Here & Now

What War is Like for a UW-Madison Student in Iran

Frederica Freyberg:
A UW-Madison School of Journalism Ph.D. student is back home living just outside Tehran. Each day brings fear and uncertainty for Tahereh Rahimi, who does not support the war, nor does she support the regime. She sees her country and people living there being destroyed. Communications are mostly down in the country, so we sent her questions to learn firsthand what it’s like right now. Here’s a sampling of what she said.

Tahereh Rahimi:
I used to think that I am — that I was brave. I think that’s not true anymore about me. I know that it’s totally fine to be scared, but I think war really changes you. Depending what type of missiles they are using, you can feel the shake. That part is the scariest part. If I want to describe it to you, you know, in the spring when the lightning hits and it sounds like the sky is being ripped apart. When you lay down on the ground, you can feel it, like the same, you know, ripping apart, feeling inside the earth. I remember one night, the middle of the war, it was 8:30 or 9 p.m. and it was raining. And we heard the sound of the fighter jets and it was not just one, it was a group of them just passing over our head. And at the same time, we could hear the explosions and also the shake. I remember, like, I was thinking, why it doesn’t finish? Why — when, when the end is going to come. It is like constant torture. You are literally just waiting for something to happen to you or your loved ones. You know, you are waiting for the bomb to hit or the roof comes down or the windows to shatter. After the jets pass over, obviously you feel happy that, okay, I’m safe. My family is safe. I am safe. But at the same time, you know that the hit — they hit somewhere else. They killed other people. You know, you feel happy at the same time that you feel guilty. while you are happy. The eighth night of the attack, when Israel bombed three oil depots in Tehran and one in Karaj close to where I live. Tehran was covered under black smoke for hours. And then it was black rain coming down. It was, it was raining black. You can just imagine how this can influence impact people’s health, especially older people, and how it’s going to leave, you know, lasting damage on people’s health, on water and so on. U.S. and Israel, they have already destroyed my country. More than 2000 people are killed. I don’t like just to mention numbers, but the numbers are real. These people are blood and flesh and they are — they are not just characters in a computer game. More than 2000 people are killed. Over 26,000 people are wounded. They are literally changing my country to another Gaza where people are deeply suffering. If they, they have not gone already, dead already. What do you think about how this war is being covered in the media? As you know, the internet is still down after almost 50 days. Netanyahu was the one dragged U.S. in this war, but I didn’t see a lot of coverage. The part that the Israel has done is sort of whitewashed or softened in the news media, and people just don’t talk about this. It might be the result of what I saw in how they were represented in, in domestic news media. But it was very disappointing that like, what they were talking was just about the oil price. Oh, the Brent oil is, like, now it’s 50 cents higher than yesterday. As if, like, it was — the war was reduced to just the oil price, you know, deleting the human side of the war. So my biggest fear is that they don’t — like, Iranian government and the U.S. don’t come to an agreement. My biggest fear is that that like somehow the ceasefire ends and they resume the war. So it means all this nightmare is going to happen again. I hope that this war ends forever and never happen again.