Total Repression And Air Strikes Bring Unrelenting Dread For Iranians

Fergal KeaneSpecial correspondent


A woman stands on a rooftop listening to the sounds of the city listed below. There is just the dull hum of traffic tonight. But she understands how easily that can alter. It is normally the dogs who notice the noise very first and begin to bark furiously. The sound of airplane. Then the ominous percussion of explosions. A ball of orange rising from an airstrike in a familiar area.


The BBC has actually acquired video footage and interviews from Tehran which stimulate a city of strained nerves, of continuous awaiting the next blast and ruthless worry of the state security device.


Baran - not her real name - is a businesswoman in her thirties. She is now too frightened to go to work. "With the start of the drone attacks, nobody attempts to go outside. If I open my door and march, it resembles betting with my life."


She lives alone however remains in consistent communication with her buddies. "My good friends and I message each other continuously asking where everybody is ... and even when there is no sound the silence itself is scary. I am doing whatever I can to survive and witness whatever lies ahead."


Thus lots of young Iranians, Baran saw her hopes of modification devastated in recent months. Thousands of people were eliminated in a crackdown by regime forces in January after prevalent presentations demanding change.


"I can not even remember how I utilized to live in the past without being advised of the loved one I lost throughout the protests," she says. "I fear tomorrow. I fear the person I will be tomorrow. Today, I survive somehow, however how will I survive tomorrow? That is the real concern. Will I even live through tomorrow?"


Now repression is overall. Open is difficult as the state's watchers are all over. Footage we acquired programs regime advocates driving through the city in the evening, flags flying from their automobiles - a message to any who might be lured to protest.


The main story is the just one allowed. State tv broadcasts footage of presentations and funeral services. Interviews with pro-regime authorities and protestors use duplicated denunciations of America and Israel. In federal government propaganda the Iranian people are proclaimed as going to suffer martyrdom.


Independent reporters still try to collect testimony that uses a reputable alternative view, but they run the risk of arrest, abuse and possibly worse. As one of them told me: "In wartime conditions you truly don't understand what they can doing."