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NEW LINES MAGAZİNE
An Iranian’s Dispatch From the Digital Darkness
A labor activist and former Evin Prison detainee compares the war’s internet blackouts to solitary confinement
Bijan
Bijan is the pseudonym of an Iranian labor activist and former Evin Prison detainee
Nilo Tabrizy is an author and investigative journalist
March 26, 2026
An Iranian’s Dispatch From the Digital Darkness
People gather during a protest on Jan. 8, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. (Anonymous/Getty Images)
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Note by Nilo Tabrizy: During my reporting on Iran over the past decade, there have been brief moments when the regime has imposed communications blackouts. I first experienced this during the Bloody Aban protests in December 2019 and January 2020. These protests started over an increase in fuel prices, but grew into calls for the regime’s downfall. State forces responded with lethal violence, killing at least 321 people.
At the time, it was only a few days of darkness.
Steadily, the state’s blocking of internet access for Iranians increased. During the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, the blackouts rolled for weeks at a time. And again during the 12-day war in June 2025, the Islamic Republic clamped down on access, claiming it was due to ongoing military operations and wartime conditions.
For reporters covering Iran from afar, the internet is our lifeline. It’s how we access eyewitness videos that often document state killings and other human rights abuses. It’s how we maintain connections with our sources, who exchange messages with us at great personal risk.
This year, Iranians have been suffering under darkness again, excluded from the world in the most severe manner yet. On Jan. 8, during the massacre of Iranian protesters, the regime cut off access and left Iranians totally isolated for 20 days.
The day the internet resumed (albeit with decreased speed and continued state surveillance), I got a message from a contact of mine. Normally, I would describe this person’s hair or face or gender, but I have to protect their identity. But what I can tell you is that this person spent years in Evin Prison, targeted for being a labor activist. When I told him I wanted to write about him, he told me he already had a pseudonym in mind — Bijan.
Bijan is cheeky, an intellectual, filled with ideas for screenplays and documentaries. An absolute chatterbox. When he was finally connected again in late January, Bijan sent me an essay over Telegram that he wanted me to publish. He told me that the experience of losing access to the internet reminded him of his days of solitary confinement in Evin Prison.
Since Feb. 28, the day that the United States and Israel began heavy airstrikes over Iran, I have not been able to get hold of him. A message I sent to him on Telegram hours after the bombing began remains undelivered.
In those few weeks between the massacre and the war, I noticed a change in Bijan. From the moment that we met, over pixelated videos and strings of Telegram chats, he always spoke rapidly; thoughts on thoughts racing to spill out of his brain. But after the 20 days of the communications shutdown after the January massacre, I noticed he was stalled. Bijan had a hard time making conversation. After the first call we had in late January, when some connectivity resumed, we only spoke for 10 minutes — a far cry from our usual hour-long calls. After we hung up, he wrote to me that he wasn’t used to speaking like this anymore. That maybe the next time we spoke, he needed to sit down and organize conversation topics.
I want to share with you Bijan’s essay, which he titled “Graffiti on the Wall of a Solitary Cell.” I want you to learn through his words and feelings, and experience how this sense of strangulation and isolation has affected him. And really, I just want you to get to know him, in case we can never speak freely together again.
Jan. 17, 2025.
It’s been 10 days since our communications were completely cut off. In economics, politics, management, social sciences and almost every field that you can name, the most important indicator of a society’s liveliness is its level of connectivity. The terrifying ease of this disconnection amounts to our expulsion from every domain of collective existence and wisdom.
Our situation today is not unlike the logic of a solitary cell. That is why solitary confinement is called “white torture” [a form of psychological and sensory deprivation] — because it suddenly tears the individual from all their social context and reduces them to a biological minimum; and it does it by imposing a sense of helplessness and humiliation.
Filling the days has become a difficult task. Suddenly, you neither have a job nor a connection to your network of social relations. In a [prison] cell, you can only pace and wander in your own imagination. These days, some have emptied out all their [kitchen] cabinets to clean them; some are sewing quilts; others prepping loads and loads of herbs for cooking later. But getting through evenings is almost impossible. When the darkness arrives, the fear of how to make it till tomorrow creeps over us. Sleep disorders and insomnia, which have stayed with us since the 12-day war, have now become a clinical issue these days.
