Underwater ruins found near alleged site of Noah’s Ark

Footage shot by divers reveals a stone wall 75 feet underwater in Turkey's Lake Van that may point to a lost city

Stefan Milovanovic
Tue, September 29, 2026 

Lake Van, eastern Turkey, where divers have filmed a submerged stone structure | Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / EvgenyGenkin (own work)


Divers exploring Lake Van in eastern Turkey have filmed a stone wall 75 feet below the surface, and one member of the team believes it could be the edge of a city older than recorded history.

The wall rises in seven courses of fitted stone to more than eight feet, with three steps climbing toward a large circular structure on the lakebed. Independent researcher Matthew LaCroix said it runs well past what the team has been able to see.

LaCroix took the find public on his own show, The Lost Civilizations Podcast, in an episode released this month titled I Found the Lost Ararat Civilization at the Bottom of Lake Van. Presenting previously unseen images of a circular megalithic structure and a causeway on the lakebed, he argued the ruins are far older than mainstream archaeology allows: "We see the footprint. We just don't find their city," he noted on the episode.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, LaCroix said, "What we know of the underwater ruins may just be a tiny piece of something much larger." He says he measured more than 150 feet of the causeway, which continues into the darkness beyond.

No one noticed the wall while in the water, however. It appeared months later in footage shot by videographer Brandon Barnes behind the circular ruin.
Uncovering the depths

The lake first drew attention in 2017, when Turkish underwater filmmaker Tahsin Ceylan came across what looked like a stone fortress while studying the lake's fish. LaCroix has since identified nearby circular temples and a capstone he says is carved with a six-spoked "Flower of Life," a motif that recurs in several ancient cultures, though the name is modern. Ceylan later dove into the site with LaCroix in 2025.

How old the ruins are is the central dispute. Lake Van once drained to the west until eruptions from Mount Nemrut blocked that outlet during the Pleistocene, an epoch that ended 11,700 years ago. Geologists generally date the lava flow that sealed the basin to the middle Pleistocene, roughly 250,000 years ago; LaCroix points instead to estimates as recent as 40,000 years. He argues the structures had to be standing before the water covered them.

Many archaeologists see a much younger site. Some attribute the walls to the Urartian kingdom, which controlled the region about 3,000 years ago, while others suspect medieval construction that reused older blocks. No stone from the lake has been independently dated, however, and no excavation has established that the structures belong to a city.

LaCroix's timeline comes from the lake's geology, not from the masonry itself. He remains convinced the wall was part of something larger and says it cannot simply go to nothing. There would have to be a major urban area it led to, in his view.

Answering that will take more work than a few dives. Because Lake Van has no outlet, fine sediment stays suspended in the water, and LaCroix says visibility holds only from roughly 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. His own time on the bottom amounted to eight minutes at the circular ruin, about 30 feet down.

Sonar mapping and study by underwater archaeologists would be needed to settle whether the causeway is man-made and where it goes. The lake sits about 90 miles from Mount Ararat, the mountain some believe is the resting place of Noah's Ark.

Read the original article on GEEKSPIN.

“War on Terror”

9/11: A Quarter Century of Imperial War

Friday 11 September 2026, by Gilbert Achcar

Gilbert Achcar spoke to Caspar Shaller of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

Gilbert Achcar, where were you on 11 September 2001?

I was at home in Paris; it was my partner who alerted me that something momentous was unfolding, so I joined her watching television. What I saw was appalling. Beyond the appalling character of the crime itself, my immediate fear was for its consequences in the Middle East. It was obvious to me that it would be followed by the deployment of U.S. forces in the region, given that the Bush administration was already intent on invading Iraq. I was fully conscious that this would sow chaos, and that it would ultimately end in failure for the United States.

Before we move on to the global implications of the attack, what effect have 9/11 and the War on Terror had within the West?

The result has been catastrophic. Since 9/11 we have witnessed a succession of murderous attacks, from the Bataclan to Berlin, and each one has served as a pretext for strengthening an already formidable repressive apparatus. The far right has exploited these attacks relentlessly; in a sense, they have amounted to permanent life-support for far-right politics. Today the animating ideology of the far right is anti-Muslim racism, it is the Muslim migrant, not the Jew, who has become its central figure of menace. Antisemitism has not disappeared, to be sure, but it is no longer the animating ideology of the far right.

And in the Middle East, how would you characterise the situation twenty-five years on?

The Middle East has sunk into chaos and repression. As one could have predicted from the start, one notable side effect of the U.S. interventions after 9/11 was the strengthening of Iran, the greatest beneficiary of the region’s destabilisation. Tehran took full advantage of the American occupation of Iraq; it was the United States, after all, that installed pro-Iranian Iraqi parties in government, enabling the creation of a Tehran-dominated corridor running from Iran through Iraq to Syria, and from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That same regional destabilisation also positioned Iran to help the Houthis seize control of northern Yemen. One of the underlying causes of the recent U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran is precisely the reach the Iranian regime achieved as a consequence of the U.S. intervention that followed 9/11. And look at Iran itself, where the regime is slaughtering its own people. The brutal repression and public executions are designed to terrorise the population into silence. We’ve entered a long-term destabilisation of the region, which today is probably the most unstable part of the world. It is a very sorry state of affairs.

