Missiles and headlines come and go. But Iran’s repressive regime continues to endure.

As missiles lit up the skies between Tel Aviv and Tehran this June, the world turned its attention to the specter of another Middle Eastern war. Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” struck deep inside Iran, killing top commanders and damaging nuclear sites. Iran retaliated with dozens of missiles. The headlines surged. Then, predictably, they moved on.

But for Iran’s 91 million civilians, especially women and ethnic minorities, the war is not over. It never was.

In the days since the strikes began, the Islamic Republic has escalated its internal war on dissent. The regime has intensified crackdowns, particularly in Kurdish regions, with reports of mass arrests and executions. More than 700 people have been detained. At least three Kurds were executed in Urmia. The international community looks outward, to missiles and diplomacy. But within Iran, the real violence is quieter: mass surveillance, midnight raids, silenced journalists and grieving families.

Whenever we speak of Iran, we must ask a simple but urgent question: Are we referring to the Islamic Republic, or to the civilians forced to live under its rule? Without that distinction, public discourse becomes muddled, and those most impacted – especially women and minorities – are erased.

I was born in Iranian Kurdistan. I taught literature at Azad University. Today, I teach in exile. From this dual vantage point, I have seen how the regime survives not through strength but through fracture, pitting Persians against Kurds, men against women, rich against poor.

Each uprising, from the student movement of 1999 to the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, has been violently crushed, but not erased. Courage has outlived repression. In 2022, when Kurds marched despite bullets and ambulances being blocked from reaching the wounded, a new kind of solidarity was born. Still, the price was high: blinded protesters, jailed artists, broken families.

“The war is not over. It never was.”

Iran’s future will not be secured by replacing one strongman with another. True change requires dismantling the roots of injustice, patriarchy, ethnic supremacy and systemic inequality. That work must come from within. But it cannot happen if the world keeps mistaking ruin for rebirth, bombs for liberation.

Silence is not neutrality. When the spotlight dims, solidarity matters more, not in hashtags, but in asylum policies, media attention and moral clarity. People are not nuclear enrichment. They are not threats or headlines. They are teachers, artists, mothers and sons, trying, against all odds, to live with dignity.

What Iran’s civilians need is not Western saviors, but space to breathe, organize and survive. They need protection for hospitals, refuge for those being hunted, and the world’s refusal to legitimize a regime that burns its own children. Solidarity does not mean picking sides in a geopolitical game. It means standing with the people who have no weapons but truth.

AVA HOMA is the award-winning author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire and a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay.