Not This Time.

It's Not a First Time.

The Portuguese, British, and Russian empires carved the country into spheres of influence as if Iran's sovereignty was a logistical inconvenience. It started with pushing back the Portuguese in 1507 from the Strait of Hormuz. Then came the Russians: Gulistan 1813, Turkmenchay 1828, two treaties carving off the Caucasus. Then Britain: the Treaty of Paris 1857, forcing Iran to relinquish all claims to Herat and retreat from Afghanistan. Britain engineered a coup in 1921.

In 1941, despite Iran's declared neutrality, Allied forces invaded from three directions simultaneously, Britain from the south, the Soviet Union from the north, the United States through the Persian Corridor, occupied the country, deposed its king, and commandeered its infrastructure as a supply route. What followed was a man-made famine: Allied forces requisitioned Iranian grain and transport networks, collapsing local food supply chains. Estimates put excess deaths from hunger and disease at somewhere between 1.5 and 4 million Iranians between 1942 and 1944.

Then the CIA and MI6 ran a coup in 1953, crushing the democratic government that had dared to nationalize Iranian oil. When the Islamic Revolution happened in 1979, the response was to arm Saddam Hussein's invasion, eight years of war, another million dead.

Every generation, a different empire. The same pattern. This is not ancient grievance. This is documented, living memory, and it is the single most important variable for understanding why Iran behaves the way it does today. Iran has been a target of imperial interest and imperial violence, in various forms, for well over a century. The actors changed. The logic did not.

It's Not Just About Us.

We watched Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, illegal under international law, launched on fabricated intelligence, backed by the United States and its coalition, a country's entire institutional infrastructure was dismantled in weeks. Not just the government. The museums, the hospitals, the civil service, the basic architecture of a functioning society. What followed was not liberation. It was a decade and a half of sectarian violence, foreign interference, and reconstruction that never quite arrived. The Iraqi civilians who died in that war are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them have no individual record anywhere.

We watched Libya. A NATO air campaign in 2011, justified as the protection of civilians, became the destruction of a state. Whatever Gaddafi was, what came after was not the freedom that was promised. Libya has not had a stable government since. Its coastline became a graveyard for migrants. Its infrastructure has been fought over by competing factions ever since. The civilians who were supposed to be protected became the casualties of the chaos that followed.

We watched Lebanon. In 2006, Israeli strikes on civilian infrastructure, roads, bridges, power stations, and apartment buildings in Beirut's southern suburbs were described by a senior US official as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

We watched Gaza, for years, and then in concentrated horror from October 2023 onward, a systematic destruction of everything: hospitals, universities, water systems, bakeries, entire neighborhoods, and more than seventy thousand lives at the time of writing.

There is a pattern here. It is not subtle. When certain states decide to project force in this region, they do not only kill people. They destroy the conditions for life. They break the infrastructure, the economy, the institutional memory of a society. And then they leave, or they don't leave, and the cameras eventually move on, and the people living in the rubble are expected to rebuild without much help and without much acknowledgment of what was done to them or by whom.

It's Our Turn, But Not This Time.

It didn't begin with bombs. It began with policy, the kind that is celebrated in press conferences. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the sanctions campaign without embarrassment: "This is economic statecraft. No shots fired. Things are moving in a very positive way here."¹ Maximum pressure. Sanctions so comprehensive that they don't just target government institutions or military assets, they target insulin supply chains, cancer treatment imports, and the ability of an ordinary Iranian family to receive a wire transfer. By design. The architecture of modern sanctions is not a blunt instrument; it is a precise one, calibrated to make civilian life unbearable enough to produce political capitulation.

Iran, for its part, did what it was asked. The JCPOA, the 2015 nuclear deal, addressed every substantive Western concern about Iran's nuclear program. International inspectors verified compliance. Iran held its end. In 2018, the United States walked away anyway. The sanctions did not lift. The pressure did not ease. What that sequence communicated, clearly, was that the terms were never really about nuclear weapons. Compliance was not the path to normalization. There was no path.

