TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran has triggered a renewed communications blackout, with many people inside the country simply not reachable per telephone or via the internet.
Still, DW managed to contact a single mother from Tehran, who fled the Iranian metropolis on the third night of the war last week.
"I left the city after a building in our street was bombed," she told DW. "We saw multiple rockets coming down."
Initially, the 42-year-old photographer expected targeted strikes against senior Iranian officials. She believed she could simply wait out the bombing in her apartment building, and hoped the military campaign would eventually bring liberation.
But with bombs raining down on her neighborhood, she decided to flee. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, left Tehran with her child and drove to stay with a relative living in the outskirts. She said she is happy to no longer be in the city.
Fear of poisoned rain in Tehran
People who stayed behind are now facing the growing danger of acid rain, after the US-Israel strikes hit multiple oil depots around the Iranian capital.
Thick, dark clouds of smoke gathered over the metropolis after the strikes, and the Iranian environment agency has urged citizens to stay at home. The Red Crescent warned that rain could contain chemicals harmful to skin and lungs.
Oil tanks aren't the only sites being hit inside the densely populated Iranian city of nearly 10 million people. Every strike has reportedly claimed civilian lives — and with officials not sounding air raid sirens and providing no access to bomb shelters, ordinary people don't know how to protect themselves.
Many people are also unable or unwilling to leave Tehran, home to their jobs and livelihoods.
More than 1,200 civilians killed
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) estimates over 1,200 civilians have already been killed in Iran, including at least 194 children. HRANA has also recorded the deaths of 187 Iranian troops, alongside 316 others whose status — civilian or military — has yet to be determined.
The civilian victims include at least 110 schoolchildren between the ages of 7 and 12, who were killed in an airstrike on at a girls school in Minab, in southern Iran, on February 28. The US has said it is investigating the strike.
No guidance for ordinary Iranians
"No party in this war is playing by the rules," said Moin Khazaeli, an Iranian human rights researcher based in Sweden.
"Infrastructure, like Iranian oil depots, are not exactly military targets, and neither are civilian infrastructure and residential areas, that the Islamic Republic is targeting in the neighboring countries. The Islamic Republic is not protecting its own population. There are no bomb shelters or air raid alerts, and no information is provided to tell people how to behave, now that the internet is off."
Khazaeli told DW that international bodies should make sure that Iranians gain access to humanitarian aid.
The exiled political scientist and criminologist also said the regime was "responsible for what is happening right now."
Khazaeli said the international organizations need to push the regime toward a peaceful transition of power, which would allow the Iranian people to "decide for themselves how they want to live."
But to many, the calls to oust the Islamic regime amid the US-Israeli strikes sound like a distant dream.
Khamenei after Khamenei
After surviving the brutal protest crackdown in January, government critics may have hoped that the US would stage a regime change through targeted killings of senior Iranian officials.
These hopes were fueled by the airstrike on the Tehran residence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the conflict, which killed the supreme leader and many other senior state officials and military commanders.
But with every passing day of the war, hopes of a quick regime change are fading.
The regime seems shaken, but so far not broken by the airstrikes, and the surviving clerics have moved to appoint a new supreme leader — Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late ayatollah.
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