Internet returns to Iran; a seaside town that witnessed the war

0:00The surreal horror film Back Rooms is a smash. The director is a 20-year-old YouTuber, and it's based on his popular web series. Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office? We get into it on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today on State of the World, internet returns to Iran and a seaside town that witnessed the war. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Wednesday, May 3rd. I'm Greg Dixon. In a few minutes, we hear about one of the early acts of war between the U.S.

0:44and Iran as seen from a fishing village in Sri Lanka. First, internet has returned to Iran. The country had been in a three-month internet blackout imposed by the government after the war with the U.S. and Israel began in February. We're going to hear from some Iranians who are emerging from the digital darkness. Just a note, everyone in this story requested anonymity fearing government retribution. NPR's Arzu Rezvani has been talking to them. Many Iranians can finally share what the worst days of the war were like for them. For one 23-year-old graduate student in Tehran, the U.S.-Israeli strikes were terrifying.

1:24But the government's internet blackout made it even worse. We had no sense of where they were going to hit. We weren't getting any alerts the U.S. or Israel were posting online. And when we turned on the TV, state channels were all raw, raw, focused on targets hit in Israel or the Emirates. There was little acknowledgement of what was getting hit inside Iran. All these months later, getting back online hasn't brought the relief she was expecting. We are just now starting to realize how many people have been detained and executed. Soon after Iran hit the internet's kill switch, security forces unleashed a sweeping internal crackdown.

2:06More than 6 ,000 people have been arrested on vague treason and espionage charges. Several dozen have been executed. These tallies from human rights organizations are only now circulating inside Iran. It's why many say reconnecting to the internet, which is still censored and unstable has been bittersweet. When we needed it, it wasn't there. And now that we have it, it feels like we're a thousand years behind. Life without the internet was especially rough for one 29-year-old content creator in Tehran. Her social media gigs dried up. She started running out of money. To get by, she says she sold off her home appliances, gold jewelry, signed copies of her favorite books.

2:55She's relieved to be working again now that the internet is back, but crushed to learn about what is and isn't included in the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. There's been no mention of how the regime is killing us right now as we speak. In prison executions or through mass unemployment from the long internet blackout, no one is talking about us. Iran was losing some$30 million a day from the digital blackout, according to Iran's Chamber of Commerce. Digital experts believe that's ultimately why the government restored the Internet. Not so much to save people, but to save itself. Arzu Razvani, NPR News.

3:33From details about what's happening inside Iran now that the Internet has returned, to a story giving details about how an early act of that war was seen far from the Middle East. It was witnessed in a fishing village in Sri Lanka, thousands of miles away from Iran, shaking that sleepy seaside town. This was one of the war's deadliest attacks, a U.S. submarine striking an Iranian naval vessel. NPR's Dia Hadid has the story. And just a warning, it contains descriptions of the retrieval of victims after a military strike. Fisherman Anil Kamara unloads his catch at the fishing harbor in Ghal in southern Sri Lanka.

4:12Dogs bark at crows, snatching sardines in silvery flashes. Kamara says it was a day like this when the war came to these shores. He saw men unload bodies from a Sri Lankan Navy vessel. Their pier is just a few dozen feet away. They were the remains of sailors from an Iranian naval vessel, the IRS Dana. It had just left an Indian port after participating in a ceremonial naval exercise. But on March 4, during the peak of fighting between Israel and the US against Iran... It is getting more and more bizarre. A submarine attack on an Iranian ship... That's Indian broadcaster NDTV. US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth announced an American submarine had fired a torpedo at the Iranian vessel.

5:01It was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death. That attack occurred some 23 miles off Sri Lanka's coast. Immediately we just intervened. Anil Jhatha Fernando is Deputy Minister of Finance. The Sri Lankan Navy rushed to the site and retrieved the bodies of 87 Iranian sailors. They rescued another 32. The next day, Sri Lankan authorities allowed another Iranian vessel, the IRS Boshar, to dock after sailors reported engine trouble. Fernando tells NPR that the government worried that the US would interpret their actions as siding with Iran in the Mideast War. So Fernando says the president, Anora Kumar Adesanayake, went to great lengths to communicate that we don't have any role to play in geopolitics and we do not take any side.

5:49We are not a part of this particular war. Humanity comes first. Humanity. In fact, that incident of the submarine torpedoing the Iranian ship has raised questions about war crimes. To be clear, international law scholars say the US acted lawfully when it attacked the Iranian ship. But what isn't clear is whether the submarine crew alerted Sri Lankan authorities that they had targeted a vessel and that there were sailors in distress. That's a critical issue that needs to be clarified. Donald Rothwell is a professor of international law at the Australian National University. He says under the Geneva Convention.

6:29There is a basic obligation to come to the aid of sailors who are shipwrecked or are in distress or are wounded. The Geneva Conventions do acknowledge submarines aren't equipped for rescues, but the crew should alert authorities when there are sailors in distress. Rothwell says a submarine crew can sidestep that obligation if they're worried that calling for help might put their own vessel in danger, say, for instance, if it reveals their location to other combatants. But Rothwell says if the crew was not in danger and did not alert authorities that sailors were drowning, then they may have committed a war crime, given the number of Iranian sailors that died in the attack, at least 87 men.

7:16The Department of Defense did not respond to detailed questions we sent about the attack. Inside a pink-painted station in Gaul, a police officer tells us when the Sri Lankan Navy vessels reached the scene, the Iranian ship had already sunk. He says bodies of the sailors were found floating over a radius of about two miles.

7:39The officer asked Zempia not to use his name because he's not authorised to talk to media. He says he and some 40 officers were pulled in to help. It was the biggest mass casualty event he'd witnessed. It overwhelmed the local hospital more, which could only hold 14 bodies.

7:57He says officers work through the day and night to fingerprint the dead, take DNA swabs and ready them for post-mortems. He says the bodies he saw were intact, with some blast wounds around the legs. Back in the Gaul Harbour, Fisherman Anil Kamara is taping up boxes of fish for market. He says he thinks about those Iranian sailors when he's out at sea. He says, I'm a fisherman. I know. A man in water is a thousand times more vulnerable than a man on land.

8:31He says, in the water, there's no one there to help you. Dear Hadid, NPR News, Gulf Fishing Harbour, Sri Lanka.

8:45That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.

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