What sanctions couldn't finish, narrative prepared. Years of systematic dehumanization, media framing that reduces a civilization of 90 million people to its government, that conflates a population with a regime, that makes the phrase "Iranian civilian" feel like a contradiction in terms, this is not accidental. Dehumanization is infrastructure. It is what makes the next phase possible, politically and psychologically, for the publics that fund it.

And then came June 2025.

In June 2025, Israel, with direct American military and logistical support, began striking Iran. Not a border skirmish. Not a targeted operation against a single site. Tehran. Major cities. Civilian neighborhoods. Over 1,000 people were killed in twelve days.² A second campaign began in February 2026. More than 3,375 documented deaths at the time of writing, and verification is ongoing.³

We started this platform in those first days because we had watched the pattern too many times to wait. The framing began immediately: "legitimate military operation," "responsibility to protect," "ethical war," "humanitarian intervention," or the most used one, Israel's "right to defend itself." American officials describing strikes as "precise." The Iranian dead mentioned in Western coverage as a secondary fact, subordinate to the strategic calculus. We had seen that language before. In Iraq. In Libya. In Gaza. It is the language that prepares the ground for forgetting, for no accountability, no reparations, no honest reckoning, no justice.

Not this time.

We know, and we learned it the hard way, that if we allow even a degree of normalization, we will end up like the other people of this region who share our fate: sleeping in tents, learning to live with the sound of fighter jets overhead, absorbing war into the texture of daily life. Not this time. This time, we document everything. Every incident. Every name. Every life. Every breath, every memory, every event, all of it. It doesn't matter how long it takes. It doesn't matter whether we live to see justice carried out. It doesn't matter how much ground we can gain against the financial, legal, military, and media machinery of those responsible. What matters is that we do not let it be forgotten. That no one escapes the weight of what they have done. That the consequences of these actions are named, and named again, and kept visible, and that we use every opportunity, every capacity available to us, to defend the rights of those who have been harmed.

We also believe this: if we hold, if we build a real infrastructure for accountability, then we can stand for every civilian in this region absorbing violence right now, not just Iranians.

Perhaps if the world had stood firmly when Palestine became Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia would not have followed. The pattern was always visible. The destination was never hidden. But it is not too late to interrupt it. We are standing now, so that the list does not grow longer.

It's All About the Cypress.

Our logo is a cypress tree.

In Iran, the cypress, sarv, is one of the oldest symbols in the culture. It appears in ancient Persian gardens, in poetry, in miniature painting going back thousands of years. It is tall, vertical, and solitary. It does not spread wide. It does not bend. In Persian poetry it became the symbol of the 'azadeh', the free person, the one who stands upright regardless of what presses against them. Hafez wrote about it. The cypress is not triumphant. It does not celebrate. It simply, stubbornly, remains standing.

And what symbol could be more fitting for Iran? What living thing in this world is older, or more enduring? The Sarv-e Abarkooh, a cypress tree in the heart of Iran, is one of the oldest living organisms on earth, estimated at somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 years old. It was planted, or it seeded itself, before any of the empires in this story existed. It was already ancient when the Portuguese arrived at Hormuz. It stood through every occupation, every treaty, every coup. It is still standing.

There is also this: what better symbol for those we have lost than a tree? Each name we document is a life that stood upright. Each one, taken. The cypress holds that memory without flinching. This is our logo. In memory of everyone we have lost to this war and the wars before it. And as a reminder to ourselves, that we remain standing, however hard the road, however few our allies, however long it takes.

We document. We analyze. We name the actors, the weapons, the legal frameworks that are being violated. We pursue every court, every tribunal, every mechanism of accountability that exists. We raise our voices until every institution that tries not to hear us has no choice but to listen. We make ourselves impossible to ignore. We will not stop, not until there is no option left but justice: for these people, for these destroyed homes, for these accumulated griefs.

We are not letting go this time.

No. Not this time.

از کران تا به کران لشکر ظلم است ولی
از ازل تا به ابد فرصت درویشان است

From shore to shore, the armies of tyranny stretch, but from eternity to eternity, time belongs to the dispossessed.