Terrified by explosions shaking their homes in Tehran and other cities, tens of thousands of Iranians have packed up and left, finding refuge in small, remote towns to wait out the massive bombardment by Israel and the United States. Pouya Akhgari, 22, is holed up in a family house with aunts and cousins in a village 120 miles from his home in the capital, Tehran. As snow falls in the mountainous countryside of Zanjan province, he mostly spends his days watching movies and TV shows and sometimes ventures out to the nearest main town. The village has been spared strikes, but Akhgari's friends in Tehran tell him about the blasts all around them. "It just feels so chaotic. I thought it'd be very short but it's dragging on," he told the AP via a messaging app. "If it goes on like this, we'll run out of money."
The UN refugee agency said that in the first two days of the war, about 100,000 people fled Tehran, a city of around 9.7 million. It said the scale of displacement is likely much higher, though it didn't have figures for the days since, or on the flight from other cities.
- A strawberry farm. A 39-year-old lawyer endured a day of explosions that shook her home in the city of Ahvaz, 500 miles southeast of Tehran. The next day, on March 2, she packed up her things and hit the road with her brother, sister, and their families—and their dogs Coco and Maggie. They went to their family's strawberry farm in a small town several hours away. The town doesn't have any military bases, so it feels relatively safe. "From morning to night, we talk about what is happening, our worries, how everything gets more expensive every day, about how far our money will stretch," she said.
- Basij. The lawyer said that on the rare occasions she goes into town, members of the Basij are now more heavily armed in the streets. "They are waiting for the slightest movement" showing dissent, she said. She stopped wearing the mandatory hijab years ago. But since the war, she wears one when she leaves home for fear of provoking the Basij.
- Screaming in sleep. One man described how, before fleeing Tehran, explosions made his 6½-year-old son tremble in fear. "You place him between you and your wife in bed, hoping he might feel safer," he said, but he still screamed in his sleep. On the highway west out of Tehran, heavy with traffic, explosions shook their car, terrifying his son, he said. Finally they reached a family home in a small village on the other side of the mountains, overlooking the Caspian Sea. There they spend their days in the house, surrounded by rice paddies, with snow-capped mountains in the distance.
- Not everyone can leave. One 53-year-old man in Tehran said that he can't move his elderly parents and so is staying home. The strain is immense, he said. "At night, I go down to the parking garage, sit inside my car and scream out loud," he said. "I pray for calm and for quieter days."
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