By Kamin Mohammadi | Truthdig | Contributor | —
( Truthdig.com ) – Every morning, I see images that I have spent my 47 years of exile from Iran dreading; smoke rising above Tehran’s densely populated, tower-filled skyscape and explosions damaging important cultural sites like the UNESCO World Heritage Golestan Palace in Tehran and Chehel Sotoun in Esfahan.
On the first day of the Israel-U.S. bombing, my cousin in Tehran managed to get internet access for a few minutes and send me footage of the first missiles as they flew over her head and the subsequent explosions erupting somewhere in the distance. That was the last video she took from Tehran, as she and her family fled soon after in what was to become a mass exodus. According to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, as many as 3.2 million people are now forcibly displaced in Iran.
A city of 10 million people, Tehran is a dense urban expanse packed with buildings and ringed by mountains where a growing population has steadily expanded onto the slopes. Despite the latest exodus, it is still crowded with millions who cannot, or will not, leave. At the time of writing, at least 1,300 people have been killed in Iran and 17,000 injured, according to Iranian officials.
But when I spoke on a popular BBC radio show last week, I was not allowed to talk about the reality of the war and instead was asked repeatedly about my feelings as a British Iranian. I felt seen, yes, but I also felt that the topic was being empathy-washed to focus on emotions over substance, garner listeners rather than understanding, and stop me or any of the other guests from talking about the factual reality of this illegal war and those waging it.
Since that day, I — a writer and journalist who has been covering Iran for over 30 years, whose work has won numerous awards and who is considered an expert on the country — have been silent. Until this article. While the images of hell filled my phone and television, words were caught in my throat. My pen was frozen in my hand. I wondered how on earth to make sense of any of this — to myself, but also for the world.
According to the UNHCR, as many as 3.2 million people are now forcibly displaced in Iran.
It has been almost two weeks now since Israel and the U.S.’ war against Iran started and everything has turned upside down, the stuff of nightmares. The war is illegal under international law — and yet Iran’s retaliation is spoken of more than the illegality of the war itself.
The English-language mainstream media continuously refers to the war as the “conflict in the Middle East,” as if the region just got up one morning and decided to set itself on fire. That is, as if there were no perpetrators, as if Israel didn’t start bombing Iran in the middle of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Similarly, the media has centered economics and the Global North and its citizens, with CNN for example, headlining, “Gas is just the start: What else the Iran war could soon cost you,” and the BBC, “Honeymooners’ relief to be home after Dubai hotel hit.” But the BBC did not cover the damage to Chehel Sotoun, and only briefly mentioned the damage to the Golestan Palace.
The dissonance continues with messages from non-Iranian friends who, perhaps influenced by such coverage and wanting to empathize, tell me that they know how I feel because their friends/sister-in-law/colleague is on holiday in Dubai and has been evacuated from their luxury hotel. They mean well, so I resist the urge to shout at them, “An expensive holiday being inconvenienced is not the same as my homeland being laid to waste, my family terrorized and the soil of which I am formed being violated.”
We Iranians in exile are used to the sometimes infuriatingly superficial reactions of our well-meaning non-Iranian friends. They don’t know how it feels to watch the places where you grew up, learned to walk and went to school be turned into hell. They don’t know that we are watching the cradle of civilization, one of the most historic and culturally rich countries in the world, be turned into a fireball wasteland resembling the arid deserts that our aggressors have in their own hearts and minds.
Some Iranian diaspora groups are singing and dancing as Israel and the U.S. rain hellfire down on our country. On the first day alone, the architects of this illegal war appeared to have released more missiles and munitions on Iran than in the whole of Israel’s 12-day illegal war last June. It is telling that when trying to find exact figures of missile numbers, Google’s first page is full of the number of missiles Iran has fired in retaliation, but there are few news stories with the number of missile attacks against it.
Reports came in of a school being bombed in Minab — a tiny town down near the Persian Gulf — and that at least 170 people, mostly school girls, were killed. And yet some diaspora Iranians still maintain that it was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that did it, that they killed every child and moved their bodies into place. Media outlets reported Wednesday that a preliminary U.S. military investigation determined that Washington was responsible for the school bombing.
It is clear that sanity has long left these particular Iranians. And yet the spokespeople of the more right-wing diaspora — actors and comedians like Shohreh Aghdashloo, Max Amini, Reza Farahan, Omid Djalili, Googoosh and Mahnaz Afshar — are the ones being given a platform on news shows instead of academics, regional and Iranian experts, analysts and journalists. On CNN, actor Sam Asghari talked about the war as “a sign of hope” and Djalili on the BBC discussed the repression in Iran as justification for the U.S.-Israeli strikes. Critical thinking has been the first casualty of this war, and legacy media has supported that.
It is clear that sanity has long left these particular Iranians.
