On February 28, at 9:40 am local time in Sohrevardi Street in Tehran, the first thing Shirin noticed was not the blast but the quiet that came after it. Tehran, a city that usually never stops talking, seemed to be holding its breath. As many as 200 US and Israeli jets had taken over the Iranian skies, raining bombs and missiles across the country, pounding more than 2,000 targets.

“I cannot stay here and cope with this fear,” she said, stuffing clothes into a bag after a bomb landed close to her home. By afternoon, the air still carried the smell of sulphur.

Under an unusually clear skyline, the mountains that ring Tehran stood out sharply, as if the city’s usual smog had been cleared by force. Around Vanak Square, municipal workers and residents swept broken glass to the curb. Traffic police and officers in plain clothes redirected cars away from bombed areas. Ambulances idled along the Niayesh highway. Armed soldiers stood on pickup trucks, scanning the streets. Tehran’s rhythms did not disappear; they tightened, compressed into the survival chores of a city under attack.

Then came the exodus. Major exit routes toward northern cities became one-way, turning into a river of outbound headlights after authorities urged residents to leave if they could. Families who stayed behind moved indoors. The city’s usual chaos drained into an eerie hush between blasts.

Not far away, Maryam, who lives in central Tehran’s Jordan neighbourhood, feels betrayed, her own previous hopes dashed. She had opposed the regime and once believed that foreign strikes might destroy it. Now, speaking through tears, she said: “I can’t bear this. I fear most for my children. It feels like we are being taken hostage by this regime.”

Fear of the future

That phrase has echoed across this war because it captures an Iranian paradox that outsiders often miss. Many Iranians loathe the Islamic Republic’s repression and the security state that has grown around it. But many are also terrified of what comes after a collapse forced from the sky.

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An Iranian commentator, describing life “trapped between two collapsing structures—one internal, one external”—distilled a fear shaped by Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan: one can survive a bad government, no government is not survivable.

Hours later, in Tel Aviv, the war’s first sensation was also sound. Sirens. Phone alerts override silent mode. The near-stampede down stairwells into shelters. And then the wait for the all-clear, followed by the climb back up to apartments where the breakfast has gone cold.

Baruch Frydman-Kohl, a rabbi who divides his time between Canada and Israel, described the in-and-out rhythm that turned a Sabbath morning into a sequence of interruptions.

“We go to the shelter, and we meet all of our neighbours,” he said, naming couples with children and young women in their 20s living in rented apartments; the building has suddenly turned into a small, nervous community. At first, everyone was anxious. By the second day, he said, people began to speak about it like an “interrupted party”, a grim joke told to keep the fear from growing teeth.

Change in routine

In northern Israel, near an airbase, William Kleinbaum said that he could hear jets taking off, the sky’s constant mechanical reminder that this war is also built on logistics. The most cinematic moments, he said, came at night. Kids asleep. An alert. The scramble to pick them up and run 150-200 metres for shelter while the sky flashed.

Even errands have changed. “I’m walking along, I’m looking very carefully,” Frydman-Kohl said, mentally mapping safe spots between his front door and the grocery store. A war does that. It rewrites ordinary geography into a list of places where you might survive the next five minutes.

In Ankara, the war arrived through screens and conversations, a conflict visible in the flicker of television light over a small shop counter, and in the tightening silence after the news anchor stops speaking. Mere Gululu, who runs a provision store in the Matepe locality, sat inches from his television as footage of explosions over Tehran looped.

Outside, Ankara looked normal: tea houses open, cars moving, city life intact. Inside homes, and inside the private scroll of smartphones, dread spread quietly.

In Kizilay, the city centre, a student wondered: “If Tehran can burn, what makes anyone immune?”

Hossein, an Iranian student at Ankara University, kept calling his parents. No answer. By evening, a cousin confirmed what he feared: their apartment in Tehran’s Narmak neighbourhood had been reduced to rubble.

In cafes, arguments broke out in uneasy clusters. Some blamed Iran’s leaders for inviting confrontation. Others believed that the strike was meant to widen the war and for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to survive in power. But many agreed on one point: the region had crossed into a new phase, one where distance offers less protection than it used to.

Impact of strikes

The assault that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets did more than kill senior figures, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also killed whatever remained of the assumption that the Gulf’s wars could be managed from a distance, contained in proxy arenas and faraway frontlines. Now, state-to-state warfare has reached everyone’s backyard, and cities that sold themselves as safe havens for investment and tourism are seeing smoke on their skylines.