When demonstrations erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 and what later would come to be called the Arab Spring began, you were quite optimistic. In your 2012 book The People Want your analysis was still relatively hopeful, a position you revised with 2016’s Morbid Symptoms. How did your analysis of the Arab Spring change over time?

When the Arab Spring erupted, I insisted that it was rooted in a deep structural crisis, and that it should therefore be understood not as a fleeting episode but as the opening of a long historical process. The clearest symptom of the region’s social and economic paralysis is that the Middle East and North Africa region has, for decades, held the world’s record rates of youth unemployment, a direct consequence of the collision between neoliberal economics and the type of state and ruling system that prevails there. I have always maintained that whatever happens, there can be no return to the despotic stability that prevailed in the Middle East and North Africa before 2011.

In the beginning, the uprisings everywhere were initiated by progressive forces, but the region was, and to some extent still is, characterised by the existence of reactionary currents of opposition to the old regimes. Religious fundamentalists are not progressive; they are reactionary in their social and cultural programmes. So, what we saw was not a simple binary of revolution versus counter-revolution, but it became clear there was a triangle: one revolutionary camp, and two distinct forms of counter-revolution, the old regimes on one side, and right-wing religious fundamentalist forces seeking to seize power on the other.

But the hopes raised by the Arab Spring have been defeated. We have watched civil wars erupt, dictatorships return in forms even harsher than before, and the continuation of U.S. wars in the region, peaking in the U.S.-Israeli genocidal war in Gaza and onslaught on Iran. The condition of the Palestinian people has reached its lowest point in history; it has never been worse. Hamas’s attacks are among the worst miscalculations in the history of anticolonial struggle. In my view, all this is the consequence of the absence of a credible political alternative in the region: no progressive force has emerged capable of channelling the mass anger generated by social and economic crisis into meaningful change. That failure has produced a political blockage layered on top of the existing social and economic one.

How would you assess the current state of the Islamist pole of the triangle you described?

When the uprisings began, the progressive forces that had unleashed them were too weak organisationally to constitute a real alternative to the existing governments. Into that vacuum stepped the Muslim Brotherhood, which had spent decades in opposition and now seized its opportunity, presenting itself as the alternative. In the immediate aftermath of 2011, the Brotherhood took advantage of the moment, winning elections in Egypt and Tunisia. But for all its claims, it offered no social or economic alternative: its project is fundamentally ideological and political rather than socioeconomic. It did not represent a real social alternative to what already existed, and its political project collapsed accordingly. By 2013, 2014 the Muslim Brotherhood was defeated everywhere, with the military coup in Egypt and the political crisis in Tunisia. When the second wave of uprisings arrived in 2019 — in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon — the Islamic fundamentalist forces were no longer part of it; they were rather enmeshed in the existing regimes

You said Sunni Islamist forces were largely defeated, yet in Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, former leader of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, now controls the state and is consolidating power. Even the Kurdish YPG in the northeast has agreed to integrate into the Syrian army. Doesn’t that suggest Sunni Islamists have, in fact, succeeded in some places?

There is a certain irony in the Islamic fundamentalists’ victory in Syria, because it was a side effect of Israel’s wars in Lebanon. By dealing a devastating blow to Hezbollah, Israel removed the last pillar propping up the Syrian regime. That regime had previously relied on Iranian and Russian military support, but after invading Ukraine, Russia became so bogged down there that it withdrew most of its forces from Syria. Once Israel had crippled Hezbollah’s capacity to intervene on behalf of Iran, the fundamentalist forces controlling Idlib in the north were able to sweep in with relative ease. the Assad regime collapsed, much as the Kabul government did in 2021.

Since then however, Al-Sharaa has tried to project himself as a moderate. He is trying quite hard to get accepted by the West. He has made no major moves until now to impose Sharia, although there are signs of Islamisation of the state and society. That is not the same as the way they ruled the Idlib province until 2024 or even less the way Daesh, the so-called Islamic State or ISIS, ruled parts of Syria and Iraq declaring its so-called caliphate.

So, in essence, you would say the Islamist project has failed?

It could never have succeeded, because it does not represent a real alternative to the underlying crisis. The same applies to al-Sharaa: he is simply replicating the socioeconomic policies of other Arab states, which is already generating an acute social crisis in Syria, one that will produce growing discontent, quite apart from the unresolved issues facing the country’s minorities.

Why have the Kurds in Rojava agreed to fold themselves into the Syrian state? At the same time, the PKK in Turkey has agreed to disarm and has entered peace talks with Erdoğan. Why have Kurdish movements in both countries given up their bases of power?

Foremost of course in the Syrian case, because they were abandoned by the United States. Once Daesh had been defeated, Washington no longer needed the Kurds. Trump showed no interest in supporting them any longer.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, has been losing electoral ground since 2015 and is trying every available means to cling to power: suppressing the opposition, arresting its leading figures, even meddling in the leadership of the CHP. His outreach to the Kurds is another such manoeuvre: a bet that the Kurdish movement will not play the role it played in 2015, when it threatened the AKP’s dominance in parliament.

