How everyday Iranians backed the revolt

Revolutions do not happen only in the streets. Yet the outside world knows the uprising in Iran almost entirely through footage uploaded from camera phones-the thousands upon thousands chanting for the fall of the regime in cities and towns across the country, and the regime answering with batons and shotguns. There has been no window into the kitchens and courtyards where the country's fate will be decided.

- KAY ARMIN SERJOIE

"I did not think a country could change so much in three months," says journalist Kay Armin Serjoie, reflecting on returning to Tehran last September after a summer in Germany. Serjoie, who has covered his native country for more than two decades, was not allowed to work as a reporter while he remained in Iran. But he remembered what he saw. And, since returning to Europe, he has written it down.

ON AN OCTOBER NIGHT, AT LEAST 600 SECURITY FORCES are arrayed down a two-mile stretch of Tehranpars Street that has been a focus of protests for weeks. Armor-clad police special forces hold intersections. Revolutionary Guards on motorcycles swing clubs at protesters who stand their ground. Middle-aged basijis stand outside mosques and government buildings.

The activists, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly young. Many of the women let their hair flow free.

Apart from the two sides, a bigger group circulates an almost unending sea of young families, elderly couples, and passersby, some just walking up and down the street, some sitting in their cars in the traffic. They are not protesting anything, yet they brave the tear gas, the shouts to move along. They act as if it were just another evening, but they're also giving cover to protesters, who disappear among them to escape the frenzied charges of security forces.