Inside Iran as the bombs fall

0:00Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:This is The Guardian.

0:09Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Today, inside Iran as the bombs fall.

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0:59Annie Kelly:On a Saturday morning, you get up and suddenly my phone was blowing up with friends and family saying, it's started, it's just started, and you didn't need to say anything more.

1:12Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:For the past week, Sanam Nagari Andalini, like millions of Iranians living outside their country, has found herself split in two, existing in some kind of shadow world. She gets up and she goes to work, but her mind and her heart are thousands of miles away with her family and friends as airstrikes rain down on her homeland.

1:38Annie Kelly:And honestly, the last week for all of us has been one of, how do I explain, waking up in the morning and you feel literally as if your legs weigh a ton and you feel paralyzed. You feel like you're constantly unable to breathe.

2:01Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Since last Saturday, when the US and Israeli bombardment began, the internet's been down. Only the occasional message or voice note has got through.

2:10Annie Kelly:So what happens is that I send a message to somebody that I know and sometimes it's one tick, sometimes it's two ticks. I lost, you know, one relative. how is everybody and how are the ones in the city or wherever they are and then he'll say well I've talked to so and so and they say they're fine. Everybody's fine.

2:35Annie Kelly:I was reminded of the 1980s when my father was there and it was in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. I would get to speak to him every three weeks when I came home from school and the conversation was basically, Baba, how are you? And he would say, I'm fine. And then over here we would say, yes, we're fine too. And nobody said more than I'm fine because he didn't want, you know, I didn't want him to feel bad for us and he obviously didn't want us to be afraid for him. And we're seeing how unfine many people probably are now.

3:14Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:The US and the Israelis say they want regime change and complete surrender. The regime says it will fight on to the end. Caught in the middle are 93 million Iranians, whose fate hangs in the balance. Like Sanam, all week we've been trying to talk to some of them about what's happened to their lives and what they want the world to know. They are going through very fighting things. The internet has been cut off. and it feels like we have fallen into a black hole. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, what next for Iran and its people?

4:07Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:For the past few months, every day was a Baltimore. war. Every day was a shadow of war. Like we knew tensions were very high and that something could happen. The scale and time is still surprised many of the people. Everything changed very quickly. Throughout the week, we've been receiving voice notes from people inside Iran. They were all really nervous about speaking. We've altered their voices. During all these days, I have been waking up in the morning to the sound of exposure. The area around the hall was bombed and our house kept shaking. At all hours of the day and night, the sound of fighter jets echoes throughout the city.

4:54Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Suddenly, there are explosions. And with every explosion, we call each other to make sure everyone is safe. Even if you are not directly affected, everyone feels the tension and uncertainty, like the death is near you. It's always worrying people, like even me.

5:12Annie Kelly:Everyone is afraid of death.

5:14Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:And many people are trying to understand what the future will look like.

5:25Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Sanam Nagari Andalini, you're a global peace strategist and the Executive Director of the International Civil Society Action Network, a peace-building NGO. Sanam, it's been an extraordinary week. started last Saturday with the assassination of the Supreme Leader and US and Israeli airstrikes. And the weekend was just absolutely catastrophic for people living inside Iran. First off, could you just give us a sense of what toll the war has already taken on civilian infrastructure there?

5:54Annie Kelly:So the first thing that I heard was the girls' school. That was hit. More than 160 children were killed here on Saturday. The strike hit during the morning session in a primary school in Minab. And, you know, there was a question of who hit it, what happened, the Americans blaming the Israelis, vice versa. So I would caution you from pointing the finger at the United States of America when it comes to targeting civilians, because that's not something that these armed forces do. And then it turned out that not only it was the Americans, possibly it was because of AI and, you know, old information.

6:28Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Incidents like this would really be one of the worst ones of civilian casualties caused by the United States, if confirmed, in the Middle East. if this is confirmed that the United States had a role in this strike, it could have major political repercussions.

6:43Annie Kelly:It's been 20 hospitals, I think about nine schools, police stations, just local police stations. The stadium, the Azra Adi Stadium, my uncle actually designed it many years ago, back in the 70s. It's an iconic place. It's a place for football. It was the kind of place where the young women would protest to get into because they wanted to watch the men's games. they hit the azadi stadium why mihrabad airport was hit mihrabad airport was again an iconic sort of site for all of us because it was the first airport and and when we were kids and you had relatives going you know living abroad the whole family would go to the airport to greet them the flights would always come at night and so it was a place of so much um nostalgia for so many of us um and it and it has not been used it's not the main airport of tehran anymore and it's not a military airport either.