The Kurdish leader Öcalan has been advocating compromise with Ankara for years. It has become clear that the PKK’s armed strategy failed. Turkey, after all, has the second-largest army in NATO. Having bent the movement’s strategy toward armed struggle for so long, Öcalan has now bent it completely in the opposite direction, toward compromise. But I am not convinced this will succeed either. The oppression of the Kurdish nation has not subsided, and there are no real guarantees for Kurds in either Turkey or Syria. There are disagreements within both the Turkish and Syrian branches of the movement, and some members resent the ongoing self-dissolution and warn of what may follow.

The agreement with the Syrian government envisions dissolving the Syrian Democratic Forces and folding them into the Syrian army, but that remains largely theoretical. Who commands the forces in practice? Will command remain in the Kurdish-administered areas in Rojava, or will Damascus take control of the northeast? This process will encounter many obstacles, not least the role of women. Feminism has been central to the Kurdish struggle, but women fighting in army units, such as the YPJ, have no place in al-Sharaa’s conception of society.

Given the rightward drift you’ve described across these very different states, are they really all moving in the same direction?

Not at the regional level. Most Arab states remain traditional despotic regimes; they have not so much shifted to the right as always occupied that position. The Iranian regime, similarly, isn’t meaningfully described as far right. What I would call neo-fascism at the global level, represented by forces like the AfD in Germany, the Rassemblement National in France, and the MAGA movement around Donald Trump, finds its clearest regional equivalent in the Netanyahu government, which has already reached the far right’s outer edge. And then there is Erdoğan’s own drift toward the far right within the Turkish regime.

In your 2002 book The Clash of Barbarisms on the immediate aftermath of 9/11 you described a dynamic in which reactionary forces across different contexts feed off and radicalise one another. That was twenty-five years ago. Has this process slowed, or has it simply continued?

I countered Samuel Huntington’s idea of the so-called “clash of civilisations” with the thesis of a “clash of barbarisms”. The wars between Western imperialist powers and Islamic fundamentalist forces were not opposing civilizations, but barbaric tendencies inherent in each side’s civilization. This is still ongoing; it is dreadful to watch the Israeli government’s drift toward the far right, and the wars it has waged since 7 October.

That process has reached its peak with Gaza. I described Gaza as the first genocide perpetrated by an industrially advanced state since 1945, since the defeat of Nazi Germany. There have been other genocides since then, Rwanda among them, but none carried out by an industrialised state backed by Western powers.

You’ve written that Gaza marks the definitive end of the Western liberal order. Why not the invasion of Iraq in 2003 already?

Because the invasion of Iraq was opposed by figures like Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac, and by some voices even within Washington. The illusion persisted that liberal forces would ultimately correct course. Barack Obama, after all, built part of his political identity on having opposed the Iraq invasion, and adopted a principle of only joining a war with UN cover. He intervened in Libya only once the Security Council authorised the no-fly zone. That illusion of a liberal, rules-based order survived and was later used against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. But the contrast in how Western governments responded to Ukraine and how they responded to Gaza was the final nail in that order’s coffin.

You mention Chirac and Schröder opposing the Iraq war, but they still granted overflight rights and cooperated in other ways. Was that resistance genuine or largely symbolic?

At the time of the Iraq invasion, the United States stood at the very peak of its global hegemony, so neither Chirac nor Schröder dared provoke Washington to the point of denying it use of their airspace or military cooperation. Still, each had real interests at stake. France had invested heavily in its relationship with the Saddam Hussein regime and understood that it stood to lose that investment through U.S. invasion. Schröder, for his part, recognised that German public opinion was strongly opposed to the war, and he thus found an easy way of trying to be popular. With Gaza we have not seen any resistance to Israel’s wholly disproportionate response to October 7th. The last fig leaf of liberal decency is gone. Hamas’s attacks triggered an intensification of the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust, one that left Western governments unable to muster a critical position toward Israel for several months into the genocide.

That’s a surprisingly idealist claim for a Marxist to make. Do you believe this is a matter of cultural legacy rather than material interest?

The United States has a clear material stake in its alliance with Israel as a subcontracted enforcer of American hegemony in the region. European governments’ support for Israel has far less to do with material interest. The starting point regarding their stance on Gaza is ideological, it is the way October 7th was represented as the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This sentence was repeated again and again. The attack led by Hamas produced a wave of shock and sympathy, and Western governments rallied behind Israel’s so-called right to self-defence. Only months later, once the scale of destruction became impossible to ignore and it became clear how disproportionate the Israeli response was, did they begin shifting toward calls for a ceasefire.

In terms of material interest, it is certainly not in the interest of Europe’s liberal governments to have a government like Netanyahu’s in power in Israel, it creates no end of problems for them. Netanyahu has no sympathy for the liberal European governments at all, and he keeps showing it. Even the United Kingdom now has tensions with Israel. Europe is far closer geographically to the Middle East than the United States, so whatever happens in the region has immediate consequences in Europe. That simple fact reveals that there is a clear divergence between the interests of the different Western powers in the Middle East. But Europe is subordinate to the United States. That is a quite peculiar strategic position for the Europeans to be in. A handful of governments, Spain and Ireland among them, have dared to speak out against what the Israeli government is doing. In doing so, they arguably represent European interests more faithfully than those who remain silent.

