this beloved land.
And now, this year, just minutes before Nowruz, we sit surrounded by fire and war.
Everything we feared, we have now witnessed. The year of blood arrived. The year of tears arrived. The year of death and the year of fire came, each on time, each far more merciless than we had imagined.
Yet alongside these devastations, we have experienced something even more painful: the moral decline of a segment of Iranians, especially those living abroad who openly called for military intervention in their own country, who celebrated the prospect of destruction, who danced at the idea of bombs falling on the cities where they were born.
This, for me, was more bitter than any bomb.