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Resident inside Tehran describes ‘a war on the city’
Hello, I’m Sheena Goodyear with CBC Radio’s As It Happens.
Today, our host Nil Kӧksal spoke to a resident inside Tehran. He is an open critic of both the Iranian regime and those who are waging war against it, so we are withholding his name for his safety.
Last summer, when Israel was launching strikes inside Iran, he said it felt like a war against the regime. This time, he says, it feels like “a war on the city.”
“They target anything and everything, and you cannot be sure whether you’ll be targeted or not,” he said. “It is consistent. It is every day.”
The first day the bombs started dropping, he rushed to pick up his young daughter from school, and get both her and his wife out of the city to safety. They told their little girl the bombs were just thunder.
“It’s a tough job to protect children in this situation,” he said. “We had to make up a lot of white lies.”
‘We do not want this war’
Now that his family is out of harm’s way, he has returned to the city he loves. He had already spent a decade of his life in Europe, and he doesn’t want to leave again — even though the bombs fall every day and the streets are deserted.
He first came home, he says, because he wanted to fight for a better future. The Women, Life, Freedom protests changed hearts and minds in Iran, he said, and he joined the civilian movement to bring down what he calls a “tyrannical regime.”
“The Iranian government is not my cup of tea. I’m not here to defend them. But this was our fight to fight,” he said. “But now it’s out of our hands.”
He says the war has left the civilian movement inside Tehran “paralyzed.” The people who would be out marching in the streets are instead fleeing the city — or cowering at home.
“We do not want this war,” he said. “When we are under fire, when our loved ones are killed, when pointless, wanton deaths are everywhere, that doesn’t help our cause.”
Iraq, Afghanistan all over again
When the Trump administration paints a narrative about liberating the Iranian people, he says it reminds him of the rhetoric used to justify the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, two conflicts he sees as “fiascos” that created chaos and bloodshed, not peace and stability.
“Yet here we are again doing the same again and starting another senseless, unnecessary war, which would be paid for by the blood of the normal people,” he said. “It is absolutely exhausting.”
He says he’s offended that Trump says he wants to be involved in choosing Iran’s next leader, and he’s outraged that other Western countries aren’t standing up to him.
“I mean, it is crazy, isn’t it? You hear the man talking about picking Iranian future leader as if we are nobody here,” he said.
“But we are somebody in this country, and this is our war.”
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