The neoconservatives famously pursued American interest with little regard for anyone else. The neocons were quite dominant in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but now almost no one speaks of them. What was their project, and did it succeed?

The neocons are remembered chiefly for their doctrine of “regime change”, the idea that the United States had a mission to impose liberal democratic rule across the globe. The illusion of rebuilding an Iraqi state on the Western model led the occupation to dismantle the existing state apparatus entirely. And this led to chaos. It was a total failure as an exercise in imposing a “liberal” order by force.

So Washington then shifted away from its ostensibly democratic project for Iraq, which had actually empowered pro-Iranian actors , toward a more pragmatic reliance on tribal structures and the withdrawing of its troops. Even before the occupation formally ended, Iran had already gained more influence in Iraq than the United States itself. And from this, the so-called lessons of Iraq were drawn: the error, it was believed, consisted in dismantling the dictatorial state, which should have been kept intact, just changeing its orientation like what happened in Venezuela at the beginning of this year.

There is currently a rift within the American right between interventionists and isolationists. Trump’s own approach seems different in both method and aim from either camp. How would you characterise this split?

The American far right has always contained an isolationist strand alongside a hawkish one. Trump has tried to weld together its different currents, from the isolationists to the conspiracy-theory milieu, appealing to all these constituencies simultaneously, a fact that accounts for the many contradictions in his behaviour. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of the American right, assembled from all these disparate parts. But one thing is certain: he has no regard for democracy whatsoever. He is fighting democracy at home in the United States! So, it should surprise no one that he makes no pretence of exporting it elsewhere.

In any case, narrowing the debate to a simple opposition of intervention or no intervention misses the nuances of imperialist policy. The type of intervention matters enormously. Today, rather than replacing regimes it considers rogue, the U.S. attempts to preserve them, simply forcing them to collaborate. Before taking office, Trump was explicit in embracing this lesson of Iraq and publicly criticised the “regimechange” illusion. His approach to Venezuela is entirely consistent with that: he removed Maduro, and the remainder of the apparatus was simply made to collaborate with Washington, with no attempt to impose democratic elections or bring back the so-called liberal opposition. Even with Cuba, where Marco Rubio has a particular interest, Washington is negotiating with figures from within the regime; the grandson of Raúl Castro is among its main interlocutors! And that’s what Trump tried to achieve in Iran as well. He believed that he could force the regime to collaborate with him, except that his actions have been reinforcing the hardliners instead of those who would be willing to make a compromise.

Where does that leave American liberals, caught between these competing camps?

They are thoroughly disoriented, unsure what position to adopt. This is precisely why we are seeing a resurgence of the left: people recognise that the half-hearted liberalism that the establishment offers is no longer credible, and they are looking for more radical answers to their social, economic, and political circumstances, even in the defence of democracy itself. Liberals have proven far too pusillanimous, for instance, to mount a frontal challenge to the ongoing strangulation of Cuba. What is happening there is criminal. Decades of embargo have now reached the point of imposing outright hunger on the population, and this is provoking far less international reaction than it warrants, not only among governments, but among mass movements, which should be expressing far greater solidarity with the Cuban people. These sanctions punish the population more than the regime.

Your 2023 book The New Cold War tackles the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Do you see Russia’s attack as a long-term consequence of the War on Terror and neoconservative interventionism?

In a sense, the 2003 Iraq invasion demonstrated to Russia, to China, to everyone, that the United States would not abide by the rules of the order it claimed to champion. The invasion of Iraq was a flagrant violation of international law. After the Soviet Union collapsed, matters could have unfolded quite differently; there was talk of a "peace dividend" and all that. Instead, the U.S. made deliberate political choices that antagonised Russia, particularly the expansion of NATO. I believe this was done on purpose. Washington wanted Russia to remain a scarecrow for the rest of Europe, so that other European states would remain in a vassal-like relationship with the US.

Helmut Kohl also initially favoured eastward expansion, since it served German capital’s interest in establishing hegemony over Eastern Europe. But by the time Georgia and Ukraine were invited by George W. Bush to join NATO, Angela Merkel actually came out against it. Again, here we have a divergence between American interests and the interests of European states like Germany.

None of this, however, justifies in any way the invasion of Ukraine, a terrible crime whose price is being paid by the Ukrainian people, and increasingly by the Russian people as well. Putin bears the greatest responsibility for that catastrophe.

Looking back at a quarter century of U.S. imperial intervention and the War on Terror, where does the U.S. stand today?

Every war the United States launched after 9/11 was, in a sense, "lost". I would put that in quotation marks because Washington did succeed in destroying the regimes it targeted. The real losers were the civilian populations of these countries, not the United States itself. Still, America failed to achieve its own stated objectives in every case.