7:33Annie Kelly:It was hit because it has some kind of iconic value. So the Golestan Palace, which is a huge Ajar-era palace in the middle of the city, and it's got a hall of mirrors, that's been damaged. Again, it's a UNESCO heritage site. So these are all actually also war crimes. When you hit a desalination plant, which means that people can't get water, this isn't the laws of war as we have noted in the past. Iran suffered from eight years of the Iran-Iraq war. And it wasn't this level of civilian infrastructure damage. So this is very deliberate what's going on.

8:08Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Right. And tell me a bit about those salination plants that were hit at the weekend. We saw the whole of Tehran covered in these really thick clouds of black smoke. And it was quite important, isn't it, that that damage that was done last night to, I think, the salination plant and also some oil reserves. So could you tell us about that? Yeah.

8:28Annie Kelly:So they hit two oil depots, one in the south, one in the north of the city. So it's like two huge plumes of black smoke. And this is the oil and the fuel that runs the city. It's got nothing to do with the security or the military infrastructure. This is entirely for civilian use. The water desalination plants that they hit are in the island of Qashb in the south of Iran. It's fishing communities. These are UNESCO sites of environmental importance as well that have been hit. So you're actually doing massive damage to an environmental ecosystem that is meant to be protected. The other thing which was incredibly sad was that there was a naval ship of sailors that were invited to India for ceremonial naval practice.

9:18Annie Kelly:The ship comes out of Indian waters into international waters, gets torpedoed by the United States. A single torpedo launched from an American submarine, the first such sinking of an enemy ship since World War II.

9:31Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.

9:43Annie Kelly:And again, the laws of the sea have been that you do that, you then go and pick up the human beings, the poor sailors in the water. They didn't do that. The Americans didn't do that. The Indians didn't do that.

10:02Annie Kelly:And the Sri Lankans did. So the Sri Lankan Navy saved 32 young sailors. They picked up about 88 bodies and took them back to Sri Lanka. And then there was a second ship, and they escorted that ship to Trincomali port and gave them safe harbor. And so this systematic, not just erosion, but absolute disregard for any norms, any rules, any question of what is war is really important because it's taken us 500 years as human beings to come up with international laws, to come up with an architecture around how we treat each other, even when we're in conflict. and in one generation they're ripping it up and protect you know as if it doesn't matter and and this is you know this is where I worry about our own government and and and others that that are not standing for that law because those laws are are there for all of us and you can't just apply them when you feel like it we it has to be it has to be equal across across all human beings and and at the moment Iranians are not really benefiting from that and do we know whether

11:08Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:people are actually able to leave their house. I read somewhere that there are no bombs, there are no civilian bomb shelters, for instance. Do you know, are people going out to work? Are people having to stay inside? What does it look like on the streets?

11:20Annie Kelly:So, again, what we hear and the little bit that we can see is that they have designated certain metro stations in Tehran as, it's like London during the Blitz. I mean, you know, some of them are going to be safe and some of them probably are not, but they don't have the kinds of heavy duty bomb shelters. And again, for a city of nine to 10 million, how are you meant to do that? So that's definitely one issue. And then one exchange that I had was with someone who said, the poor people or poorer people who need to earn a living don't have a choice. They have to get up every morning and go do whatever the job is because they get paid daily wages.

11:59Annie Kelly:And of course, inflation was horrific before. Combination of mismanagement, corruption, and very definitely sanctions and the policy that the United States just overtly states that they wanted to squeeze people economically until they hurt. But with the war, it gets worse. I'm sure that also, at the same time, lots of people are still OK because it's been one week. And the question is, how long can you survive?

12:33Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:Many people prefer to stay home because it is so dangerous unless they really need to go out. The streets are quiet and, you know, tense. We still have access to basic supplies, but people are buying extra food, like, just in case. You know, it's a feeling of helplessness, angst and worry. I think this is shared by pretty much everyone. They're worried about banking services because a lot of the banks have closed services that are not even allowing cash patrols. They're worried about droughts. They're worried about being able to afford food, let alone access it. We can only hope to survive until the end of this one.

13:14Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:For now, we can get our daily necessities. However, prices have increased. Everything is more expensive. We are very worried that our money will run out or that even the few shops that are opening my clothes.