In solitary confinement, much like these days of ours, “no news” is not “good news.” Lack of information is a tool to break someone. The interrogator keeps repeating that everyone has forgotten about you, huge events have happened that you are not aware of, and you are trapped in this snare that we have designed for you. Unfortunately, those are to some extent true. These days, lack of news eats away at us like a canker sore. We struggle not to be forgotten, yet we know, the logic of solitary is of erasure and oblivion.
Darkest thoughts visit us, and we know the reality will be even worse. We struggle to feel something, but the logic of solitary erodes one’s emotional capacity.
Eventually [in solitary confinement] you pilfer a pen and secretly start to write. Just as in these days, anyone with minimal technical knowledge struggles to find a way outside. Whatever you can reach, you write down your name and today’s date. Maybe someone will read it later, this way you won’t be forgotten, and you will offer some comfort to them. But after a few times, you realize that you feel alienated from your own name, and the conventional numbers that apparently record the days are just some meaningless digits. You desperately try to write something else, but what remains to be written except for obsessive calculation of days and hours? How many days have passed and how many days are left. How many victims lie behind and ahead of us?
These days, through short telephone calls that are like telegrams, and without any other additional information, we ask about the well-being and health of each other and our friends, just like words exchanged in the hallways of solitary confinement cells from underneath the blindfolds. But more than conveying news of health and well-being, there is a lump in our throats and silence and signs for remembering: an in-law of an ex-colleague, a friend of an ex-student, other fellow inmates from the past and their families. There has been a disruption of equilibrium between humans and soil in this land. This part is not yet complete and for now it remains fragmented.
Ultimately, they turn the simplest things in solitary confinement into a privilege, like the right to contact your family, like our situation right now, where the right to communicate itself has turned from a right to a privilege. A privilege that the master can at any time take away for anyone that he sees fit. This work, more than being reliant on hardware infrastructure, is dependent on societal software dynamics.
Pressing that “disconnect” button means trampling upon social psychology, public education, the economy and livelihoods, stability and our collective future. But pressing on that button twice within two months is akin to the second missile strike to the Ukrainian plane [a 2020 incident in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a plane with two surface-to-air missiles] — our collective life, instead of being a right, is effectively a kindness that a master can take away from us at will. This means that the relationship between power and society is solely based on the binary of submission or dehumanization, and not as a metaphor or abstract analysis, but in real form and in real time and space.
No one comes out of solitary confinement the same person they were before. Cutting off communication is a tool of repression, punishment and social incapacitation, with far-reaching and long-term consequences. You wake up every night in fear and tremble at every phone that rings or knock because life becomes a privilege that can be taken away at any moment for any pretext. From this perspective, preventing the repetition and normalization of communication blackouts is a central struggle — one that cannot be achieved simply by changing who holds power at the top, nor even by integration into the global order or reliance on the fragile rationality of the market. It requires transforming the existing master-subject relationship in our society and reclaiming the right to life itself.
Today, [the regime’s] power is shaking, yet we see that almost no effective force is targeting its foundations. Instead, a competition has emerged over who will get to sit on this blood-stained throne. Until the power of society grows strong enough to empty the seat and hold it accountable, only the names will change; the solitary cells and white torture will remain, as will widespread communication blackouts and the so-called “white lists” of permitted contact.
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TAGS:Evin Prison
Weeks into the war against Iran, the offensive capabilities of the Iranian regime
have been degraded to a fraction of their prewar strength, and its defensive
capabilities are nonexistent. US and Israeli warplanes fly uncontested over
Iranian airspace, and the thousands of missions flown in 2025 and 2026 have
seen only one aircraft hit by enemy fire. The military infrastructure of Iran has
been shattered, except for the ability to conduct selective attacks against oil
infrastructure and radar sites, and the ability to intimidate international shipping.
The Pentagon sees this as kamikaze tactics—clever, high-profile incidents with
few long-term strategic consequences.