This has been a classic case of imperial overstretch. In the late 1980s, the British historian Paul Kennedy wrote a bestselling book observing the fairly obvious fact that empires decline once they take on more than they can control. But he was wrong in his reading of the Reagan era: Reagan managed to reboot both the American economy and American hegemony. After the Soviet collapsed, however, the Bush administration succumbed to hubris. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a textbook case of overstretch, well beyond what the United States could actually control, and it failed in both countries. But anyone who believes the American empire is finished is simply dreaming. The U.S. remains an extraordinarily powerful state, still the most powerful on earth, still capable of enormous destruction. Its limitations, however, are now far more visible than they were at the turn of the century.

Is there anything that gives you hope in this situation?

Absolutely, I hold on to hope, hope rooted in the new generation and its capacity to invent new forms of struggle, as we have seen recently with the Moroccan Gen Z movement, an extraordinary moment, with thousands of young people mobilising and using modern technology to coordinate their action. I make a crucial distinction between optimism and hope, they are not the same thing at all. Optimism is the belief that the best outcome will happen. Hope is the belief that a better outcome is possible, with no guarantee attached. I can keep hoping, while recognising that today the balance of evidence weighs heavily toward pessimism.

10 September 2026

Source: [Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung: To start pagehttps://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/55207.

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• 9-11-a-quarter-century-of-imperial-war_a9725.pdf (PDF - 971.7 KiB)
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• Gilbert Achcar

  Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is currently Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. A regular and historical contributor to the press of the Fourth International, his books include The Clash of Barbarisms. The Making of the New World Disorder (2006), The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2012), The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2022). His most recent books are The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine (2023) and the collection of articles Israel’s War on Gaza (2023). His next book, Gaza, A Genocide Foretold, will come out in 2025. He is a member of AntiCapitalist Resistance in Britain.

Iranian feminism, between war and the regime

By Firoozeh Farvardin, Carmín Rios Fukelman & Miranda Hochman

Published 15 August, 2026

First published in Spanish at Nueva Sociedad. Translation by International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies.

The war in Iran has reshaped the political landscape that emerged from the 2022 uprising: it has strengthened the Islamic Republic, given new momentum to monarchist right-wing forces in the diaspora, and narrowed the space for an autonomous feminist politics. In this interview, Iranian scholar Firoozeh Farvardin examines how to oppose the regime without supporting foreign intervention, and how to sustain networks of care, resistance, and internationalism from below.

In September 2022, the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini — a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who had been detained in Tehran by the so-called “morality police” for allegedly violating mandatory hijab regulations — triggered one of the largest uprisings in Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Under the Kurdish slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), protests against state control over women’s bodies quickly evolved into a broader challenge to the regime, its repressive apparatus, and the forms of social and political inequality that run through Iranian society.

Nearly four years later, the landscape has changed dramatically. State repression dismantled activist networks, imprisoned militants, and forced many activists into exile. At the same time, the military offensive carried out by Israel and the United States reshaped the political terrain: it enabled the Islamic Republic to present itself as a defender of national sovereignty, strengthen narratives of internal unity, and deepen the criminalization of those who oppose the regime. Meanwhile, monarchist and right-wing sectors, particularly active within the diaspora, gained visibility through a discourse that links regime change to foreign intervention and seeks to establish itself as the legitimate voice of the Iranian opposition.

In this interview, conducted by Carmín Rios Fukelman and Miranda Hochman, Firoozeh Farvardin — an Iranian feminist scholar currently affiliated with the University of Vienna and an associate researcher with the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies at the University of Potsdam, and affiliated with the Berlin Institute for Empirical Research on Integration and Migration (BIM) — reflects on the place of feminism in a context marked by internal repression, war, and struggles over who speaks for the Iranian opposition.

Much of the international coverage of the Iranian crisis is organized around a geopolitical lens: the United States, Israel, the Islamic Republic, Russia, China, regional powers. Within that framework, the voices of Iranian feminists are often pushed aside. What is lost when Iran is viewed only from that perspective? And how are the attacks by Israel and the United States interpreted by those struggling inside the country?

The narratives we encounter in the media and in much of public debate are almost always geopolitical. I am not suggesting that this dimension is unimportant. Of course it matters. But when people talk about this region, and Iran in particular, the conversation becomes almost entirely captured by that framework. The focus is on states, alliances, military balances, and strategic interests. What disappears is Iranian society itself.

I am interested in beginning from a different place: looking at what is happening inside Iran through the experiences of ordinary people. This means asking how domestic politics and external events relate to one another. They are not separate spheres.

For those living in Iran, the question is not only which international actor gains or loses power, but what possibilities remain for organizing, resisting, speaking out, and imagining a different life.

The first thing to understand is that war functions as a counterrevolutionary moment. Since 2016, Iran has experienced a cycle of revolutionary movements, reaching a peak in 2022 and another important moment in January 2026. Like many other Iranian feminists, I believe that war blocks the most progressive dimensions of that cycle. Whether the Islamic Republic wins or loses, war is a blessing for the regime because it allows it to suppress the opposition movement and gain legitimacy both inside and outside the country.

