In Iran, an Uneasy Calm Amid a Cease-Fire

0:08Hi there. I'm Jessica Mendoza. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm the co-host of the Journal podcast. I live in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday afternoon, I opened up WhatsApp to record a voice note, a message to a man in Tehran, one of many people inside Iran that our reporters have been able to speak to in recent weeks. I wanted to know how people there were feeling this week, as the world counted down to a Tuesday night deadline set by President Trump. He was threatening to strike Iran's power plants, bridges, and other critical infrastructure, and warning in a social media post that, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight if Iran didn't reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

0:52Within minutes, my WhatsApp pinged. The man had responded. Reporter Hamraz Bayan translated for both of us, in Farsi and English. Hello, I'm 38 years old. I'm a civil engineer, and I manage construction projects. Alongside that, my wife and I run a cafe and a restaurant.

1:18There were a few hours till the deadline, and he was at home with friends, bracing for a potentially serious escalation of the conflict.

1:30Tonight, we've invited two of our friends over to our home just to be together. It might be the last night we have electricity. Right now, we are having a small gathering. By tomorrow morning, when we wake up, very bad things may have happened.

1:54Less than 90 minutes before Trump's deadline, the U.S. and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. Trump's threats were off, for now.

2:07For many across Iran, the ceasefire brought a wave of relief after weeks of intense bombing. But the two-week pause looks fragile. The man I'd been speaking to told me that for him, the anxiety hasn't lifted. This ceasefire has also made us worried whether in the next two weeks they will reach a final agreement, because right now both sides of the war are claiming victory. People are both happy and afraid at the same time. We have to wait two weeks to see which direction this situation will move in.

2:49Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, April 9th.

3:02Coming up on the show, inside Iran during a fragile ceasefire.

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3:50For weeks now, people inside Iran have been living with this constant tension. What happens next? With the tentative ceasefire in place, I wanted to understand what regular Iranians had been living through. I started by sitting down with our colleague Jared Malson, who covers the Middle East from Turkey. And he reminded me that many Iranians were already suffering even before the bombing campaign began. Well, so to begin with, you have to put this in context to set the stage of where Iran was before the war, which is the country was in a very severe economic crisis. You had this collapsing currency, a surge in price inflation, a rising cost of food and inability to sort of make economic decisions, which caused these protests over the winter and really a huge uprising against the government.

4:44The regime responded with a deadly crackdown in which they sent security forces to open fire on those crowds of people. A new video appears to show protesters in Iran being shot. Killing thousands of people in one of the worst, deadliest political crackdowns in recent world history anywhere. Over a few days in January, Iranian security forces shot and killed thousands of protesters in the streets. Tonight, mounting evidence shows there is a deadly crackdown on Iranian protesters. Reports that thousands of anti-government protesters have been killed during a brutal crackdown. The exact death toll has been hard to confirm, but some human rights groups estimate that over 10 ,000 people were killed.

5:30Just a few weeks later, the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran. And life got even harder for many Iranians. People that we spoke to on the ground in Iran talked about how the bombings were shaking their buildings at night, waking up their children, blowing out the windows of their houses, and just causing a lot of fear and anxiety about the future of the country.

5:58My colleagues and I spoke to a lot of people who talked about how, even for the great many people that are opposed to the regime, and including some who wanted the U.S. and Israel to attack, who were really desperate for change, these attacks were so intense that it was pushing the country to the brink of state failure. Here's White House spokeswoman Caroline Levitt. In total, more than 13 ,000 targets across Iran were struck. Again, this is in the matter of just 38 days. The bombing campaign has mainly focused on military targets, but civilian infrastructure has also been affected. People are worried about, yeah, just about institutions, vital services, critical infrastructure unraveling, and that there was a risk of chaos within the country.

6:47And it was also becoming clear that the regime is not going anywhere. That is a view that many people have told me. For example, in my reporting where I visited the Turkish border with Iran a few weeks ago, where I spoke to about two dozen people, almost all those people said a version of the same thing where they said, you know, we don't like this government. We want to get rid of them, but we also don't want another country to come in and bomb us. One of the people our colleagues talked to was the civil engineer in Tehran I'd been messaging. It was late on Tuesday evening for him, and he was in his apartment with friends.

7:34I'm at home right now in a neighborhood in northwest Tehran. At the moment, people who oppose the war, who have been present in the streets of Tehran for the past 37 days, marching and showing their support for the government, have been gathered in a main square near my home and are continuing their march. I can hear them from behind my window. We kept exchanging messages about what it's been like to live through the war. He described a strange juxtaposition.

8:12War is a very strange thing. You can be sitting there discussing signing a contract with a swimming pool contractor, while at the same time hearing explosions in the distance. Or today, we went out for lunch, and suddenly the sound of explosions filled the air.

8:35Every time I hear an explosion, I immediately think about where I can take shelter. I keep my mouth open so that if an explosion happens nearby, my eardrums won't be damaged.

8:52In a way, you just learn to live with it.

9:00These days, the weather in Tehran is very pleasant Spring here is usually beautiful And this year, because of the heavy rainfall The air is more humid and very enjoyable Except during the times when explosions happen Today, one happened, here are hope When that happens, the smell of burning rises along with dust and the scent of compounding.

9:35We also talked to people about how they were just bracing for the worst, you know, stocking up on canned goods, water, batteries, fueling their cars, and just bracing for impact. That's our colleague Jared again. And then you have to imagine if you've been living under four or five weeks of bombing and just trying to breathe through that. And then the president of the United States is posting about how he's going to end civilization in your country. How would you feel? So I just think the level of fear and uncertainty and anxiety was just absolutely unimaginable.

