A person rides an electric scooter along a footpath with Dubai’s skyline, including the Burj Khalifa, in the background. Photo / Katarina Premfors, for The Washington Post
Iranians living in Dubai wake up every morning to calls from family members whose accounts of wartime Iran reveal in fragments the terror of life under attack by the United States and Israel.
Two weeks into the war that US President Donald Trump initially said was intended to force regime change in Tehran, the Iranians living in Dubai say their families are mostly huddled at home, trying to avoid both the US-Israeli strikes and supporters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) patrolling the streets with guns.
Some who celebrated when they learned the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed said they are still holding on to hope and spend short phone calls reassuring their family in Dubai, on the other side of the Gulf, that positive change is coming.
But even those who initially supported the strikes by the US and Israel say they are now struggling to imagine the future.
“If this war were to end now, we would be in an even worse place than we were before,” said Pivi, 36, an architect who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her family in Iran.
Pivi said she hoped that eventually, people would take to the streets to demand a return to democracy, as her own family had during mass protests in Iran in December. “But right nowmost people are too scared to move.”
That fear, as missiles and bombs fired by two of the world’s most powerful militaries rain down, as well as the absence of an organised opposition, helps explain why Iranians who participated in the protests against the Government just a few weeks ago have not taken to the streets.
Iran and the United Arab Emirates - which is home to one of the biggest Iranian diasporas outside the US - have been intertwined for generations, with an estimated half a million Iranians living here.
Even before Iran’s 1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic, waves of Iranian migrants arrived on these shores, forming thriving communities and businesses.
In recent years, despite flaring political tensions between the two nations, ties remained strong - from traders ferrying goods and people from one shore to the other on wooden dhows to the IRGC-linked businessmen operating in high-rises, who experts say use the UAE as a hub to avoid Western sanctions.
There is an Iranian hospital, mosque and even community clubs in Dubai, where Persian is often heard on the streets.
The extent of ties is partly why Iranians living in the UAE say the last two weeks have been so nightmarish. Their phones sound constantly with alerts warning them of incoming airstrikes by Iran.
In the mornings, they wait to hear from their families, who cannot receive calls from abroad but who can, sometimes, call out.
“The past two weeks have been the most surreal of my life,” said Reza Namazi, who grew up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and has lived in Dubai since 1990. “The UAE is my home, but Iran is my homeland.”
Iran is the place that has his heart, Namazi said, but the UAE is a country he has come to love, where he raised his children and built his businesses - and where he said he feels safe despite the ongoing attacks by Iran.
Having witnessed Saddam Hussein’s violent assaults on Iran in the 1980s, he is not scared of the barrage of drones and missiles that Iran has fired at the UAE - the vast majority of which have been intercepted.
“But I do feel betrayed,” he said.
The airstrikes feel particularly out of place given the emirates’ self-made reputation as havens of commerce and tourism.
“It is my dream country being hit by my home country,” said Maryam, 53, who has lived in Dubai since 1984. “We’ve lived in Disneyland, and suddenly we are hearing alerts. Still, 80% of my worry is for Iran.”
She said she waits each day for a call from her 87-year-old mother, who sometimes has to try 30 times to get through. No one is leaving their houses, Maryam said, and even the people who celebrated for days in the wake of the US strikes have stopped.
The reality described by those in Iran jars even those who lived through previous wars there, Namazi said during in an interview at Iranish, one of his new restaurants. An entire police station levelled. Neighbourhoods disfigured. Smoke, everywhere.
“They are carpet bombing,” he said of the US and Israel. “Parts of Tehran are totally flattened. For what? They are going to break Iran into a million pieces.”
Some younger Iranians in Dubai, who grew up under the Islamic regime and ultimately fled its repression, said they saw the US-Israeli war as the best, perhaps only, way to liberate the country.
Sima, a 33-year-old designer, said she spent years running from the morality police enforcing Iran’s laws requiring that women cover their hair and dress modestly in public.
She left her family in Tehran three years ago to move to Dubai to pursue her career but still dreams of going back, she said.
One of her oldest friends was killed during the strikes, Sima said, and she feels “every day that my heart breaks watching my beautiful country be destroyed”. Still, she said she asked herself: “What other choice do we have?”
She compared the attacks to a surgery needed to eradicate cancer.
Pivi, who also left Iran for Dubai three years ago, said the message her parents convey when they call her each day is the one she tries to hold onto: “We are scared, but we are hopeful”.
Some friends have told her they are skiing outside Tehran, insisting they must continue to live.
Most, however, are more like her mother, who is often too nervous to walk the 10 minutes to her grandmother’s house, fearful of IRGC supporters who look like they could be 12.
Pivi said that her family, which has a long history of backing the resistance, supports Reza Pahlavi - the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran - returning to the country and leading a democratic transition. But the current fear and uncertainty make it hard to envision that transition, she said.
Many in the older generations who have lived through war said they never thought that intervention by the US, or any foreign power, could bring about positive change in Iran.
“People were naive,” Namazi said. “They thought they could invite a foreign power in and then have their country liberated.”
Maryam said that anyone “who has lived through war did not want this to happen”.
“Those who have lived through war know there is no winner,” she said. “And no one who attacks Iran could be our saviour.”
Amin Ebra, 41, who is the chef of Iranish and a co-owner with Namazi, said he spends his days in a state of suspension - feeling that the experience he and other Iranians are having of the war is different from others in Dubai.
“I don’t know sometimes whether I want to laugh or to cry,” Ebra said, noting that he is not sure what to expect when Iranians gather for Nowruz, or Persian new year, on Friday. He said he wanted to believe that a new future for a freer Iran was possible when the strikes began but now feels more despair.
“In trying to obtain freedom, they are destroying a country,” he said of the US and Israel. “The Taliban left, and the Taliban came back. No one can say this will be different.”
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