However, despite assurances from the White House and the Pentagon, the Iranians are unwilling to surrender or even seek a ceasefire in the conflict. President Donald Trump’s now-postponed threats to bomb Iranian energy infrastructuHre reveal a fundamental problem. The United States and Israel are fighting a war of attrition, where the goal is to compel the Iranians to submit or surrender through a campaign aimed at the destruction of their military infrastructure. If the Iranians cannot fight, they will not fight.
Yet, the Iranians are fighting a different war—a war of exhaustion. Their objective is to absorb US and Israeli attacks, hold on, hold out, and wait for the impatient Americans to tire. It is a war of will and defiance, not capacity, and it worked in Vietnam, twice in Afghanistan, and repeatedly in Southern Lebanon. For the Iranians, they win by not losing.
Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the most famous military theorist in history, once warned, “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”
Such is the case in the current conflict. Washington and Jerusalem believe the solution is to destroy Iranian hardware and, realizing its weakness, Tehran will capitulate. The brilliant air campaign has exceeded all expectations. Still, much like the “body count” fallacy that guided US strategy in the Vietnam War, this is unlikely to lead to victory. Clausewitz would say that this strategy of attrition is self-defeating, as the Iranians are defending with a strategy of exhaustion, through resistance and patience.
The first element of the Iranian strategy is muqawamat (“resistance”). This was best exemplified in 2006, when Israeli airstrikes flattened the Hezbollah suburbs of Beirut, not unlike Gaza today. Infrastructure throughout southern Lebanon was destroyed, and little in the region was left untouched. Yet, not long after the announcement of a ceasefire, Hezbollah organized the “Divine Victory Rally.” Hundreds of thousands of residents of South Beirut celebrated among the ruins, defiantly showing their resistance to the Israeli invasions. Those who died were revered as martyrs, and those who survived were proclaimed to be Muqawimun (the “resisters”). The rubble of houses and infrastructure did not matter, as it was a physical sacrifice to the resistance.
The second element of a war of exhaustion is sabr (“patience”). A word with both temporal and spiritual meanings throughout the region, patience is validated by the drift of the Trump administration’s own statements. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a self-described opponent of “forever wars,” has not put a precise timetable on the Iran War but often refers to ending the war in a matter of weeks. President Trump, too, has been a longstanding critic of endless wars and prefers limited operations such as Operation Absolute Resolve, the mission to apprehend Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.
Yet, this administration is not alone in its criticism of long wars. After the seemingly interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American people are not looking for another long “war of choice” in the Middle East. Add in the upcoming congressional elections, and the Iranians see the obvious wisdom in patience. The Iranians only need to listen to their Taliban neighbors, who told the American forces for years, “You have the watches. We have the time.”
Another reason for patience is the reported and potential costs of the Iran War, both in the consumption rates of precision weapons and the direct financial burdens. In the former, there is a limit to the number of weapons available, especially as the fight against Iran competes against other active operations, such as Ukraine, and potential contingencies such as Taiwan. Add to that the long lead time for producing replacement weapons. Each bomb used in the war may hit an Iranian target, but American and Israeli stockpiles are not infinite.
The Iranians clearly understand a war of exhaustion. For Tehran, resistance and patience are the best ways to stand up to the West: to win without losing, and to let unforgiving oil markets and impatient enemies dictate war strategy.
According to Politico, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made it clear that the spike in global oil prices was proof that Iran would not capitulate, arguing that the West is more worried about oil prices than about defeating Iran. If the United States and Israel thought the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, would be more conciliatory, his first public statement declared a strategy of exhaustion. Iran would “continue our effective defense and make the enemy regret it. The lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used.”
In 2002, then-President George Bush declared Iran part of “The Axis of Evil.” Soon after, Iran embraced the term “Axis of Resistance” to describe its network of proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, and Yemen. “Resistance” is also the term used to explain the current war by Foreign Minister Araghchi, the late Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani, and others. It is not only a slogan but also a strategy.
As the US continues to expend its resources, its patience, and the pocketbooks of consumers worldwide, military and strategic planners must rethink the logic of trying to win an offensive war of attrition against a regime fighting a defensive war of exhaustion.
Mark Kimmitt is a retired US Army brigadier general. He served as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East post-retirement. Kimmitt graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, and received master’s degrees from the United States Army Command and General Staff College and the National Defense University.
