Inside the Uprising Iran Tried to Crush

Time: “The men who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran came to power in 1979 after millions of ordinary people filled the streets to demand the end of a despotic regime. Looking out their windows in the first days of 2026, they knew exactly what they were seeing on thoroughfares and boulevards. They also knew how to clear them. On Jan. 8, Iranian authorities shut down the internet and gave security forces their orders. What followed was one of the most intensive massacres by gunfire since World War II.”

“President Donald Trump had promised the U.S. would ‘come to the rescue’; it did not. The regime claimed victory… In the pages that follow, five Iranian writers assay the state of the country they long to return to. Known for most of its 2,600 years as Persia, it has been the Islamic Republic of Iran for less than half a century—a radical, catastrophic experiment in governance whose final hours will be determined by ordinary people now driven indoors by truck-mounted machine guns. Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is in free fall. And the despots quail.”