The central Tehran square was not designed as a shooting range. But for the last fortnight, Haft-e Tir has been buzzing with another kind of midday activity home makers in chadors, college students, retired clerks all gathered around an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps instructor, who is patiently snapping the bolt carrier of a Kalashnikov in and out of the receiver. May 17 wire-service photos tell the harrowing story: Soldiers like Nasser Sadeghi pointing at illustrated plates, crowds of civilians looking through, and a 39-year-old mother of three named Mahnaz telling AFP it was her duty to learn to shoot a rifle.

It is not a show on the parade ground. The booths have spread around the capital since the beginning of May, and Iranian state television has integrated the campaign into the programming: At one point the network invited a Guards trainer to show an anchor how to aim and shoot in the studio, in real time. The video has been spread on social networks of women, side by side, clearing AK-47s in the mosques and at the Vanak and Tajrish squares at night. There is no parade preparation in Tehran. It is creating a population.

The skyline of Tehran, with the Iranian flag civilian mobilisation has extended from official institutions to public squares.

This is important if you are to understand, you need to remove yourself from a picture frame. The Islamic Republic is now six weeks into a tenuous ceasefire, which was suspended on April 8 after about 40 days of war with the United States and Israel mediated by Pakistan in Islamabad, and that the American president himself admits it hangs by a thread. The first strike, which Washington code-named Operation Epic Fury, struck on Feb. 28, and knocked out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the first hour and decimated Iran's conventional air and naval forces. What is left of the coercive power of the regime is embodied in two forces: the IRGC's remaining missile units and the Basij, the neighbourhood-based paramilitary that has been the eyes, hands and, when necessary, the truncheon of the regime.

In simple terms, the civilian-rifle programme is an effort to expand the second pillar by a factor of 10. The script itself comes from the doctrine of the 'mosaic defence' reorganisation of the Iranian military in 2005, which devided command into 31 provincial nodes, each of which would be able to withstand a decapitation attack and re-constitute as an insurgency. Tehran witnessed what transpired in Iraq subsequent to 2003. It witnessed the return of the Taliban to Kabul after 20 years of nation building funds. Its state media message now to the Iranian street and to Washington and Tel Aviv is anything but subtle: invade the cities and they will fight back block for block as long as it takes.

But will the booths make a meaningful fighting force is a different matter from will they make a meaningful deterrent? Thirty minutes with a Kalashnikov is not enough to make a homemaker a guerrilla. It can, however, increase the psychological price of a ground campaign no serious Pentagon planner has been interested in the first place. War games that the United States has simulated over the last two decades about an invasion of Iran have given the same uneasy answer: too much time, too many casualties, too much occupation nobody at home has the stomach for.

You can't see what the cameras are capturing.

The other half of the story is where the cameras have not focused: In the bazaars, bread lines and foreign exchange windows of north Tehran. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that Iran's GDP will shrink by 6.1 percent this year and the rate of inflation is close to 69 percent. Every time Iranians purchase cooking oil they are humiliated as the rial has fallen to about 1.32 million per US dollar. Since 2024, Iran has not released any official GDP data. Even the numbers that are available from the domestic services are difficult to confirm from outside due to Internet blackouts. What you can verify is a queue.

The naval blockade ordered by Washington on April 13 has the potential to deprive Tehran of up to seventy percent of its export revenues, according to the estimates Oxford Economics. The Strait of Hormuz is the gateway for over 90 percent of Iran's trade, both imports and exports, on an annual basis. The closure of the strait, which was a weapon Tehranian had used against the West in early March, also stopped its own imports of non-hydrocarbon and food supplies. The country was already experiencing an inflation rate which was over forty percent, prior to the onset of the war. In the second quarter of war economies, they do not get better.

But the regime is still making money. According to the data from Kpler trade-intelligence, Iran was shipping 1.84 million bpd of crude in March and 1.71 million in early April, via dark-fleet tankers, ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman and quiet deals that have kept the price of Iranian Light, Iranian Heavy and the Forozan blend above ninety dollars on most days of trading in the past two months and more than a hundred dollars on many days. At a minimum, that's about five billion dollars in export dollars in a 30-day period, in the middle of a shooting war. That is, the state hasn't gone under. But it's a gamble that it won't run out of time first.

