The Rooms They Never Returned To
There are images that no human being should have to see, and yet there are images that the world must not be allowed to look away from. In Iran, under the Islamic Republic, cruelty has not only entered prisons, courtrooms, streets and schools; it has entered bedrooms after the child never came home. It has entered kitchens where mothers still set aside a cup of tea by instinct. It has entered classrooms where a desk remains empty. It has entered the unfinished future of a nation whose young people went into the streets not because they wanted death, but because life had already been made unbearable.
When we speak of massacre, the word can become too large, too political, too distant. It can be filed away under “crisis”, “protest”, “unrest”, “security response”. But massacre does not happen to statistics. It happens to bodies that were once held as babies. It happens to names. It happens to children who had schoolbags waiting for the next morning, books open on their beds, bookmarks placed carefully between pages they intended to return to. It happens to teenagers who were supposed to revise for exams, argue with their parents, fall in love, complain about homework, laugh too loudly with friends, and come home hungry after school.
Instead, some of them were shot. Some disappeared. Some were returned to their families with wounds that told the truth even when the state lied. Some were not returned with dignity at all. The horror is not only that life was taken. It is the way life was treated after it had been taken: as waste, as evidence, as a problem to be hidden, as a body to be moved. To imagine a young person, a protester, a beloved human being, piled among others in black bags is to stand at the edge of a darkness almost beyond language. Yet language must try, because silence is exactly what tyrannies depend upon.
Inside every black bag there was a world. There was someone’s daughter who once braided her hair before school. Someone’s son who left his shoes near the door. Someone’s brother who teased his sister and borrowed things without asking. Someone’s sister whose clothes still carried her smell. Someone’s friend whose last message may still sit unread or unanswered on a phone. Someone’s lover who had imagined a wedding that poverty kept postponing, who may have gone to the protest because two young people could not build a decent life inside a country held hostage by corruption, fear and ideological rule.
There are lovers in Iran who did not die old in each other’s arms, but were separated by bullets, batons, prisons and morgues. There are young couples who wanted nothing more radical than a small home, a shared table, a child one day, a normal life. But normal life became impossible. Work was scarce, prices rose, futures narrowed, dignity was rationed, and the state demanded obedience in exchange for survival. So they went into the streets carrying the most dangerous demand of all: the right to live as human beings. For that, some were killed. And those who survived were left with a grief no court can measure: the grief of continuing to breathe after the person who gave meaning to tomorrow has been taken.
What does a mother do with an empty room? Does she close the door, or leave it open? Does she fold the shirt her child will never wear again? Does she move the books, or keep them exactly where they were? What happens to the bookmark inside the school textbook, the half-charged phone, the cup, the scarf, the shoes, the unfinished sentence in a notebook? These objects become witnesses. They accuse the world more quietly than any speech. They say: a life was interrupted here. A future was murdered here. A nation’s children were not protected.
And Iran is not alone in this abandonment. On 7 October 2023, ordinary Israelis also left home for an ordinary day. Some went to a music festival to dance, to be young, to feel free under the open sky. Some were in their homes, in communities where breakfast tables, children’s toys, bedrooms, gardens and family photographs belonged to the texture of normal life. They were not soldiers in battle. They were not carrying guns. They were young people, parents, grandparents, friends, lovers, children. Many never came home. Many were murdered. Many were taken hostage. Many were left behind to live inside the permanent wound of absence.
The world saw the horror for a moment, and then too much of the world moved on — not from the war, not from Palestinian suffering, which is also real and immense, but from the original wound that began that chapter of terror. The murdered Israelis became inconvenient to remember. The hostages became footnotes. The grief of Israeli families was pushed aside, as if acknowledging it would somehow erase the suffering of Palestinians. But this is the sickness of our age: we behave as if compassion must choose a side, as if one child’s blood cancels another child’s blood, as if a mother in Israel, a mother in Gaza, a mother in Iran, a mother in Sudan, a mother in Afghanistan, and a mother in Yemen are not all standing before the same abyss.
Why has the world become so selective in its mourning? Why does one suffering become a global symbol while another is treated as background noise? Why do some dead receive marches, headlines and speeches, while others vanish into diplomatic caution? Why are the crimes of the Taliban against Afghan women so quickly normalized? Why is Sudan’s agony, with civilians trapped between armed factions, hunger, displacement and sexual violence, so often pushed to the margins? Why does Yemen’s long suffering rarely break through the walls of international fatigue? Why does Iran’s massacre struggle to reach the conscience of the world, even when the dead are young, unarmed, and crying only for freedom?
These questions are not asked to reduce Palestinian suffering. Palestinian civilians are human beings too, and their grief must never be mocked, denied or used as a weapon. But if the world can only see Palestinian suffering while forgetting Israeli victims, Iranian victims, Afghan women, Sudanese civilians, Yemeni children and countless others, then something deeper than compassion is at work. Compassion has become political currency. Human pain has been sorted into acceptable and unacceptable categories. Some victims are useful to ideology; others are abandoned because their suffering complicates the slogans.
This is not a demand to ignore Palestinians. It is a demand to stop erasing everyone else.
Even football, which pretends to stand above politics, has become another stage where Iranian pain is asked to disappear. Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, FIFA has reportedly considered or planned restrictions that would prevent supporters from displaying Iran’s pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag inside stadiums, while Iran is still expected to participate under the emblem of the Islamic Republic. Before publication, this detail should be checked against the latest official FIFA and stadium rules. But if this restriction is enforced, it should be called what it is: a disgraceful act of institutional cowardice dressed up as neutrality.
