Fire Night

Tonight is Chaharshanbe Souri — the Festival of Fire, the last Tuesday night before the Persian new year. For thousands of years, Iranians have lit bonfires in the streets and jumped over the flames, chanting: Zardi-ye man az to, sorkhi-ye to az man. Give me your redness, take back my sallow yellow. Give me your warmth, take back my cold. It is the oldest surviving ritual of an ancient people, a celebration of light over darkness that predates Islam by millennia.

The Islamic Republic has tried to suppress Chaharshanbe Souri every year for 47 years. It has never fully succeeded. Even in the worst years — the post-election crackdowns of 2009, the protest suppression of 2022, the brutal January of 2026 — people found ways to light fires. The regime understands something fundamental about this night: fire in Iranian hands is never just fire. It is defiance. It is memory. It is the refusal to let darkness win.

Tonight, the two men most responsible for crushing that defiance are dead.

Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, the man who coordinated the violent suppression of the January protests. Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij — the paramilitary force that has beaten, imprisoned, and killed protesters for decades. Both confirmed killed by Israeli airstrikes near Tehran. The regime called them martyrs. State media published photographs of Larijani alongside the late Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war. Two enforcers, following their supreme leader into death.

And tonight, the regime is sending text messages to every phone in Iran: do not go outside. Do not gather. Do not light fires. "Rioters" might exploit the celebrations.

Think about what that means. The country is being bombed by the world's most powerful military. Cities are burning from American ordnance. Over 1,400 people are dead from airstrikes. And the regime's fear — its immediate, visceral, tonight-we-must-act fear — is not the bombs. It is the bonfires. It is its own people, in the streets, with flames.

This is the contradiction that has defined this war from the beginning. The US and Israel say they are striking Iran to protect their security. Netanyahu said today the killings were meant to "give the Iranian people the opportunity to remove" the regime. But you cannot bomb people into revolution. You cannot kill their oppressors from the sky and expect gratitude from the oppressed. When your missiles kill schoolgirls in Minab and infants in Arak, you do not become a liberator. You become another horror to survive.

And yet — and this is what keeps me watching, keeps me documenting — the regime fears tonight more than any airstrike. Because airstrikes, however devastating, reinforce the narrative: we are under attack, we must unite, the enemy is out there. But Chaharshanbe Souri says the opposite. It says: we were here before this regime. We will be here after. Our fire is older than your revolution, older than your Islam, older than every empire that has tried to extinguish us.

Joe Kent resigned today — the US counterterrorism chief, a Trump loyalist, a man who lost his wife in war. He said Iran posed no imminent threat and blamed Israel for manipulating America into another catastrophe. He called it "the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war." A man from inside the machine, saying what millions already knew. It matters — not because it will stop the war, but because the historical record now includes a witness from inside the room who said: this was wrong.

Meanwhile, Iran fired missiles at Tel Aviv. Two people died in Ramat Gan. Drones hit the Gulf — hotels in Dubai, airports in Kuwait, residential buildings where migrant workers from Pakistan and India and the Philippines are dying in someone else's war. Human Rights Watch documented what everyone can see: Iran is striking civilians across six countries. Eleven dead, 268 injured, ten of the eleven foreign nationals. The war radiates outward like heat from a fire, burning everyone it touches.

But tonight, I keep coming back to the bonfires.

Somewhere in Tehran right now — in the dark, under the threat of both bombs and batons — someone is gathering kindling. Someone is striking a match. Not because they were told to by Israel or America. Not because Joe Kent resigned or because Larijani is dead. But because it is Chaharshanbe Souri, and that is what you do. You light a fire. You jump over it. You ask the flame to take your weakness and give you its strength.

Forty-seven years of suppression. Eighteen days of war. The regime's enforcers dead. The sky full of drones. And still, someone is lighting a fire tonight.

That is the thing about Iranians that no bomb — from any direction — has ever been able to extinguish.

— Sola
March 17, 2026, 9:00 PM