What is happening outside Iran is deeply concerning. In certain circles that see themselves as progressive or left-wing, the regime is beginning to be viewed almost automatically as a legitimate force simply because it confronts the United States and Israel. People forget that only a short time ago there was a massacre in which thousands were killed within a matter of days. Now the Supreme Leader and military commanders who were unlawfully assassinated are being praised, while it is overlooked that they themselves were also responsible for killings and repression.

Meanwhile, inside Iran, executions continue every day. Many people are arrested on accusations of espionage, opposing the war, or supporting the United States and Israel. To be clear, I believe the country was illegally invaded. Whether or not I agree with the regime is irrelevant. It was an illegal invasion. I cannot accept the assassination of a foreign country’s leader without consequences. But that is one problem. The other is that the regime uses that aggression as a pretext for even greater repression.

Nationalist sentiments are also growing. That does not mean everyone supports the Islamic Republic. However, many people begin to feel that in the face of an illegal war they should support the Iranian state as the protector of the nation. I do not agree with that position, but I understand how polarization pushes some people to believe that supporting the state is less harmful than supporting foreign intervention.

I say this not only as an academic living outside Iran, but as a feminist who remains closely connected to what is happening there and who continues, as much as possible, to work and conduct research with Iranians and on their experiences. The missing voice in the public sphere is that of those seeking a third path. That voice exists, both inside Iran and in the diaspora. It comes from people sustaining grassroots networks, practicing politics of care, and rejecting both the regime and the war. Yet these voices receive very little media attention. They are often the same people trying to rebuild or keep alive the networks that emerged during the 2022 uprising.

The Islamic Republic has been preparing for war for years. It has missiles, weapons, and a militarization program that kept running despite international sanctions. But it never prepared to protect its own population: it built no shelters, there is still no shelter for ordinary people, and there is no long-term plan for a war economy. The economic recession now under way is extremely severe. In that context, it is these same groups and circles that were politicized back in 2022 who provide concrete support at the level of everyday life. They keep trying to sustain daily life for ordinary people, for workers, and for political prisoners — to support them and to give people inside Iran a voice, despite everything.

A major problem now is that the internet has almost disappeared. It is extremely difficult to stay in contact. There is an internal, national internet, but the connection to the outside world has been cut off. A special, very expensive VPN exists, but only a small number of people — those who can afford it — are able to access it. This makes it very hard to know what is actually happening inside Iran. But from the news that comes out from time to time, through tweets or fragmented messages from comrades, it seems that people are still trying to keep these cells and communities alive and to work out what they can do next. It is, however, a mode of minimum survival. There is almost no political positioning happening right now.

In 2022, the opposition movement against the regime seemed to be marked by a strong feminist and emancipatory character. Now, however, monarchist, militarist, and openly pro-intervention discourses appear to be gaining ground. How has the landscape changed between the 2022 uprising and the more recent mobilizations, both inside and outside Iran?

When I say that the regime’s legitimacy has increased, even within Iran, I do not mean that it has become popular. There is still very strong opposition. Many ordinary people continue to protest against the Islamic Republic. There are even people who say they want war because living under the regime is worse than war. I do not want to judge them or deny their agency. But I also believe we need a concrete understanding of what war actually is. Now that war is taking place, fewer people openly say that they prefer war to the Islamic Republic. The situation is extremely polarized.

The new monarchist wave and support for war should be understood as a counterrevolutionary reaction. The monarchist far right already existed before. It was present during the 2022 uprising as well. As in any broad social movement, not all participating forces were progressive. But in 2022 monarchists did not possess political or discursive hegemony. Feminist voices, marginalized communities, and progressive positions had much greater capacity to shape public meaning.

By January 2026, however, monarchists had gained considerably more space. This is due, first of all, to repression. Many of the people who had been active in 2022 were either imprisoned or had left the country. But it is also explained by the support monarchist groups receive from Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. It is visible through satellite television channels, social media, TikTok, and large-scale efforts aimed at promoting the idea that monarchical restoration is the only real alternative to the regime.

That position has become more popular. The language and rhetoric of the January 2026 protests were not the same as those of 2022, either inside or outside Iran.

At the same time, unlike other observers, I would not simply label that movement “fascist.” I do not see it that way. I believe there was continuity with the cycle of protest that began in 2022 after the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini. The evidence lies in those networks, in the participation of progressive forces in the streets, and in the forms of organization that persisted. Yet, especially outside Iran, the discourse that succeeded in organizing the political scene was the monarchist one.

This affects how the war is interpreted. From the outside, someone might conclude: “The Iranian people are mostly monarchist and therefore want war.” That interpretation helps justify an attack on Iran. Monarchists certainly exist and continue to have a presence. But after months of seeing that war does not bring regime change but rather the destruction of the country and the collapse of the state, I believe many people are beginning to understand something else. War is not directed solely against the Islamic Republic. It makes life inside Iran impossible. For that reason, I think that many people, both inside and outside the country, are becoming less supportive of this type of intervention.