One reason the shock travelled so fast is that diplomacy had not been a rumour. It had been visible.

In the weeks before the strikes, Oman had been mediating indirect US-Iran talks, shuttling messages between rooms in Muscat and Geneva. Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi publicly described progress, saying that peace was “achievable” and emphasising commitments around enriched uranium and verification. To many in the Gulf, those talks were not a side story. They were the levee holding back the flood.

If you want to understand how wars begin in this region now, you have to accept the coexistence of two realities: strategic planning in capitals and sudden terror in homes. The same week when officials spoke of negotiating frameworks, families in Tehran were packing bags and searching for roads out. The same morning when politicians debated “objectives”, schoolchildren died in places where no objective can justify the slaughter.

Ghastly murder of school girls

In Minab in Hormozgan province, Iranian authorities reported that more than 160 schoolgirls were killed when a strike hit a primary school. A staff member said that soon after she stepped out she heard a horrifying sound, and then ran back to a building reduced to rubble, filled with screaming.

“I felt like I had become mute,” she said. More painful, she added, was that all those caring for the freedom of Iranian women have gone mute at this barbaric attack on hapless Iranian girls.

In Tehran, reports of civilian casualties deepened fear and anger. In the region, they hardened the sense that the war had slipped from “precision” into something older and uglier: punishment, humiliation, and escalation without a clear endgame.

Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a thinktank in Washington, warned that Khamenei’s death “opens the region’s largest Pandora’s box” and argued that “regime change via air power is extremely difficult”.

US enters new phase

He also noted that the US had entered what he called an “anti-Powell Doctrine” moment, one defined by no attempt to build a broad national consensus, no clear objective, and a flexibility emerging from the belief that events will produce the desired outcome.

That flexibility might look like agility in Washington. In West Asia, it reads like a warning: if even the war’s authors are not sure what the finish line is, everyone else is forced to plan for the worst.

Inside Iran, the first public response did not fit neatly into any single narrative. In most neighbourhoods, pro-regime supporters flooded the streets in organised rallies, waving flags and holding identical posters, calling for “severe revenge” and chanting slogans against the US and Israel. Thousands gathered at Tehran’s Enghelab Square for mourning processions.

Mourning and celebration in Iran

The authorities declared a public holiday to mourn the Supreme Leader and tried to reassure the public that essentials would remain available, from petrol and food to medicine and baby formula. Long lines formed at petrol stations. Some ATMs went dark; others dispensed cash as the central bank doubled online transfer limits.

But beneath the organised mourning, there were also celebrations, often under the cover of darkness, mostly in areas that had seen bloodshed in January, and in Kurdish areas.

Behnam (24) said that he drove through Sa’adat Abad honking and smiling at strangers. In Mashhad, a conservative stronghold and Khamenei’s birthplace, Fereshteh (47) described people handing out sweets, dancing in traffic, and young men and women celebrating, the women without the mandatory hijab.

But there are many who saw in the strikes not liberation but a preview of collapse. Mohammad (31) from Arak said: “In just one day, they flattened a girls’ primary school and killed so many children. Do you really expect countries that turned Gaza into ruins to bring you democracy?” Bahareh (40), a political science graduate and homemaker, spoke of the security apparatus that is still intact. “Do you really think Khamenei’s death will end the Islamic Republic?” she asked. She fears the emergence of an even more authoritarian order, a survivalist regime leaning on violence.

This is the Iranian dilemma in its raw form: revulsion toward the rulers, dread of the vacuum, and rage at being treated as collateral by forces that claim to be saving them.

Assault on Gulf cities

Meanwhile, Iran’s retaliation has expanded the map of war. Missiles and drones targeted Israel and American assets across the region.

Reports described explosions in multiple Gulf capitals and strikes that shook the confidence that wealth and modern infrastructure could buy safety. Dubai, Doha, Manama, and Kuwait entered the war’s vocabulary, not as financial centres but as potential targets.

Analysts have long described the Gulf’s vulnerabilities in almost mundane terms: electricity grids, desalination plants, water treatment systems, ports, airports, and energy facilities. Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi, warned that without air conditioning and water purification, the Gulf’s extreme climate turns infrastructure into an existential crisis.

Rob Geist Pinfold of King’s College London described the bind Gulf leaders are facing: joining the fight risks the perception of acting “in concert with Israel”, a legitimacy problem in societies where public identification with Israel is politically toxic.

