When Shahrzad went to demonstrate in the streets of Tehran on January 2, she was buoyed by one fact: The day before, President Trump had promised that if Iran killed protesters, “the United States of America will come to their rescue.”
“We were all so hopeful,” the 29-year-old woman, who left Iran a few days ago for a nearby country, told me. Like many of those I spoke with for this article, she used a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against her family. “But when Khamenei started threatening us the day after, we were shit-scared. What if they came to a deal with Trump over our heads?”