The Silence that Followed the Sirens: Iranian-Armenians and the 12-Day War
Somewhere beneath those flashing targets were her aunts, uncles and cousins, including a girl just four years old. At work, the hours collapsed into each other. Her hands moved on autopilot—opening emails, clicking through tabs—while her mind looped the same unanswered questions.
Are you hurt? Did you get out in time? Are you still alive? Are you still alive? Are you still alive?
Her aunt paced the apartment beside her, unable to sleep, phone in hand, waiting for anything to break the silence—a missed call, a blue checkmark, some proof of life from her sister still in Tehran. Each hour stretched heavier than the last.
The screen lit up and a familiar face came into view. Davidian’s family crowded around the phone, bracing for whatever might come next—a smile, a sob, or a goodbye.
Her cousin grinned, greeting them in his typical witty manner to lighten the mood. The ironic casualty allowed relief to permeate slowly, delayed by days of panic. For a few minutes, it was almost easy to pretend nothing had happened. But the war was still there, just outside their walls in Tehran’s Zarkesh province, just beneath their voices. In the forthcoming days, uncertainty and respite would oscillate like the airstrikes themselves, as the families on either side of the Armenia-Iran border fought to remain connected amidst a surge in death tolls, debris and dial tones.
“War is so widespread and reoccurring, my family constantly mentions how it follows them everywhere and pops back up just when they think they can relax,” says Davidian, sharing her family’s hesitation to leave because they don’t believe anywhere has ever truly felt safe for them. “My aunt said during one of the calls, ‘Whatever happens to our people, we will go through it with them.’”
Even before the missiles, before the blackout, Armenians inside and outside Iran understood what it meant to live with one foot hovering near the door. Davidian recalled her mother saying something nearly identical to her aunt’s message during Armenia’s Nagorno-Karabakh War with Azerbaijan in 2020. They, too, debated if to flee. They chose to stay.
Armenians in Iran have endured revolutions, repression and sanctions for centuries alongside their Iranian neighbors. But this war felt different. In a world where messages and alerts now move faster than missiles, families in Armenia lost contact with loved ones across the border as Iranian cities were plunged into silence. Others packed bags they never used, torn between the fear of staying and the fear of leaving everything behind. The Israel-Iran War lasted just 12 days. But when U.S. President Donald Trump called for a ceasefire, many Armenians woke to a new reality: even without bombs falling, the ground beneath them had shifted.
The 12-day war began after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized a series of airstrikes on June 13, just hours before a planned round of U.S.–Iran negotiations in Oman. Israel targeted three of Iran’s most sensitive nuclear facilities: the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Enrichment Complex and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center. Israeli officials claimed the sites—long monitored by the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—were being used to accelerate uranium enrichment, allegedly bringing Tehran dangerously close to building a nuclear weapon. In the attacks, Israel also conducted targeted killings of several senior nuclear scientists and top military officials, including General Hussein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s highest ranking military officer. Netanyahu referred to the operation as a necessary act of preemption, framing it as a last resort against an existential threat.
Iran denied the allegations, insisting its nuclear program remained strictly peaceful and for civilian purposes. Still, the strikes came after years of warnings from the United States and European leaders that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize an already volatile region. The formal position of the U.S. and its Western allies is clear: Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons, amid longstanding concerns about its nuclear ambitions. Israel’s actions have now opened new questions about what deterrence, diplomacy and escalation will look like in the Middle East going forward. In response to the airstrikes, Iran announced on July 2 that it has suspended cooperation with the IAEA, prompting concerns that international inspectors will no longer be able to monitor its nuclear program. Although cooperation has been curtailed, Iran remains a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
For the older generations in Iran, brutal wars with regional adversaries are a familiar shadow. Many have already lived through the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s where hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed over eight years. But for those born after, this is their first experience of large-scale military conflict on Iranian soil, a jarring shift from years of economically debilitating sanctions to bunk
In 1603, Shah Abbas I of Persia forcibly relocated thousands of Armenians from the town of Julfa in Nakhchivan to Isfahan, creating what became New Julfa, one of the oldest Armenian diasporic communities in the world. Today, that legacy stretches across Iran in Tehran’s Armenian neighborhoods—in the city of Tabriz, near the border with Azerbaijan, and in Isfahan, where centuries-old cathedrals stand as monuments to both survival and permanence. Smaller Armenian communities remain in Shiraz and Urmia.
Armenians in Iran are a recognized religious minority, protected under the Iranian constitution, but never fully untethered from their homeland to the north. They have their own churches, schools, newspapers, cultural organizations and seats in the Iranian parliament. For many Armenians living in Iran, the Persian state is their home. Even if presented with the choice, leaving is not an option.
“[My family] never left Iran,” says Davidian, who explained her family had just given their passports and legal documents to a travel agency for an upcoming vacation. When the war began, they were unable to leave the country. “Some of my family also didn’t want to be split apart, so many of those who could have potentially left, still chose to stay.”
As the airstrikes landed in Tehran, Davidian’s cousin and her spouse made the decision to move north, toward Shomal. The capital had begun to feel untenable, especially with a four-year-old child in tow growing increasingly anxious by the sounds of the bombs. Other family members dispersed to the home of relatives in Rudehen, just east of Tehran. But soon after their arrival, an attempted attack triggered air defense systems. As air raid sirens blared, it became clear that safety there was no guarantee either. Compounding their fears, the area lacked access to electricity and running water. With basic necessities scarce and the war expanding, they chose to return to their neighborhood in Tehran, where nearly one thousand Iranians would perish during the conflict.