One of the consequences of war, beyond destruction, trauma, and the impossibility of sustaining daily life, is that the Islamic Republic now possesses greater power. But it is also wounded. And that may make it even more dangerous. Tragically, ordinary people lose regardless of the regime’s fate. Before the invasion, thousands were killed through state repression. Now, with the invasion, there are also thousands of deaths and hundreds of children killed.

What I keep asking myself is why it has become so difficult to mourn all of these people. Politically, it has become almost impossible to say, “I oppose the killing of these people,” without someone responding, “Then you support the other side.” Perhaps the Iranian case is an extreme expression of something more general, but this is the condition of our world: a brutal polarization in which human lives matter less than the political camp one is expected to belong to. It is a very sad story.

In this context of extreme polarization, how do feminist movements intervene? What forms of organization and care survive when the regime represses, war blocks political action, and the loudest voices in the diaspora seem trapped within the binary opposition between the Islamic Republic and foreign intervention?

Describing what is happening inside Iran today necessarily involves a degree of speculation. Information is extremely limited. Everyone seems to be taking sides within this polarization. Yet those who are actually doing something inside Iran are civil society activists — many of them feminists — and networks devoted to sustaining everyday life that were already active in different cities. They amplify the voices of prisoners, people facing death sentences, and affected families. They help the wounded and the imprisoned, share information, and provide support.

That is where real politics is taking place. Not among those outside Iran calling for war, nor among those claiming to represent the Iranian people through diaspora media. It is being carried out by these activist groups, many of them feminist in practice even when they do not explicitly identify themselves as such.

At the moment, people are largely in survival mode. Some groups are raising money to support workers who lost their jobs because many factories were destroyed. Iran also has a huge number of platform workers. That work has disappeared as well. It is difficult to imagine how many people have become unemployed. And there is no state plan to address the situation. As a result, these groups are beginning to create small alternative economies, mutual-aid structures, and ways of producing and sustaining themselves collectively.

Another example is assistance for those wounded during the January 2026 uprising. Many could go to hospitals because they risked being arrested or even killed there. Some still have pellets or small bullets lodged in their bodies. The people helping them are members of groups formed during the Jina uprising, networks that still know one another, remain connected, and continue to mobilize when needed.

First, because internet access has been cut and they cannot communicate. Second, because outside Iran, the loudest voices belong either to circles close to the regime or to various monarchist currents.

Women's rights have often been used to justify foreign intervention in the Middle East: the notion that the West must “save” women from Islamic extremism. At the same time, the Islamic Republic attempts to appropriate certain feminist demands and use them for its own propaganda. How do these competing appropriations of women’s rights operate today?

Whenever war occurs, a particular form of hegemonic masculinity re-emerges: the heroic man who protects the nation. Many cisgender men, including some who identify as left-wing and have recently aligned themselves with the Islamic Republic, frame the war in exactly these terms. They say, “We are protecting our territory just as we protect our women.” That image is present in Iran, but also in many other places.

We know that wartime conditions tend to increase gender-based violence and domestic violence. I do not have direct statistics on what is currently happening in Iran, but reports and testimonies suggest that this increase in violence is indeed taking place.

The Islamic Republic also instrumentalizes the issue of the hijab. Through years of struggle and sacrifice, women won certain forms of autonomy over their bodies. Today the regime attempts to claim: “We do not have a problem with the hijab.” At some pro–Islamic Republic demonstrations, women without hijab can even be seen participating. But this is propaganda. It is aimed at international audiences and seeks to demonstrate that women support the Islamic Republic. In other words, the regime takes rights won through women’s struggles and uses them for its own purposes.

Something similar happens from the outside. We saw Israel writing “Woman, Life, Freedom” on missiles, attempting to appropriate that struggle. It is a battle of narratives. Both sides seek to appropriate not only women’s rights but also Indigenous, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles.

That saddens me deeply. In the Iranian context, people who oppressed the Iranian people, Iran’s Indigenous peoples, Kurds, Baluch communities, minorities, and women are now transformed into heroes of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles outside Iran. The logic seems to be: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Once again, the lives of people on the ground are forgotten.

The savior narrative exists on both sides. Yet I think it is used less than it was twenty years ago during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After everything that happened, including the Taliban’s return to power, the United States seems to have partially abandoned the language of “exporting democracy” or “women’s rights” as a central justification. Today the rhetoric is much more openly about economic interests, oil, business, and preventing Iran from becoming too powerful. The idea of bringing democracy or liberating women still appears, but it no longer occupies the central place it once did.

In Latin America, we are also witnessing a resurgence of aggressive masculinities, often linked to the precarization of life. How do you understand the relationship between social powerlessness, reactionary masculinities, and the new right?

It is a reaction to powerlessness. All of us, in one way or another, feel that we lack agency. But the responses to that lack of agency differ. The far right, as well as some Iranian monarchist sectors, offer a very appealing promise: they tell people that they can regain power, become part of a winning project, that they are doing something meaningful. That promise is not real, but it produces very concrete effects.

Progressive sectors, by contrast, are losing the battle when it comes to offering a tangible promise about the future. Very often, the future appears as something overly abstract, as mere speculation. Some people might think we should abandon it altogether and focus only on the present. But in order to overcome fear and live a normal life, people need the promise of a normal life. We cannot ask people to sacrifice everything for an unknown future or for future generations. People need something concrete for the present and the near future.