But doing nothing in the face of the attacks can also look like weakness. In other words, passivity has a price, and so does participation. War forces governments to choose which cost they can survive.

The fear goes beyond physical damage. Gulf states have spent decades marketing themselves as islands of stability. A few missile impacts and a few viral videos of smoke over iconic skylines can raise insurance premiums, spook investors, reroute tourism, and sharpen domestic political questions about safety and sovereignty.

Global implications

And once the Gulf becomes part of the battlefield, the war’s global implications heighten. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Even a limited disruption can send world energy prices up, push inflation higher in economies far away from the region, and reshape political calculations in the US, where domestic support for overseas wars is thin. And where Trump was elected on the promise of not involving the US in any more wars.

Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based risk consultancy, said that Americans, scarred by Iraq and Afghanistan, have a limited appetite for another major conflict. He argued that the war’s political consequences in the US will hinge on duration: if it drags on, energy costs and inflation could become the war’s domestic frontline.

In Ankara, the fear is not only about spillover strikes but about what the war’s logic will normalise. Professor Vali Nasr, an expert in West Asian politics, has called the moment a “once-in-a-generation rupture,” and warned that the conflict is not simply a military operation but a geopolitical earthquake.

Türkiye’s fears

That reading resonates in Turkish political circles, because Israel’s rhetoric has increasingly named Türkiye directly as a strategic concern. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has labelled Türkiye a growing threat and described President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “a sophisticated and dangerous adversary”, language that Turkish audiences interpret not as campaign theatre but as strategic signalling.

This matters because Türkiye is not just another regional player. It is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a large military, complicated relationships with Washington and Moscow, and a domestic landscape sensitive to Kurdish politics and refugee pressures.

A weakened or fragmented Iran could reshape Kurdish dynamics across the region, affecting Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria simultaneously. It could also trigger new migration flows, adding strain to a country already hosting millions displaced by Syria’s war.

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In the Istanbul neighbourhoods where Syrian refugees live, the spectacle of Tehran under bombardment is not a distant story. It is a reminder that displacement can become permanent, and that wars have a way of moving, like weather systems, towards the next vulnerable border.

Views and analysis

Turkish analysts quoted in the local press have offered competing forecasts. Arif Keskin suggested that killing a leader can produce a successor who is “born weak”, forced into concealment, potentially making the system brittle and paranoid.

Retired Major General Cem Gürdeniz argued the opposite: that Iran’s political-religious command structure has continuity and that assassination could consolidate resistance rather than dissolve it, much as an invasion can unify a society against an external enemy.

If this war has a single strategic lesson, it may be that the old regional map of neat “axes” is dissolving under pressure.

Elie Podeh of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has argued that rigid divisions between a “resistance axis”, a “moderate axis”, and a “pro-Muslim Brotherhood axis” are giving way to more flexible alignments. Countries that once treated Iran as the primary danger now publicly downplay that threat even as they privately fear escalation, because the bigger danger may be general destabilisation.

Podeh also pointed to a parallel shift: Israel’s regional policy, including its conduct in Gaza and its posture across multiple fronts, has revived older perceptions of Israel as an aggressive state seeking hegemony. In that environment, overt cooperation with Israel becomes domestically risky for Arab and Muslim governments. Hedging becomes the default survival tactic.

Contours of the conflict

Experts said that the contours of the latest escalation are stark. First, the war has already widened beyond Iran and Israel. Second, the war’s economic consequences will not wait for a ceasefire.

Third, the political outcomes inside Iran are unknowable and may remain so for a long time. Khamenei’s death removes a central pillar, but structures do not always collapse when the roof is hit. Sometimes the remains harden, and splinters become more problematic.

Fourth, the region’s alignments are likely to continue shifting in unexpected ways.

And finally, the moral centre cannot be a minor detail of strategy. When a girls’ school becomes rubble, when families become refugees inside their own city, when children sleep in shelters and wake to sirens, the “implications” of the war stop being abstract. They become a daily accounting of what human beings can endure.

In Washington, the war is framed as a necessity. In Jerusalem, it is framed as a transformation. In Tehran, it is framed as revenge and survival. On the streets, from Tehran to Tel Aviv to Ankara, it is felt as a narrowing of life, a shrinking of certainty, and the unsettling sense that the old boundary between battlefield and home front has finally dissolved.

The arc of the next strike is no longer a line on a map. It is a shadow that now falls, potentially, across every capital in the neighbourhood.

Iftikhar Gilani is an Indian journalist based in Ankara.