"We don't know if we'll be alive tomorrow" Tehran residents report fear, full bunkers and hardly any news
Israel's military and US President Trump have called on the people of Tehran to flee. But it's not that easy. Those who stay are often on their own.
18.06.2025, 23:32
dpa
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- Tehran is repeatedly rocked by explosions.
- It is almost impossible to flee the Iranian capital - there is a lack of fuel and the situation is hardly safer elsewhere either.
- Residents of the city report dramatic scenes as they flee from the hail of bombs.
The streets of Tehran are deserted, stores are closed, telephone and internet connections are unstable at best. Israel has been attacking Iran's nuclear program and military facilities for almost a week. Its attacks have largely disabled the Iranian air defense system. By its own admission, the Israeli air force has a clear path in the skies over Tehran. And on Monday, US President Donald Trump called on the approximately ten million inhabitants to leave the city.
Thousands tried to escape to the suburbs, to the Caspian Sea or even to Armenia or Turkey and were stuck in traffic jams for hours. Meanwhile, elderly and infirm people have been left behind and are now stuck in high-rise buildings. Their relatives are desperate: What to do?
The AP news agency interviewed five people in Iran and one with an American passport in the USA about their situation. Most of the calls end abruptly and after a few minutes because the people on the line get nervous or the connection drops.
Hardly any fuel left at the petrol stations
49-year-old Shirin lives in the south of the Iranian capital and says that over the past few days, every call and text message to friends and relatives has felt like it could be the last contact. "We don't know if we will still be alive tomorrow," she says.
According to a human rights group, at least 585 people were killed and more than 1,300 injured in the Israeli airstrikes. Shirin says that escaping is out of the question for her. Her father suffers from Alzheimer's disease and has to be transported by ambulance. Her mother's severe arthritis makes even a short journey extremely painful.
Nevertheless, Shirin is still hoping for an escape. She has spent the past few days getting medication. Her brother waited at a petrol station until 3.00 a.m. only to be turned away because the fuel had run out, she reports. Since Monday, petrol has been rationed to less than 20 liters per driver at petrol stations in Iran.
Where to flee to?
Some people, like 22-year-old Arshia, say they are simply tired. "I don't want to be stuck in traffic for 40, 30 or 20 hours just to get somewhere that might be bombed at some point," he says. The 22-year-old has been living in his parents' house since the first Israeli attack.
His once lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwest Tehran is now a ghost town, he says. The schools are closed. Only a few people still go out with their dogs. Most of the local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others have closed. The prospects of finding somewhere else to stay are poor. "We don't have the means to leave at the moment," says Arschia.
Air raid sirens are unreliable
Some families have made the decision to separate. He sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a nearby pharmacy was hit on Monday, says an Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years. "It was a very bad shock for them," the 23-year-old says of his family. He himself stayed.
The state media, which is also a target of the bombing, has stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: the police appear to be working largely undercover, the air raid sirens are unreliable, and there is little information on what to do in the event of an attack.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, there were still air raid drills and sirens in Tehran. Many houses had basements where people could seek shelter. Now the capital is teeming with densely built high-rise apartments without shelters.
Subway stations as a last resort
"It is a kind of omission of the past that no shelters were built," says a 29-year-old Tehran woman who left the city on Monday. Her friend's boyfriend had been killed on his way to the shops. "You can't expect the boyfriend - or anyone for that matter - to leave the house and not come back when he was just going on a normal shopping trip," she says.
Many people flee to subway stations when they are attacked. Whole families lie on the ground there. A student who fled to Iran from another country says she held out in a station with her relatives for twelve hours on Friday. "Everyone there was in a panic," she says. "No one knows what will happen next, whether there will be war in the future and what they should do. People think they are no longer safe anywhere."
The authorities have declared that mosques, schools and subway stations should serve as emergency shelters. But some are closed, others are overcrowded. The government has admitted that it has cut off internet access. It said this was done to protect the country. But average Iranians are being denied access to information from the outside world.
"If we die, we die"
Meanwhile, Iranians in the diaspora are anxiously awaiting news from relatives. An Iranian-American human rights researcher in the US says he last heard from relatives when they tried to flee Tehran earlier this week. He suspects that a lack of gasoline and traffic prevented them from leaving.
His older cousins - with whom he grew up in Iran - told him: "We don't know where to go. If we die, we die," reports the exiled Iranian. That was the worst thing. "They just felt despair," he says.
For Shirin, the war is ambivalent. On the one hand, she is against the theocratic constitution, which disregards women's rights. But she doesn't like the idea that Israel could determine the future. "As much as we would like to see the end of this regime, we didn't want it to be done by a foreign government," she says. "We would have preferred a change to be brought about by a popular movement in Iran."
The 29-year-old, who has left Tehran, appeals to people abroad. "What is happening here is not a routine matter," she says. People in Iran care about their lives and livelihoods just as much as other people anywhere else in the world. "How would you feel if your city or country was bombed by another country and people were dying left and right?" she asks.