Severing of Lifelines
Iranian authorities said the internet blackout was a security measure—a way to prevent Israeli drones from geolocating targets and to stop footage of the bombings from flooding the outside world, risking losing any upper hand in negotiations and warring optics. But for Davidian and those who also had loved ones trapped in Iran during the war, it was the severing of lifelines amidst emergency evacuations.
Tigran Davudyan, an expert on Iranian studies and a former journalist at Alik, an Armenian-language newspaper in Tehran, has lived in Armenia for more than three decades. He described how the war has disrupted daily life for Iranian civilians—including a recent strike that destroyed a building near the Alik editorial office. The blast killed several people and shattered windows at the paper’s headquarters, though the staff escaped unharmed.
Banks halved their hours and limited withdrawals. ATMs stalled following an Israeli cyber attack. Gasoline, once plentiful in an oil-rich nation, was rationed to 20 liters per car. Storefronts were shuttered and shattered. Electricity flickers, at times shutting off for hours unexpectedly (even before the strikes), and medicine is in short supply—both largely due to heavy sanctions from the international community. Summer homes, ordinarily weekend retreats, became improvised refuges for those able to flee highly dense population centers like Tehran.
Those with the means began preparing to leave. But even that decision required a delicate negotiation between scarcity and bureaucracy. With airports closed, escape was only possible via roadways and only for those who had a cabotage permit (a document that allows Iranian cars to cross into neighboring countries). Without it, people are forced to abandon their vehicles at the border, crossing on foot or by bus. Bus tickets to Yerevan were sold out for weeks, while taxi drivers in Armenia significantly raised fares.
“[We’ve] urged my relatives in Iran to pack up their most important documents as well as emergency kits to have at the ready if anything comes to worst and they need to flee their homes,” says Davidian. “Some plans were [made] for them to drive to the Armenian border and be picked up by my family there, so as to not go through the hassle of paperwork relating to importing a car. But the idea of really leaving Iran was always on the backburner.”
“In Yerevan, there are cars with Iranian license plates,” says Davudyan. “That means they had a cabotage ready. They were prepared to leave before the war began.”
Years of sanctions had already hollowed out household savings. While some families still had the money to leave, restricted bank withdrawals meant many couldn’t access it. Unless cash was previously stored at home before the war, there was little for anyone to take with them to safety.
“The strikes are disturbing, they hit constantly at night, then in the morning,” says a friend of Davudyan from Tehran via phone call, who didn’t want to be named for safety concerns. “Maybe it is targeted, but if you hit a target in the middle of the city during the day, you should know that many people will be killed. It is absurd, people are just walking and quite a few people are killed. It is clear that the civilian population is suffering a lot.”
He shared that he knows many people in his community who fled to Armenia and that while some are starting to return, they are afraid of what could come next.
When a ceasefire was suddenly called on the 12th day of fighting, Davidian and her family were in disbelief.
“[My family] had a gut feeling, positive thinking, that everything would be more or less okay,” says Davidian.“But for a ceasefire to be called and followed by all sides so quickly was unbelievable. Especially under the conditions Trump had announced, without Iran giving its [demands] or having agreed to a ceasefire. It all felt rushed and unrealistic.”
She described feeling grateful, but skeptical. “We’re all glad things have mellowed,” Davidian says, “but we don’t know for how long.”
Even as some outside Iran hope the war might hasten regime change, many Iranians aren’t convinced, nor are they interested in toppling their government through foreign intervention.
“[Iranians] feel they’re fully capable themselves to take action through less lethal methods,” says Davidian. “Taking down the current regime under the conditions of war would only put the country in survival mode and start a bigger, long lasting war with more unnecessary casualties, instead of creating room for the change that the U.S. is supposedly aiming for.”
Her hesitation is echoed by others, including Davudyan. As for American involvement, he says “it will ruin things even more.” The targeted assassinations of Iranian military officials, he added, have already tipped the fragile sociopolitical balance within the country dangerously.
“[Iranians are] afraid,” says Davudyan. “If someone kills the Iranian Supreme Leader, [Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei], and the radicals get angry, they could drop a thousand bombs on Israel. Trump says, ‘We know where the leader is, but [the United States] won’t kill him.’ We can’t say the same about Israel.”
On social media, the fear is palpable. Iranian-American author, Sahar Delijani, posted on Instagram that, following the June 24 ceasefire, “ordinary people are living in fear of the regime’s intensified crackdown.”
She listed mass arrests of dissidents and activists, executions of alleged Israeli spies, a surge in the violent deportation of Afghan refugees and assaults on political prisoners. All of it, she wrote, is “setting back people’s hard-won progress in their fight against the regime, stoking dangerous waves of nationalism and xenophobia and reversing the bitterly fought-for steps taken by Iran’s civil society toward equality and freedom.”
For now, Davidian’s family plans to stay. They see Iran as no less safe than anywhere else in the world and no less a homeland than Armenia. Leaving, they say, is unimaginable.
“You never know when another war might break out on the other side of the world,” Davidian says, echoing her aunt’s sentiments. “You might as well fight the odds in your homeland.”
