Inside Iran: How 90 Million People Are Living Through Bombardment, Sanctions, and Economic Collapse
The maps and graphics that fill Western coverage of Operation Epic Fury are mostly about things that can be counted from the outside: strike packages, target lists, missile intercept rates, tanker traffic data, oil price movements. What they do not show — what is genuinely difficult to show, given restricted access and disrupted communications — is what life in Iran looks like right now. The story of 90 million people living through their country's most severe crisis in a generation is largely absent from the analysis that shapes Western policy, and that absence has consequences.
The Economic Situation Before the War
Iran's economy was already in serious difficulty before the first American and Israeli aircraft crossed its borders on 28 February 2026. Years of escalating sanctions had reduced GDP per capita by approximately 20% from its 2012 peak. Annual inflation had been running above 40% for five consecutive years. The rial had lost more than 90% of its value against the dollar since 2018. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment in urban areas, was officially around 25% and informally higher. Middle-class households that had once been relatively comfortable found themselves navigating an economy of constant improvisation — finding goods that sanctions had made scarce, managing savings that inflation was devouring, and making difficult calculations about emigration.
What the Bombing Has Added
The strikes have added acute physical destruction to chronic economic decline. U.S. and Israeli forces have targeted military installations, missile production facilities, air defence systems, and — controversially — the power infrastructure that supports Iran's military-industrial complex. That infrastructure is also the infrastructure that keeps hospitals running, pumps water, and powers the communications networks that ordinary Iranians depend on. Electricity supply in Tehran has become intermittent. In several provincial cities, water treatment has been disrupted. Internet access — already restricted by the government's filtering system — has become sporadic as undersea cable landing stations and domestic exchange points have been damaged.
Food supply chains, already strained by years of sanctions limiting agricultural imports and spare parts for processing equipment, are under additional pressure from higher fuel costs, damaged road infrastructure in some areas, and the general disruption to commercial activity that accompanies sustained bombardment. Market prices for basic staples have risen 30–50% since the war began. The rial has collapsed further — from approximately 600,000 to the dollar before the war to over 900,000 as of mid-March.
The Political Dimension
The Iranian government's narrative — that the country is under attack by foreign aggressors and that national unity is both a moral obligation and a practical necessity — has gained some traction in the immediate crisis, as nationalist sentiment tends to do during bombardments. But this rally-round-the-flag effect is historically fragile in Iran, where the government's legitimacy has been contested by large segments of the population since the disputed 2009 election and more acutely since the 2022–2023 Mahsa Amini protests that shook the regime.
The question of what happens to Iranian domestic politics after the bombardment stops — regardless of the military outcome — is one of the most significant and least analysed aspects of the current conflict. A regime that emerges militarily battered, economically devastated, and politically weakened faces a population that was already expressing demands for fundamental change before the war began. The external pressure of military strikes does not resolve Iran's internal political tensions; it suspends them temporarily, and may intensify them when the suspension lifts.
The Humanitarian Record
Humanitarian organisations — the ICRC, MSF, UN OCHA — have issued increasingly urgent statements about access restrictions and civilian harm. The precise civilian casualty count from the strikes is impossible to verify independently, given the information environment. Iranian state media claims are clearly inflated for propaganda purposes; U.S. and Israeli official statements clearly minimise civilian harm. The truth, as in all such conflicts, lies somewhere between and will only be established definitively after the conflict ends and independent investigators gain access.
What can be said with confidence is that 90 million people are bearing the cost of a conflict that was not of their choosing, in a country that has been under severe economic pressure for over a decade. Whatever one believes about the strategic necessity of Operation Epic Fury, that human reality deserves to occupy a more prominent place in the analysis than it currently does.