When Civilians Pay the Price: From Flight 655 to the 2025–26 Iran Protests

I was still a child when I first saw that civilians are the ones who disappear first. But at the time I assume I had accepted it as it were a law of the world

The 1978 revolution had already filled the streets with fear.

Then came the long war with Iraq, sirens, funerals, cities learning to live beside death.

By the time I was sixteen, loss was no longer unfamiliar.

But nothing prepared me for the day an ordinary passenger plane, Iran Air Flight 655, fell from the sky, taking 290 civilians with it.

That was the moment the lesson became permanent that in the struggles of power among nations, it is always the civilians who pay the price, and that civilians are nothing but some numbers, and statistics.

I lived in a small, deprived village south of Shiraz during those years of war. Death was not abstract to us. Missiles struck cities. Funeral processions passed through streets with unbearable regularity. Mothers cried in ways that seemed to have no ending.

We learned to continue living beside fear. Or perhaps we simply learned to carry it quietly. Years later, a therapist would tell me: you learned to survive, which is not the same as living.

When Flight 655 was shot, grief filled the only state television channel we had. Images of mourning repeated day and night until sorrow itself felt ordinary. At sixteen, I believed this endless coverage existed to honour the dead.

Only much later did I understand how easily civilian tragedy can be used for purposes far removed from compassion.

Yet one feeling never left me, that ordinary people with ordinary lives could vanish in an instant because powerful actors made catastrophic decisions.

Decades passed.

I left Iran, built a life, became a scientist, and learned to speak in data and evidence instead of emotion. The memory of Flight 655 faded --or at least I thought it had -- into the background but never gone, only quieter.

Until December 2019.

I had been invited to give a seminar at an international conference in Iran. At first, I ignored the invitation. Returning to my homeland carried a weight I could not easily explain. My wife suggested time has changed, and old days all are gone, we can make time with family, old friends, familiar places.

So I accepted the invitation and we went.

The morning after my talk, I arrived at the conference venue and immediately sensed something had changed. Conversations were tense. Voices were low. The word war was being whispered again. Even among scientists.

News had broken that a senior Iranian commander had been killed by the United States. State media spoke of revenge. Military language returned. Once more, the region felt suspended over the possibility of catastrophe.

Inside my body, something old awakened. Something I had spent years trying to bury.

I cancelled my travel plans. I returned to my parents’ home and called the airline, searching for the earliest possible flight out. None were available. I had to wait two more days.

Those two days stretched endlessly. Sleep came only in fragments.

Fear returned in a form I recognised from childhood.

My flight was scheduled for 2 a.m.

At the airport, security felt less like travel and more like entering a military base. I was so tense that my body betrayed me in a small, humiliating way, one of those private moments fear can create. Perhaps no one noticed. But I knew. And shame mixed quietly with terror.

While waiting to board, memories of Flight 655 circled in my mind.

The civilians. The children. The suddenness. The fact that body of many victims never recovered.

Part of me called myself a coward. Another part simply wanted to survive.

When the plane finally lifted into the darkness, every vibration felt like a warning. Every change in sound felt like the beginning of an ending. I watched the flight path obsessively, as if awareness alone could protect us.

We landed in Doha. I found Wi-Fi and sent a message to my wife:

‘I have left Iran’.

But safety still felt uncertain. The next flight would cross the region again. Only after take-off did I realise the route had changed, away from the Gulf, over land. Relief washed through me so suddenly it was almost painful.

I asked for whisky.

“It’s six in the morning,” the flight attendant said gently.

“I know,” I replied. “Please.”

Exhaustion finally overcame fear.

I slept.

At Heathrow, my wife was waiting.

She looked relieved, until she spoke.

‘A passenger plane had crashed in Tehran, I am so happy you made it’, she said. ‘Officials were calling it a technical failure’.

I heard myself answer immediately, without evidence, without hesitation: ‘It is a lie. They have shot it down.’

I did not surely feel relief that it wasn’t my flight.

I felt something heavier, the knowledge that it could have been.

Days later, the truth emerged.

Another aircraft. Another sky. 175 civilians this time including many children.

The old trauma returned, no longer as memory but as presence.

I hid in my office and cried where no one could see.

In the years that followed, I experienced a severe psychological collapse that led to treatment for trauma and PTSD. One lesson from therapy was simple, protect your mind. Stay away from the forces that reopen old wounds you cannot close.

I surely tried. But suffering does not respect personal boundaries.

News travels. Images travel. Grief travels.

And once you have learned to see civilians at the centre of history, not its margins, you cannot easily look away.

In the past couple of months, new images have reached us again—not in the form of an airplane falling from the sky, but through the same enduring principle: civilians will pay the price.

This time, crowds filled the streets, voices raised in hope, asking their government to end the economic hardship that had made even the basics of ordinary life unaffordable. Tens of thousands gathered, believing that someone, somewhere, might hear them.

Then came a complete internet blackout that lasted for days.

And once again, civilians were reduced to numbers, in what many will remember as one of the darkest episodes of recent years.

Once again, there was mourning. More parents without children. More children without parents.

I no longer try to measure the scale of loss or decide which power carries the greater blame.

I only recognise the pattern I first saw as a child

That ordinary people asking for their most basic human rights,

trusting that their lives matter,

and discovering too late how fragile that trust can be.

For a long time, I believed in the words of the Persian poet Saadi, who came from my hometown:

“Human beings are members of a whole,

In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

Other members uneasy will remain.”

I am no longer certain the world lives by those words, or perhaps they were always more hope than truth.

But I know this much that somewhere, always, there are civilians boarding planes,

trusting the sky and believing they will arrive home;

walking peacefully into the streets to ask for their basic rights;

while somewhere else, decisions are being made that may determine whether they do.

I was a child when I first learned this.

I am older now.

But the lesson has never changed.

I remember the civilians.