A horrendous tragedy is unfolding in Iran, and when the media downplays it — through sparse coverage of the human cost, featuring uninformed people or using language that obscures the perpetrators — it becomes an active accomplice to the carnage. In the first two days of bombing, 24 out of 31 of Iran’s provinces were hit and at least 130 cities were attacked, according to reports. As of March. 8, the Iranian Red Crescent (IRCS) calculated that 10,000 civilian sites had been destroyed, including 5,535 homes, 1,041 commercial units (i.e., shops — people’s livelihoods), 65 schools, 32 medical centers (including hospitals and pharmacies) and 13 Red Crescent facilities. A freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf has been hit, disrupting water supplies to 30 villages.
And then came oil rain on March 7. Four major oil storage facilities and a distribution center, including the Tehran refinery and depots in Aghdasieh, Shahran and Karaj were bombed. In the Shahran district, witnesses described to myself and other media how unrefined oil was leaking directly into the streets. The oil got into the sewage and water systems, resulting in the street drains burning and sewer grates bursting into flames under people’s feet as they walked the streets.
The IRCS said the explosions released “significant quantities of toxic hydrocarbon compounds, sulphur, and nitrogen oxides” and warned that “in the event of precipitation, the resulting rain is extremely dangerous and highly acidic.”
Tehran residents woke up on March 8 to a deep black sky and black oily rain that fell on the capital and its unprotected residents. The highly toxic cloud from the explosions eventually moved northeast over Central Asia and Afghanistan — who knows which country it is poisoning today. Tehran residents reported difficulty breathing, headaches, skin damage and eye irritation. One Tehran resident told Time, “Something like a black monster has swallowed the sky over Tehran. It’s as if all the cars and the street pavement have been coated in black paint.”
The IRCS warned that people should not leave their homes even after the rain stopped because its evaporation was causing high levels of toxicity in the air, citing risk of lung and skin disease. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that damage to Iranian petroleum facilities “risks contaminating food, water and air” and that the hazards “can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with preexisting medical conditions.”
Jim N R Dale, senior meteorologist at British Weather Services, warned that the pollution would create problems for the entire country, impacting agriculture and food supplies and generating a medical crisis. The acid rain and black smoke amount to an environmental disaster. Even if the smoke eventually fades, conditions will not quickly return to normal. And yet, despite this grave threat to the health of not just Iranians, but also other countries in the region, mainstream media provided more coverage of Iran’s strikes on Dubai and the rave parties happening in Israeli shelters than of this incident, described by some environmental activists as an ecocide.
We have seen such chemical destruction before, and so experience tells us that the consequences of these environmental catastrophes are being severely underestimated. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, chemical weapons were used against not just the military, but also civilians. I was one of the first journalists to investigate and write about this. The Iranian parliamentary speaker (and future president) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani concluded months after the Iran-Iraq war ended that when it comes to Iran, “the war taught us that international laws are only drops of ink on paper.”
My own family lived in areas where that war was the worst. The women and children left, but our men had to stay put. And while we didn’t lose anyone directly in the war itself, in subsequent years I have lost five uncles, two cousins and two close family friends to various forms of cancer and brain tumors at a premature age — all men who were obliged to stay and work in the worst-hit areas.
When it comes to Iran, “the war taught us that international laws are only drops of ink on paper.”
In my interviews with the surviving civilian victims of Iraq’s chemical attacks, I saw for myself how wars never end for some — turning into decades of expensive-to-treat ill health that can make the sufferer wish they had died under a bomb after all. Some 7,500 Iranians were killed by Iraqi nerve gas and mustard agents, and an estimated 75,000 people are still being treated for chronic chemical weapons injuries.
I would be remiss not to add here that letters from U.K. ministers at the time show their awareness of what the chemicals they were selling to Saddam Hussein would most likely be used for — in direct contravention of the 1925 Geneva protocol that forbids the use of chemical and biological weapons in war (but not their development, production or possession, the loophole those ministers were exploiting).
Photo of Azadi Monument, Tehran, by Sorena Shirzad on Unsplash
Based on my experience investigating the Iran-Iraq war, I am sadly confident that this new illegal war waged on an enormous country with a population of 93 million, is sowing a humanitarian crisis for the future. When hospitals, medical facilities and pharmaceutical factories are bombed, the final death toll is not just from the people who happen at that moment to be under the bombs. It increases over the following weeks and months and includes the elderly who cannot find treatment, the ill who cannot access hospitals and victims of accidents who have no emergency room to go to.
As sanctions imposed by the U.S. since 1979 and by the European Union since 2011 make it almost impossible for Iran to access medicine from outside the country, it makes its own. But when factories and pharmacies producing these medicines are destroyed, then all those people who urgently need medicine become the death statistics of the future.The Western media’s framing however, only compounds the long-term effects of the war, ensuring that we may never hear about much of the enormous amounts of suffering.
An alliance between the media, the perpetrators of the illegal war and some of the Iranian diaspora is downplaying the loss of Iranian lives and the environmental harm, thereby also eroding outside solidarity and sanitizing war crimes. They are justifying prolonged attacks.
Via Truthdig.com
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