The Middle East at war
For a generation that barely remembers the Iraq War, this feels like uncharted territory.
On Saturday 28th February, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated, large-scale military offensive against Iran. The country’s Supreme Leader of 37 years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the operation. Seeking revenge for their leader’s death, the remnant decentralised military units of the Iranian regime launched retaliatory missile and drone attacks at targets across the Middle East, unleashing chaos across Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon.
This extent of military conflict is – for many of us – unlike anything in our living memory. I was only three years old when the US invaded Iraq, an event that now serves as a point of comparison for the magnitude of what unfolded this weekend.
For many Iranians, the death of the country’s brutal theocratic leader marks a new era in its history. Khamenei oversaw violent and deadly crackdowns on protesters taking part in nationwide demonstrations in 2022 and January this year. As many as 33,000 civilians are estimated to have died in January’s massacre alone.
Following this weekend’s events, I caught up with Rostam (a pseudonym), one of the Iranian students at Imperial I interviewed for my last piece on Iran.
“The overall feeling of Iranians – both inside and outside the country – is one of joy and hope,” Rostam told me, reflecting on Khamenei’s assassination. He said many Iranians had been waiting for the US to strike the regime after repeated promises to do so by US President Donald Trump.
At the same time, he said that “Iranian people understand the cost of war” and that the coming weeks are likely to bring more civilian casualties. “After the January massacre, they’ve reached a point where they’d rather die for freedom than continue to live under oppression,” Rostam said of the Iranian people.
In a statement posted to Truth Social on the day the US offensive was launched, President Trump told Iranians: “Tonight … the hour of your freedom is at hand … when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I asked Rostam whether he thought this was a fair demand to make of the Iranian people, after peaceful protests have repeatedly been met with brutal oppression by the country’s militia. His response: “Yes, because that’s exactly what we requested from him.”
“Now, it’s a waiting game where we wait until the US says ‘We’re done,’” Rostam explains, “Then, we can start to do something about it.” Trump has indicated that the US operation will take about four to five weeks to achieve its objectives, though he stated on Monday 2nd March that the US is able to “go far longer than that.”
Rostam’s views contrast sharply to those of regime loyalists, who have been pictured sobbing and grieving the loss of Khamenei in Iran and abroad. He believes that these demonstrators only represent about 10 percent of the Iranian population.
As well as expressing his hope for a new future for his country, Rostam was repeatedly apologetic about the spillover of the conflict across the region. “We are obviously very sorry to them, because this is a crazy regime who attacks whoever they want,” he said.
Other Imperial students with loved ones in the Middle East have shared their stories of this weekend’s events with us. One student from Jerusalem shared her worries about her parents and grandparents still in the region. “Maybe this is an unconventional metric, but I like to measure the magnitude of Iran’s retaliatory strikes through how worried my parents are,” she said, “Usually they don’t take shelter, but maybe for the first time in a few years, they have used our bunker.”
She continued, “My grandparents, who are in the West Bank, don’t have shelters, and a lot of the time Israel’s iron dome does not protect these Palestinian territories from missile strikes.”
Another student wrote to us: “My parents were 15km from the US base in Kuwait when it was struck. The whole car shook.”
A Lebanese student shared with Felix: “Now that I am in London, I feel as though I should be relieved to be safe and no longer hearing missile strikes every day. However, having my family still back home makes that impossible. I constantly find myself checking the news, and up till 3am to make sure nothing has happened near our home and that there is no evacuation notice for our neighbourhood.”
The student has a younger sibling still being schooled in Lebanon. “Like many students in Lebanon right now, he has had to attend classes online while bombs can still be heard in the background, which I’m sure is extremely stressful,” she explained.
A friend of mine moved to Dubai just two weeks ago. Over the weekend, he anxiously stayed put in his house whilst loud explosions sounded overhead. Previously considered a “safe haven” for expats, the UAE has been hit by falling shrapnel from intercepted missiles. Hugely popular hotels such as the Fairmont on The Palm and the Burj al Arab have been hit, as well as the international airport – one of the busiest in the world. The government has urged the population to remain calm and trust in its advanced air defence systems, with a sense of normality already starting to resume in the days following these initial events.
The word “unprecedented” gets thrown around in the news a lot nowadays, but even though we have observed geopolitical tensions rising over the past months and years, it feels like nothing could have prepared us for the scale that this war assumed from its very first day.
Most of us will know someone who has been impacted by the events of this weekend in some way. For some, retaining a sense of normality in the face of such change is a challenge. As it was put by one of our readers: “It just feels like we have to pretend life just goes on over here while everything is burning over there.”
