How Our New Iran Reporter Covers the Country Without Being in It

As soon as Israel began missile strikes against Iran last June, I wanted to find ways to capture the human toll on Iranians who were suffering in a country I knew well — both from being there and from covering it for years as a reporter.

The challenge for me, and for many journalists, is both simple and complicated: How do you capture what is happening inside a country at a time of war when you can’t be in that country?

Iran tightly restricts independent journalism, and I haven’t been able to visit since 2010. My last trip, by chance, coincided with a round of protests against what many Iranians believed to be a fraudulent election, which served as early exposure to the popular dissent and political repression that have characterized much of the country’s modern history.

I wish I could work safely inside Iran, where the chance encounters that typically make up a foreign correspondent’s life could help me more easily portray the country in all its complexity. Not being there presents enormous challenges in understanding what day-to-day life is like for Iranians, and makes it more difficult to reach a diverse set of sources from across Iran’s fractious political divides. Just trying to ascertain how the price of milk has changed can take two or three phone or video calls.

But part of my job is finding ways to report the truth and reflect the humanity of Iranians despite the immense obstacles we as journalists face. That starts with having a broad network of human connections and finding every possible way to communicate with them.

For example, at the outset of the June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran, I wrote a profile for The Washington Post of one of the earliest civilian victims, a young poet living in Tehran named Parnia Abbasi. She and her family were collateral damage from a strike targeting a nuclear scientist who lived in their building.

In interviews over an online communication platform, voice memos and text messages, Parnia’s friends provided me with memories that helped bring her life into view: how she took them camping, her oddball sense of humor, her love of sunflowers and the band Coldplay.

Of course, speaking to them in person would be my preference. (I’m fluent in Persian, which helps in interviewing sources and tapping into Iran’s political and cultural discourse.) But if my work can help to reflect the lives of Iranians a bit more fully, that is enough motivation to keep me going from outside the country’s borders.

Even though we are not there, we can still produce ambitious investigative journalism that holds the Iranian government to account. In 2013, my Reuters colleagues and I published an investigation into the business empire of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. We developed sources with confidential information; gathered and reviewed court records and data from the Tehran Stock Exchange; and interviewed Iranians whose properties had been confiscated by the conglomerate.

In 2022, I wrote about Iran’s Covid vaccine project for The Washington Post, and found serious conflicts of interest that implicated Ayatollah Khamenei. The main evidence came from hundreds of pages of public corporate filings, written in Persian.

And, alongside the journalist Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, I also wrote a forthcoming book on the history of Iran since 1979.

In some ways, reporting on Iran from afar has become easier over the last 15 or so years. As faster internet access has become more widely available in the country, more people can connect with the outside world through apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. With YouTube shows and podcasts, creators in Iran have been able to provide a window into domestic political debates. I also meet with people who were recently in Iran, and those with specific expertise, such as diplomats, current and former Iranian officials and human rights activists.

But at this very moment, covering Iran has never been more difficult. In early March, less than two weeks after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, I joined The New York Times as the new Iran correspondent. After the war began, the government imposed a strict internet blockade, similar to one in January that blocked the news of the regime’s deadly repression of antigovernment protesters.

The shutdown has managed to further cloud and narrow our view of the country, and has silenced the voices of the tens of millions of Iranians who don’t have access to government-approved “white SIM cards,” which are given to select people to bypass censorship and connect directly to the internet or Starlink devices.

Despite the clampdown, I’ve been able to successfully connect with Iranians during brief windows of connectivity who shared their experiences through voice or text messages. Those messages, plus social media posts and domestic news reports, helped me report an article examining how people were marking the Iranian new year, a holiday usually meant for renewal, amid one of the darkest times for the country in modern memory.

I’d rather be on the ground, seeing this for myself. But given the pressures faced by journalists inside Iran, one significant upside of being outside is the ability to deliver strong accountability reporting on an authoritarian government, without fear of retribution.