Casualties from US strikes driving nationalism, according to accounts from within Iran
President Donald Trump has repeatedly asked when Iranians will “rise up” against their government, most recently in a post on his Truth Social platform. But according to Hossein Hamdieh, a social researcher based in Tehran and writing in The Guardian, the ongoing US war appears to be producing the reverse effect.
“There is no reliable nationwide polling that can tell us what Iranians think about the war in real time,” Hamdieh wrote, calling his account an observation based on conversations rather than a formal survey. “So this is an observation, not a poll.”
Hamdieh said that before the war began, the digital ecosystem in which he works — Iranian startups and tech businesses — was rarely a source of support for the Islamic Republic. “Being an advocate of the state was generally frowned upon, not least because of the internet blackouts that had repeatedly disrupted the very infrastructure upon which the digital economy depends,” he wrote.
Yet even in that milieu, Hamdieh reported, “one can feel a growing detestation of the US and its war in Iran.” He identified business people with large social media followings as among the “loudest voices” shaping the conversation, and cited entrepreneur Majid Hosseini Nejad, founder of Iranian online travel agency Alibaba, who wrote on X on Sept. 2: “God willing, the day isn’t far off when attacking Iran becomes a terrifying nightmare for them, and they won’t even have the guts for such wishful thinking.”
Hamdieh said many in those circles share the sentiment, and while it does not necessarily translate into support for the state, he has witnessed “the birth of a strong dislike for the US, alongside a growing desire to build Iran back better.”
He attributed the shift in part to images and stories from the war: the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, a sports complex in Lamerd, demolished homes in Tehran, and a wedding in a small southern village where people were killed and maimed. “For the most part, these incidents do not inspire people to pour on to the streets in support of the invaders,” Hamdieh wrote.
Instead, he argued, accounts of civilian casualties tend to “unify a divided country against foreign invasion” and evoke memories of wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. “If they are intended to encourage people to ‘rise up and fight,’ they appear to be producing quite the reverse effect,” he wrote.
Hamdieh said the assumption that Iranians see the regime as a kidnapper of the nation is eroding, replaced by a view of a country at war with a hostile regional foe backed by the US. “A person can dislike the Islamic Republic and still dislike an American war against Iran,” he wrote. “One can oppose the state and yet not want to see one’s country bombed into submission.”
He said nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments are on the rise. Asked in February, he would have described the gap between state and society as “perhaps unbridgeable.” Now, he said, “it has a chance” of closing. “If the intention is to encourage Iranians to turn against their own state, the war may be doing the opposite,” Hamdieh wrote.
He cautioned that his observations are not a poll. “From where I stand, people do not look likely to rise up,” he wrote. “They may instead be closing ranks.”