13:46Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:And could you give us a sense of what we know about the death toll and how many people have been killed and where as well?

13:52Annie Kelly:Up to Saturday, the 7th of March, the statistics that I saw were around 1 ,500 people or so had been killed. About 10 ,000 had been injured. But when I asked about whether this included the young men serving National Service and, you know, wherever barracks that they might be in, Army barracks and so forth, the answer was we don't know because we don't look at them in terms of what their job is, right? But you can imagine like that in Iran, like any other country, the military will likely has its own hospitals and its own system. So we don't really know the numbers. And these numbers that I'm saying are before the attacks on the oil depots that happened on Saturday.

14:33Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:When the strikes begun, when the supreme leader, the Ayatollah, was killed on Saturday, last Saturday, Okay. You did see Iranians celebrating on the streets, both outside, but also inside Iran. There is no doubt that the regime was hated and feared by many people inside Iran. But what is your sense of how people felt when the strikes began and how that might have changed over the last week? You know, first of all, when they killed Khamenei, one of the things that I found, you know, I don't know if the word interesting is right,

15:07Annie Kelly:But, you know, my observation was that here's a man who in life did not particularly have that grandest stature or an aura like Khomeini, his predecessor, had had. He never had that. And all of a sudden, by killing him, he was turned into a martyr. He was all of a sudden being labeled as imam. And you had it from Pakistan all the way to Iraq, people out in the streets protesting that, you know, this man has been killed. So he was 86 years old. He knew that he was going to die sooner or later. he had cancer. But this idea that, oh, you know, we went and assassinated him in a regime change has actually backfired because he's gained a much greater aura and it's rallied a whole universe of people around the question of, you know, again, Americans and others coming into the region.

15:56Annie Kelly:I wish that Khamenei had been arrested so that we could see these guys in court. That's, you know, that would be what I would like to see. And I think there are lots of people who think the same way. But that choice was never given. And, you know, the other part of it was that this assumption that, oh, you get rid of the head, like they did with Saddam Hussein or with Gaddafi in Libya in 2012, and the regime will topple. But the Iranian regime was never like that. The system of power was very, very different to your traditional dictatorship. Not only that, they anticipated this kind of attack because they'd seen it.

16:36Annie Kelly:So apparently they had four layers of people. They had their systems in place in terms of replacements. They've decentralized their military so that there isn't just central command and control. There was a lot of preparation that was done. And this is where I struggle to understand how Israel and the United States and the, you know, the Pahlavi, the Shah's son who was, you know, advocating for war, how badly they misread and misunderstood the nature of this state. But if you're going to go up against it, then you do need to understand what you're up against. And it's the same with the security forces.

17:18Annie Kelly:There's national, there's army, there's police, there's standard things. And then they establish parallel security forces. The IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard, its mandate is to protect the revolution. Its mandate is it serves the Supreme Leader's Office. Khamenei ensured that that was his power base. We have the Basij, which is the volunteer forces. They're all over the country in villages and towns. And they are both a force of oppression, surveillance, and when there's an earthquake, they're the first ones to run and help people. They're also the first ones if there's polio vaccinations that have to be done.

17:55Annie Kelly:But they are embedded in the country. And so when you go after the state, when you go after the traditional state that we know, as I say, the police offices or the administrative buildings and so forth. You're going to, the ones that are left are these, is this other parallel structure. And why, you know, why had you not understood the implications? Or maybe you did understand it, and your intent was to destroy the civilian infrastructure, which is what we're seeing.

18:24Sanam Naghari-Anderlini:So we hear Trump talking a lot about regime change. We talk about how he's going to continue, the US is going to continue until the regime, you know, they've got rid of the regime. is what you're saying is that it's not as easy as removing a dictator and his power base grumbles, that actually what you're dealing with here is far more complicated and far more infiltrated into every single level of political, civilian, administrative life in Iran.

18:53Annie Kelly:It's also a question of saying, when in recent history or ever, has there been an attempt at regime change with an air campaign that has been successful. You know, Libya, they had to bring in their mercenaries. They had to bring the hired boots that ended up being quasi-jihadi, a lot of them heavily sort of conservative, radical Islamists. And they ended up with a Libya that is split in two. And Libya is a population of 7 million. And so it begs the question, genuinely, what is the purpose? And my thesis is that this is not about changing the regime and enabling Iranians to have a secular democracy.