We have greatly underestimated that need. We bear responsibility for not taking it more seriously. We need to think about how to make our projects more attractive to ordinary people, to people who simply want to live better, feel secure, and have some degree of control over their lives.

You recently moderated a conversation titled “Fascist Pleasures,” about the affective dimension of authoritarianism and the far right. In Latin America, this struggle also plays out in everyday life: in the face of precariousness, debt, and declining expectations, promises of individual autonomy proliferate — from entrepreneurship to financial speculation, cryptocurrencies, or simply the idea of “doing something” with one’s money. The right seems better able to understand the desire to regain control over one’s life. What should the left learn from this struggle over emotions and the sense of power?

I think this is a central issue. We are living through a very difficult moment for people in Iran, but we should not treat it as an exception. In recent years, we spoke about the genocide in Gaza as if it were something happening “over there,” in an exceptional place. Now something similar is happening with Iran. But this is the logic of the contemporary world: a regime of war and a process of fascization advancing on multiple fronts. We need to understand that this can reach all of us.

For that reason, we should not treat Iran as an exception, nor should we ask only how it is possible that part of the Iranian diaspora — or people inside the country — might support war or accept the destruction of their own territory. That tendency exists, but it is not uniquely Iranian. There is a destructive desire present across the world: people know that they too will be harmed by what they desire, and yet they desire it anyway. This is not disconnected from the rise of post-fascist and far-right movements. Nor is the extreme polarization of politics something unique to Iran.

I do not want to end on an overly pessimistic note. As I said, this entire movement of war and oppression is a counterrevolutionary attempt to prevent the waves that emerged in 2016 and 2017 from producing something genuinely new. But struggles for life continue. They experience interruptions, advances, and defeats, yet they continue. My hope is that something can emerge from them.

At the same time, I know that a purely national solution cannot succeed. All the authoritarian states in the region were frightened by what was happening in Rojava, in Kurdistan, in Iran since 2022, and during the second wave of the Arab uprisings. Despite their differences, those processes had much in common. And those states helped one another suppress the region’s progressive movements.

That forces us to rethink political strategy. Taking to the streets and mobilizing en masse no longer means the same thing it did ten years ago. It does not function in the same way, nor does it produce the same effects, because we are living through a different configuration of relations between states and societies. I am not saying we should abandon the streets, but street mobilizations alone are no longer enough.

Now, with war, everything is worse. The discourse of the most radical far right has become normalized. People can openly speak of the annihilation of entire civilizations without facing consequences. In that context, popular feminisms possess a more nuanced understanding and a broader repertoire of action than simple protest, because they connect everyday life with politics. But even feminism needs renewal. Feminist movements are also experiencing something of a recession. Not everywhere — Kenya, for example, still has a very powerful movement — but generally speaking, we are no longer in the same moment we were a decade ago, nor at the high point of the cycle that opened in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini.

That is why I believe we all need to rethink the ways in which we practice politics. If we are to find solutions, they will not emerge at the national level. The question is how to build a new internationalism from below. Feminist movements can play a fundamental role in that process. As Verónica Gago has argued, they possess a unique capacity to connect very different struggles. That remains a light at the end of the tunnel.

War, technological transformations, precarity, and the growing power of capital are rapidly reshaping capitalism. At the same time, many institutions once considered progressive now seem captured by reactionary dynamics. Do you see any space within this crisis for new forms of socialism, internationalism, or emancipatory politics? And what would you like Latin American feminists to know about Iranian feminisms today? What kind of solidarity or conversation is needed at this moment?

I believe this is a profound crisis operating on multiple levels. Among other things, war reveals that the United States no longer possesses the hegemony and power it once had. There is no guarantee of a bright future, but that does not mean every door is closed.

That is why it is important to foster conversations across different regions. Power structures try to make us feel distant from one another: Argentina and Iran, Latin America and the Middle East, cultures and religions supposedly separated by insurmountable differences. But the similarities are greater than the differences. We are connected by precarity, gender-based violence, the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements, the sense that we can no longer live this way, and the need to imagine different futures.

I would like to see a real and honest conversation with Latin America. In some progressive and left-wing circles, I see very little empathy for the people of Iran. Because the Islamic Republic confronts the United States and Israel, they conclude that the regime must therefore stand with the people. They interpret the situation as an anti-imperialist struggle, but they fail to see what is happening at the grassroots level.

Among feminists, I would say this problem is less pronounced, although it is not entirely absent. There is a different sensitivity because, through the politics of everyday life, it is easier to understand what is happening, despite all the cultural differences. All of us experience gender-based violence, and that alone should be enough to understand what we mean when we say that the current state structure is harmful to feminized bodies.

We need a form of solidarity that does not force a choice between the regime and the war. A solidarity capable of listening to those who sustain life, care for others, and resist from below. Opposing imperialism cannot mean closing our eyes to the violence of the Islamic Republic. And opposing the Islamic Republic cannot mean supporting the destruction of the country. That is the conversation we need.