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During peacetime roughly 47 percent of Hormuz crude is headed to China, 14 percent to India, 11 percent to Japan and nine percent to South Korea, a total of more than four barrels for every five through the twenty-one-mile waterway. The rest is mostly consumed in Europe. This is what led to a surge in the price of Brent above 120 dollars per barrel after its closure on March 4, and it is why QatarEnergy was compelled to declare force majeure on its LNG supplies and why the Dutch TTF gas benchmarks nearly doubled to over 60 euros per megawatt-hour, forcing the European Central Bank to postpone its planned rate cuts on March 19, while raising the inflation forecast for 2026 and cutting growth expectations. The UK inflation is now forecast to go above five per cent this year. Industry estimates have some American pump prices on the path to five dollars a gallon if the nation's oil port at the Strait of Hormuz does not resume to full operation. North America has seen prices of jet fuel more than double since the war began. Fuel surcharges have been passed along by shipping companies, such as FedEx, USPS, and Amazon. Foodstuff prices have risen by 40 per cent to 120 per cent in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries that import more than 80 per cent of their foodstuffs and Lulu Retail has been airlifting staples.

The true tale behind the rifle drill footage at Haft-e Tir is this one, which is truly a global story.

The perspective from the exterior of the Western frame

The pictures from Tehran, when read together, tell a story that is not that comfortable to tell by the western capitals. The traditional view Iran's regime is in its death throes and desperately clinging to a rear guard is a valid but incomplete thought. A more discerning, less ideologically blinkered reading the kind that doesn't start from the premise that Washington's is the only frame sees three things at once.

Tehran is taking the opportunity of the ceasefire to spin a 40-day air campaign into the illusion of insurgency readiness. The capacity of the Basij to absorb tens of thousands of half-trained civilians doesn't matter much. The message is the deterrent and it is being sent over state television precisely in order to ensure that Tel Aviv and the Pentagon get it before the next round of strikes is scheduled. Second, the war has solidified a domestic constituency that, only months ago, tore down posters of the late Khamenei in the streets, and that neither side desires to mention in public. A non-trivial portion of the people Trump's crackdowns imprisoned and killed during the 2026 protests are attending free Kalashnikov tutorials by the same regime.

Third, and here the wire copy out of Tehran is seldom so forthright, the Islamic Republic is not the isolated country that Iraq in 2003 was. Pakistan is the mediator. The buyer is China, the banker is China and, as Trump himself put it on Air Force One on May 15 flying home from Beijing, the suitor whose leader has personally offered to help end the war is China. Russia has not been silent, but rather unobtrusive. The freight rail line that runs from China to Iran via Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan was opened in 2016, and is the sort of infrastructure that becomes more useful the closer that chokepoints are. Yes, Tehran's leverage is not as it would like it to be, and Oxford Economics is correct that re-routing is diminishing its leverage, but it has not come to an end.

But former United States defence secretary Robert Gates noted this week that Iran's internal systems "seem very much intact" following the bombing and that a civilian uprising is not likely in the near future. One reason is that of the Basij. One of the whys is the rifles in the squares.

What happens next

A Pakistani source told Reuters on Monday that a fresh Iranian offer had been presented to the U.S. representatives, who, the source said, "keep changing their goalposts," and added that there was "not much time. That's what the state of this moment is. Since the ceasefire that brought the war to a halt on April 8, it has been renegotiated, threatened and brought back from the brink at least three times. American blockade of the Iranian ports has remained in force. The US Navy escort mission launched by Trump on May 4, which was suspended after two days, may be restarted at 24-hours notice, according to Operation Project Freedom. On May 5, the CMA CGM San Antonio was attacked by a cruise missile in the strait. On May 7, a Chinese owned chemical tanker was attacked. Paper open, practice closed.

In case of a failure of negotiations, the next stage of the war is not going to be that same. Iran's air defence has been eliminated. It has its usual naval force. What remains is its missiles, its proxies, its rail connection to the east, its dark fleet and more and more clearly its lessons in Haft-e Tir Square, which feature the AK-47. All those are non-factors in a stand-up fight. They all provide a way to avoid stand-up combat by making the alternative cost prohibitive.

The real question is not whether Mahnaz, mother of three, will ever fire her rifle or not. Whether the world economy can sustain another six months operating on half rations, Brent on a roller coaster of triple-digit prices, the industry in Europe operating on diesel surcharges of 30 percent, food imports at 70 percent in the Gulf Cooperation Council, and a regime in Tehran that finds against all odds a kind of new legitimacy in war.

This little bit in the square is the booths. What happened behind them is not.