The 13th day of the Second War

 It has taken nearly two weeks for me to gather enough concentration to write this. We are in another war. The Iranian regime, the United States, and Israel are at war.

There were royalist groups encouraging war as a means of liberation—an interventionist strategy that has never worked. Yet the assumption was that Iran is somehow too exceptional to follow the same patterns repeated across the region and throughout history.

There is not much to expect from a war led by a U.S. president whose judgment is widely questioned, alongside another leader already under an arrest warrant from the ICC for war crimes.

Some danced with joy when the attacks began. I don’t know how many are still dancing two weeks later.
Some screamed—both with joy and with fear.
Some are simply afraid.

In our geography, the will of the people is rarely the only force shaping history. Those in power—inside and outside the country—follow their own agendas and ideologies. Though they may appear very different on the surface, they often resemble each other more than they admit: two sides of the same coin, a kind of yin and yang of power, each justified in the name of faith or righteousness.

It is very difficult to hold an anti-war position at a time like this, when emotions are heightened and the blood of a massacre has barely dried. It becomes even harder when opposition to war is taken hostage by different factions, none of whom show the slightest sympathy for the rights of ordinary people. Each group reshapes the language of anti-war sentiment to fit its own ideology, beating its own drum.

When I was working on Walnut of Knowledge, I did not imagine a war that could ravage my hometown and country to this extent. Films often come from deep instincts—you sense something brewing, you feel it drawing closer—but I never thought it would reach this scale.

Perhaps one day, when the lunacy of war has passed, we may find ourselves facing harsher times, and the wounds may take longer to heal than we expect. We will look back at the paths we have taken across at least three generations. Perhaps then we will find one another again. The bonds will be different, and our mutual connections more informed by what we have lived through.

And perhaps, by then, we will no longer believe in the promises of quick fixes.