As night falls on Iran's cities, the rallies swell. In places such as Enghelab (Revolution) Square in Tehran, thousands gather under a canopy of Iranian flags.
The rallies have been held for more than 70 consecutive nights in cities and towns across the country, in response to the war launched on Iran by the US and Israel. Demonstrators wave banners bearing logos of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Tehran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.
“We will stay committed to our revolution until the very end,” one man told state broadcaster Irib during daily coverage of these rallies on Monday, in reference to the 1979 revolution that brought the current cleric-led system to power.
But others are enraged by these gatherings, reflecting wider divides among the population of 90 million that have been exacerbated by the war, according to people interviewed by The National.
“They annoy me so much,” Fereshteh, a woman in a city in central Iran, told The National. “They are complete idiots, coming and standing and waving flags for four or five hours.”
Roads are closed to make way for the rallies, and convoys of vehicles whizz through city streets blasting pro-government slogans from loudspeakers late into the night.
“The traffic is so annoying,” said Omid, a resident of Tehran. Like other Iranians The National spoke to for this story, he used a pseudonym for fear of retribution for speaking to foreign media.
Omid said the rallies attracted a wide range of people at first, including Iranians who were not supporters of the government but were protesting against the war. But after more than two months, those still coming out are the “diehard segment” of regime supporters, he said.
Another encroachment on urban space that upsets Fereshteh almost as much as the nightly pro-government rallies is the number of banners of the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son and successor, Mojtaba, that have been put up all over her city.
“There are pictures of the Khameneis one behind the next: one of Khamenei, one of Mojtaba, one of Khamenei, one of Mojtaba,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”
One has a red background, “like the red of the devil”, she added, which she came to understand was a symbol of revenge yet to be taken for Ali Khamenei’s assassination in an air strike on February 28, the first day of the war.
“That’s the thinking. It’s also really moronic,” she said.
Streets, squares and paths in Tehran have become “practically unusable”, one woman wrote on X, criticising the congestion caused by the rallies and the proliferation of pro-government posters and banners. “They’ve turned Tehran into hell.”
State media describe the nightly gatherings as “spontaneous”, but some Iranians doubt that. “It's all a government thing,” Kaveh, another resident of the capital, told The National.
In Iran's highly diverse society, it is not possible to group people into neat boxes based on their beliefs and levels of government support. Some back the current system of clerical leadership, which has been strained by the war but has not been toppled.
With a ceasefire in place since April 8, Tehran has proclaimed victory in the war and has gained leverage in negotiations to end it permanently by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway along Iran's southern coast through which about one-fifth of global energy supplies are normally shipped.
Show of national unity
For some Iranians, the pro-regime rallies are symbols of national unity and resistance in the face of US and Israeli attacks.
One Tehran-based analyst told The National that he had taken part not because he felt he had to, but as a citizen uniting with others in the face of a foreign onslaught.
“When a foreign threat reaches national borders, when a school in Minab is bombed, we Iranians know how to put domestic disputes aside for later,” he said. “These gatherings show that national sovereignty is a red line for us. That is, we solve our problems ourselves, not with foreign tutelage.”
He was referring to the deadly bombing of a girls’ school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on the first day of the war, in what a US military investigation said was probably a strike by its forces.
The nighttime gatherings have been supplemented by daytime events, including a mass wedding for couples who have signed up to a state-backed scheme supporting the war effort and weapons training sessions.
Many Iranians grumble at the current leadership, especially its handling of the country's dire economic circumstances. But they are wary of the fallout from government collapse and would rather have financial stability over anything else.
Some oppose the leaders but are also against military strikes on their country and have grown angrier as the US and Israel have widened their attacks to target civilian infrastructure. Others have supported the US and Israeli military operations as a last-ditch attempt to bring about the regime's collapse.
Rallies highlight social divides
The social divides between people who generally support the government and those who do not have deepened since the war began, people said.
Kamran, a man in his 30s from a city in central Iran, believes regime supporters' desire to root out its opponents has grown stronger, as they disapprove of their lifestyles and beliefs.
“It [the war] has definitely caused a lot of divisions, and in everything the extremists only support their own kind,” he told The National. “They want everyone to either be like them, or to disappear. This really became clear after the war started.”
The pro-regime rallies have also been used as a form of coercive control amid an ongoing security crackdown on perceived dissent, Kamran said. He was recently stopped at a checkpoint manned by police forces.
“They threatened me a bit and said 'come and wave flags at night so we don’t open a file on you’. Then they let me go,” he said.
“Parvandeh-sazi” – literally, “making a file” – involves fabricating a legal case against an individual and is common in political and security cases in Iran, human rights groups say.
Kamran did not join the pro-government rallies but participated in the widespread anti-government demonstrations across Iran in January when he was injured by pellets fired by security forces.
To him, the contrast between the government's encouragement of the rallies and its brutal response to January’s demonstrations is stark. Security forces “sprayed people with bullets” during the protests in January, he said, but the gatherings now have “the backing of the government itself”.
At least 7,000 people were killed in the crackdown on the protests, human rights organisations based outside Iran said, while some reports put the death toll far higher.
Insiders and outsiders
Some pro-government commentators and officials have been given access to so-called “white” SIM cards that allow them unrestricted online connectivity, while the majority of the population have been denied internet access for almost three months.
Companies have been offered “internet pro” to allow them to conduct business online. In recent days, this service has been opened to Iranians who do not have business licences, Omid said, allowing them at least partial access to international platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram – at a price.
The cost of data was about seven times more than internet services used to charge, Omid added, creating a divide between those who can afford to spend a hefty portion of their income on internet access and those who simply cannot.
“We were buying internet at 5,000-6,000 tomans [about 2.8 US cents] per gigabyte, but the pro-internet is 40,000 tomans per GB,” he said.
“It’s a really strange move by the government,” he added with a dry laugh. “They said they shut off the internet for security reasons and now they are selling internet access like this.”
Another way to get online is through individuals who advertise and sell VPNs and data for access to the global internet via Iran's intranet, which is still operating. Their data charges have dropped to around between 150,000 and 400,000 tomans per gigabyte, after rising to as much as 1 million tomans at the beginning of the war. But the cost is still out of the reach of many in Iran, where the minimum wage is around $110 a month.
“A group of Iranian programmers has been voluntarily trying to find ways for people to connect to the international internet for free,” Omid added. “But these methods are not very widespread and sustainable.”
New supreme leader raises hopes
Some Iranians have hope that the country's new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, can address their grievances.
“In the religious sphere, for example, he has very modern and new views, and I think his election can help bring Iranian society closer together. I’m certain that changes will happen,” said a Tehran resident, who also described the nightly rallies as evidence that people support their government against foreign attacks.
The new supreme leader was badly injured in the US-Israeli strike that killed his father and has not been seen in public since.
Analysts and observers widely believe he has at least temporarily handed over decision-making on foreign policy and security to a group of commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Many other Iranians see the younger Mr Khamenei as part of a system that is unable and unwilling to respond to their needs.
In Iran, “it’s impossible to live a decent, comfortable life," Kamran said.
