As the war in Iran enters its second month, many Iranians are urging the U.S and Israel to keep striking their country.
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It has been more than a month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 11,000 targets. U.S. and Norway-based human rights groups estimate hundreds of Iranian citizens have been killed. So a month in, what do Iranians themselves think of this war? NPR’s Emily Feng traveled to Iran’s border with Turkey to find out.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: I meet this woman from Tehran after she’s just walked across a land border with Iran with her luggage. She says she has no work now due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of her city. And like many Iranians crossing through this mountain border, she’s looking for some respite from the war but will head back soon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “You don’t need to worry about us,” she says.
Like all the Iranians in this piece, she asked to remain anonymous. They’ve received texts from the Iranian government, and some have seen signs coming out of Iran telling them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “In the past few years, the Islamic republic has proven to us that we cannot trust them, so much so that we’d rather trust Israel,” she says.
We’re standing in a crowd of Iranians looking for cars to take them further into Turkey and overhearing us, an Iranian man who says he’s just crossed as well to work in Turkey, interjects.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “There’s no such thing as hardship in Iran. Everyone lives freely, man or woman. She’s lying,” he says.
Next to him, a second Iranian man listens on, wide-eyed and shaking.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “In two days, the government killed 40,000 people,” the man says.
He’s referring to a deadly government crackdown in January on protesters, a crackdown which President Trump repeatedly criticized before attacking Iran. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths in that crackdown, but many Iranians, including this man, believe the death toll is far higher.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “You say she’s lying, but are all 90 million people in Iran lying?” he asks.
This exchange shows the fraught debates Iranians are having about whether the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran is justified. Most Iranians NPR interviewed argued it is – their perspectives indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year’s killing of demonstrators proved to them, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never have changed their government.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “Three of my own friends were killed,” says this Iranian. “My friends were all young. I knew them all my life, yet the government killed them so easily.”
Every two years, there’s a protest, he says, but this time, his hometown in Iran’s western Kermanshah Province was brutally retaliated against by government paramilitary groups and punishment.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “It’s like my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it,” he says. “I see no future for my children in Iran.” And his only hope now, as much as it pains him to say, is a foreign intervention.
NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, and the dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed in border areas, including in eastern Turkey, may not be representative. Many are Iranians wealthy enough to travel, but there are also poor Iranians working, often under the table in Turkey. A few are heading off to study abroad, and their commonality is they all feel they have lost opportunities to make a living, to voice their opinions or simply to live under the current government which they say must go.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “We are scared of this bombing,” this Iranian woman says, “but we are happy thinking there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January,” she says…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: …”They were met with bullets, with slaughter, with executions.”
“Our pain,” another Iranian tells me…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: …”Is something you have to feel for yourself to understand.”
He spent the last seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: “Iran’s security forces took everything from us. They are pain incarnate,” he says. So much so he is willing to lose all he has left, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.
The vast majority of the Iranians NPR spoke to had immediate plans to return to their country. One young Tehran resident says, we are not fleeing. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she’s going back in a few days. She tells NPR, we’re determined to rebuild our country if the government changes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: That situation, I’m going to work.
FENG: In that situation, she says she will work for her country, even for free.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Van, Turkey.
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