10:17Then came the ceasefire. By that point, it was in the early hours of the morning in Tehran, and my WhatsApp chat had gone quiet. I sent one more message. I know it's really late there, so I don't know if you're sleeping. But around 7 p.m. Eastern time, President Trump announced that there would be a two-week ceasefire on the condition that Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. I just wanted to know how you feel about that. You know, how did you and your family and friends react when you heard this news? And does it change anything for you and your family? Four hours later, a thumbs-up emoji lit up my WhatsApp chat.

11:09Then this message came through. No, I don't think it will change anything for me. Because the most important point is that the necessary agreement needs to happen between Iran and the United States. Given the way these two countries deal with each other, I consider the changes of an agreement to be low. I think these two weeks will pass with a lot of anxiety.

11:40So far, the ceasefire is holding. But there are big challenges to converting it into a lasting peace. That's next.

11:57The ceasefire has now been in place for two days. As we're recording this, there's an uneasy calm. Iran has not launched any attacks on neighboring Gulf countries for more than 24 hours. The U.S. has also paused its bombing campaign. But issues remain. Israel is still launching strikes against Lebanon, something that could derail the ceasefire. And crucially, the actual terms of the ceasefire haven't been agreed to yet. So the most important thing to know about this ceasefire is that it is a classic Trump deal in the sense that you have an initial announcement of a deal with many of the details to be worked out later.

12:41So there's a lot of inbuilt fragility to this ceasefire arrangement and a lot that can still go wrong. Formal negotiations are set to take place in Pakistan later this week. U.S. officials are expected to talk to their Iranian counterparts to hash out the details of a long-term peace agreement. And there is a lot to work out. Jared, I'm curious what you think the biggest sticking points ahead are. Because on the one hand, you know, both sides are saying, you know, we did it. We won a big victory here. But on the other, you know, it sounds like there's a lot of daylight between the two sides. So the Strait of Hormuz is a great example.

13:21And it's also potentially the most salient issue, obviously, because of the massive historic disruption to the world oil supply and the rising gas prices and inflation globally and so on. The Americans want the strait to be opened unconditionally. They want to return to the status quo prior to the war. That's also, importantly, what the Gulf countries want. And the Iranians show no indication of going back to that previous status quo. They want to maintain control. Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. And Jared told us that not much has changed since the start of the ceasefire. According to shipping data from the SMP, only four ships crossed the strait on Wednesday.

14:05That's less traffic than we've seen in the days before. And there's no sign that Iran and its military wing, the IRGC, are willing to give up control. They said in their statements that ships that cross now during this interim two-week period have to do so in coordination with their armed forces. We understand from our reporting that that means in coordination with the IRGC specifically. And so there's a lot to be figured out here. Will the Americans accept that? Will industry accept it? You know, talking to people in the shipping and oil industries today, what I understand is that there might be a scenario down the line where there's an imperative to move the oil and to get these tankers out of there where they might be willing to work with the Iranians under some circumstances.

14:52But there's a lot that would have to be figured out, right? Because how do you pay a fee to a government that is heavily sanctioned, that has no access to the international financial system? We understand that that might be done through cryptocurrency or the payments might be done in Chinese yuan, for example. But how all of that exactly would work? You know, industry is asking. How hard will the Americans push them on this issue in the negotiations? Are they willing to blow up the ceasefire just over this issue? We don't really have answers to all those questions right now.

15:29How is the Iranian regime approaching negotiations with the U.S.? One of the tactics of this regime is that they play hardball in negotiations. They did this in the nuclear negotiations over the 2015 nuclear deal in the Obama administration, the so-called JCPOA, in which, you know, negotiators that worked on that deal told me that, you know, they would negotiate one day and they would think that they've, okay, we've settled this issue. And then the next day, the Iranians would come back and just say, oh, no, that issue is reopened. We didn't really agree to that. The Iranians really suit up for this.

16:06They use these kind of tactical maneuvers in the context of negotiations to try to confuse and outmaneuver their opponents. In the wake of a ceasefire, Iran declared victory in the war. Jared says that they'll likely want to keep that momentum as talks get underway. Again, to use the Strait of Hormuz as an example, this wasn't an issue in the negotiations six weeks ago. It wasn't on the table. The two sides were talking about the nuclear issue. The Americans wanted to also place restrictions on Iran's missile program, for example. The Strait of Hormuz was not in those talks, and now it is. No matter how these negotiations go, Jared says the entire region is at an inflection point.

16:54We are going to wake up to a very different Middle East when the dust settles from this. Like, I put it this way, like, again, like, Iran's influence in the region was at a nadir prior to this. Because now, five or six weeks into this war, the tables have turned and they now have new lines of international influence, not just in the region, where they've totally changed the balance of power in the Persian Gulf vis-a-vis the Gulf states. but they also have leverage over the global economy and all kinds of countries in Europe and Asia and so on that are reliant on Gulf oils. There are 12 days left in this ceasefire.

17:45For the civil engineer I was messaging in Tehran, he's also counting down to a much more personal deadline. He's about to become a father. His wife is due around the same time the ceasefire is set to expire.

18:03My wife is now in her 37th week of pregnancy and I think our son will be born in about two or three weeks. Throughout this war, we have really hoped and still do that our son will be born at a time when peace between Iran and the United States has been established.

18:25so that he can live in an Iran where the shadow of war is no longer hanging overhead, an Iran whose differences with the U.S. have been resolved. That would be certainly a better world for him.

18:57That's all for today, Thursday, April 9th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Hamraz Bayan for translating the WhatsApp messages. Additional reporting in this episode from Hamraz Bayan, Rebecca Fung, Hanna Mousavi, and Summer Saeed.

19:18Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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