For many Iranians in exile, the Lion and Sun is not a provocation. It is not a weapon. It is not hatred. It is a memory of Iran before the revolution, a symbol carried by families who refuse to let the regime define the nation it has occupied, wounded and misrepresented. The Islamic Republic did not merely inherit Iran’s place in sport; it replaced the ancient and recognizable symbols of Iranian civilization with its own ideological emblem, a stylized word resembling “Allah” in Arabic, placed at the center of a flag that many Iranians now experience not as national belonging, but as the banner of the state that has imprisoned, executed, blinded and murdered their people.
To tell Iranian spectators that they may not enter with the Lion and Sun is not “keeping politics out of sport.” It is allowing the regime’s political symbol to stand while treating the people’s historic symbol as the problem. What, then, is FIFA really protecting? Peace, or the comfort of dictatorships? Sport, or the official paperwork of power? If football belongs to the people, why are Iranian people being asked to cheer under the flag of those who have made their homeland a prison? Why should a mother whose child was killed by the regime be expected to watch Iran play beneath the emblem of that regime, while the flag she recognizes as Iran is treated as forbidden?
This is the same moral sickness in another uniform. The United Nations offers abusive regimes seats, microphones and diplomatic dignity. FIFA offers them flags, anthems and global legitimacy. The victims are asked to be silent in the name of order. The exiles are asked to hide their grief in the name of neutrality. The people are told that their memory is political, while the regime’s symbol is called official.
But there is nothing neutral about erasing the wounded and protecting the costume of the powerful. If FIFA truly wants football to unite people, it should begin by understanding that a nation is not the same thing as the regime that rules over it. Iran is not the Islamic Republic. Iran is older than this regime, deeper than this regime, and more sacred than the emblem this regime placed over its stolen state. The Lion and Sun is not the danger. The danger is a world so afraid of offending power that it finds it easier to silence the people who survived it.
What does condemnation mean when it is not followed by consequence? What does it mean for international bodies to “condemn” a massacre, then continue to negotiate with the very structures that made the massacre possible? What does it mean to speak of human rights in one room, while in another room representatives of abusive regimes are received with microphones, titles, flags and procedural respect?
There comes a point where language itself becomes a cover. “Concern” becomes a curtain. “Condemnation” becomes a performance. “Dialogue” becomes a shelter for those who have learned that if they wait long enough, the world will move on. The dead will be buried. The mothers will be exhausted. The headlines will change. The diplomats will return to their tables. The killers will discover that the price of brutality is not isolation, but another round of negotiation.
This is not justice. This is not peacekeeping. This is not neutrality. It is corruption under observation: a visible moral collapse watched by the whole world, explained away by protocol, protected by diplomatic language, and normalized by silence. If an institution cannot protect civilians from regimes that torture, execute, disappear and massacre their own people, then people have the right to ask what that institution is for. If the United Nations can offer speeches to the victims and seats to the perpetrators, then the question is no longer whether it has failed. The question is whether its failure has become part of the machinery that keeps dictators safe.
The people of Iran know what empty condemnation sounds like. They have heard it after executions. They have heard it after crackdowns. They have heard it after children were killed, protesters were blinded, women were beaten, prisoners were tortured, and families were threatened into silence. They have heard the world say “we are deeply concerned” while the regime remained in power, remained funded, remained armed, remained recognized, remained seated at international tables as if the blood of its citizens did not matter.
And this selective conscience is not limited to Iran. The world has echoed Palestinian suffering across continents, and Palestinian civilians do suffer. Their dead are human too. Their children matter too. But why has that suffering become almost the only suffering some voices can see? Why were Israeli civilians murdered on 7 October so quickly pushed aside in the moral memory of the world? Why were young people who went to dance at a music festival treated as a political complication rather than as human beings? Why did so many people move past the slaughter of Israelis in order to speak only of Israel’s response? Why does one grief become global, while another grief is made inconvenient?
Where is the same global voice for Iranian children shot in the streets? Where is the same outrage for Afghan women locked out of education and public life? Where is the same relentless attention for Sudanese civilians trapped in war, rape, hunger and displacement? Where is the same moral urgency for Yemen, for the minorities crushed by militias, for prisoners tortured behind walls, for mothers searching among bodies, for families forced to choose between silence and death?
If humanity only mourns when mourning is politically fashionable, then it is not humanity. It is tribalism wearing the clothes of compassion.
The United Nations and the governments that hide behind its language must answer a simple question: what is the value of an international order that cannot rescue nations from the cruelty of dictators? What is the purpose of global institutions if they preserve the dignity of states while the citizens of those states are stripped of dignity, safety and life? At what point does diplomatic recognition become complicity? At what point does silence become participation? At what point does condemnation without action become an insult to the dead?
Iran’s murdered children did not need another statement. Israeli families did not need the world to forget their dead the moment politics became uncomfortable. Afghan girls do not need sympathy without school doors opening. Sudanese civilians do not need reports while their lives collapse. Yemen’s children do not need another paragraph of concern while hunger writes itself into their bodies.
They need a world that can still tell the difference between peace and appeasement, between diplomacy and cowardice, between neutrality and moral surrender.
The dead of Iran were not “casualties”. The dead of 7 October were not “context”. The suffering of Palestinians is not a slogan. The suffering of Afghans, Sudanese and Yemenis is not an afterthought. These are human beings. They were loved. They were awaited. They had shoes by the door, books on the bed, messages on their phones, plans in their heads, and people who believed they would return.
If the world cannot hold all these truths at once, then it has not become moral. It has become tribal. And if international institutions cannot distinguish between the protection of civilians and the protection of power, then the failure is not only political.
It is human.
The rooms are still there. The schoolbags are still waiting. The books are still open. The shoes are still by the door. The mothers are still listening for footsteps that will never come.
And if the world cannot hear that silence, then perhaps it is not because the victims are voiceless.
Perhaps it is because the world has chosen which cries it is willing to hear.
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