Smoke billows after Israeli forces struck oil depots in Tehran on March 8. Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images I hadn’t spoken to Hamid in close to a year when his name popped up on my phone last weekend. Just a few lines of text, pushed through a VPN from downtown Tehran in the middle of the night. He’d woken up to find everything outside coated in a dark, greasy film, he wrote. The cars. The trees. The windowsills. Hundreds of tons of smoke, soot, and​ toxic particulates settled over the city