LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Iran is making good on its vow to regionalize the war the U.S. and Israel started nearly two weeks ago, and it's having global consequences.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The first statement attributed to Iran's new supreme leader alludes to those consequences. Iranian state TV - an anchor there read a statement by Mojtaba Khamenei saying that Iran will continue to attack its neighbors. He's also vowing to maintain leverage by closing the Strait of Hormuz through which about one-fifth of the world's oil passes. Here in the United States, Americans have noticed higher gas prices, and we're about to check in with four other countries affected by the war.
FADEL: We've got four of our international correspondents joining me now to talk about the uncertainty of this moment - Hadeel Al-Shalchi in Beirut, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv and Ruth Sherlock on the Turkish-Iranian border. Thank you all for being here.
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: Thanks.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Thank you.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Thank you.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Thanks, Leila.
FADEL: Hadeel, I want to start with you in Lebanon because we saw overnight this intense bombardment again in the southern suburbs of Beirut. What is happening?
AL-SHALCHI: Right. So in the evening last night, Dahieh, which is in the southern suburbs of Beirut and considered a Hezbollah stronghold, got wide evacuation orders, and then the bombing started late last night. You know, and the Israeli military is killing Hezbollah operatives and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But then Dahieh is also residential. It's densely populated. So those strikes are also killing civilians - more than 600 people so far, according to officials. It's also not a fancy part of Beirut. It's not very rich, and the number of displaced is rising dramatically. Like, last week, it was 400,000. Just a couple of days ago, it was 700,000. And then just yesterday, it jumped another hundred thousand to 800,000 people.
FADEL: Where are they going?
AL-SHALCHI: Well, the people with money are able to get hotels - some renting apartments but, like, astronomical prices, and then the rest are on the streets. In west Beirut, on the beach, people are sleeping on sidewalks under blankets, making little fires to keep themselves warm 'cause it's, you know, still pretty cold here. I went to one shelter, a sports city stadium on the outskirts of Beirut, and I talked to Maisoon Man (ph). She had left Dahieh on foot just, like, three, four days before she arrived at the shelter. She had slept on the streets, and now she sleeps in a tent with six other people, including her brother-in-law. This is what she told me.
MAISOON MAN: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
FADEL: So she's saying there she can't even wash for prayer. There's no place for her to be clean.
AL-SHALCHI: She said she hadn't showered in, like, five days because, you know, the stadium isn't equipped for people to live there. And there's also this suspicion now among Lebanese people. Like, for example, east Beirut, where I am, is majority Christian, and nobody's taking the displaced here...
FADEL: Yeah.
AL-SHALCHI: ...Just because they're really worried about, you know, being a target.
FADEL: Completely a different scale, but here in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, it's kind of the same thing, and the concern is around foreigners. So it's been harder and harder for anybody to find a place to stay 'cause they also don't want to be targeted by Iran, who is retaliating. And that brings me to you, Daniel. I mean, you're across the border of Lebanon and Israel. We've seen these devastating attacks in Lebanon, but there's also these rockets coming across the border and retaliatory attacks from Iran. What's it like there?
ESTRIN: Well, last night was really dramatic along the northern border with Lebanon. Hezbollah mounted its largest attack of this war so far - more than a hundred rockets fired overnight. Iran fired at the same time. There has been really, really high support for the war that Israel and the U.S. launched against Iran. But this morning, I am hearing a crisis of confidence in Israeli leadership, especially from Israelis in the north, very close to Lebanon, this frustration about this expanding war with Hezbollah and people saying, well, wait. We've - we - didn't we fight a war with Hezbollah last year? These are people who fled their homes at the start of the Gaza war. You know, it's incredible to hear Hadeel speak about these masses just on the streets and in stadiums. These are Israelis who came back to their homes, thought that they were rebuilding their lives, and now there's suddenly a new war. They're sleeping in shelters, in safe rooms. And people are asking themselves, well, wait a minute. Is this the new normal? Are we going to be expecting war every few years now?
FADEL: You're describing this - the starting cracks - right? - among people. I mean, it's upending lives. What is the rhythm of life where you are in Tel Aviv after two weeks? It's almost two weeks of missile fire.
ESTRIN: You know, it's really been surreal. I had not really fathomed in the many years that I've lived in this country just how many bomb shelters there are everywhere. You hear the air raid sirens. You hear the loud booms. You hear sometimes the really loud missile impacts. We've seen craters from where missiles have hit here in the city of Tel Aviv, this metropolitan city along the Mediterranean coast. There's no panic, but people are just really tired. We've had missiles fired throughout the night, so people are not sleeping, and that is compounded on this general sense of exhaustion after 2 1/2 years of war.
AL-SHALCHI: Actually, there's a very similar feeling here among Lebanese people who are leaving their homes that they actually had a chance to rebuild because, you know, the war a couple of years ago with Hezbollah and Israel - they lost their homes. They lost their buildings. But then they were able to rebuild in the past 15 months or so. And now they say, I don't know if we - I can rebuild again. And so that's also causing a lot of anger here, too.
FADEL: I'm listening to you and Daniel talk about this exhaustion of war and then trying to get back to life and rebuild. And this is where I want to bring you in, Aya, because this regional war now - not contained between the U.S., Israel and Iran - is now seeping into places that we'd never expect, a place like Dubai, known for luxury and stability and safety. I mean, what is it like there?
BATRAWY: Dubai was built around basically this idea that you could come here, flaunt your wealth, have a really good time. People come here literally to be bubbled off from the rest of the world, from wars, from sanctions and from that kind of instability. So when we heard booms overhead, their air defenses here have been incredibly successful, but the trauma has been so deep for people because they're just not expecting this whatsoever.
You know, there have been limited numbers of deaths in the UAE from debris, and almost all of those people killed have been migrant workers. For the millions of migrant workers in the Gulf, whether that's from South Asia or the Philippines, a lot of them are considered essential workers, essential laborers. They're the ones driving the trucks, getting the food from the ports to the grocery stores. You know, I heard Daniel talking about this, like - these air raid sirens. So we don't have bunkers in Dubai. Again, Dubai wasn't built for war. And we don't have as much time when we do get these missile alerts because we're so close to Iran.
FADEL: And just a reminder, the attacks that are coming in are the retaliatory attacks from Iran.
BATRAWY: Exactly. A lot of retaliatory attacks from Iran. They're all retaliatory because there's U.S. troops in the Gulf and because also Iran's whole, you know, message right now is that, I'm going to disturb the entire region's economy. We haven't actually seen an attack on any physical banking infrastructure in the Gulf until now. But very early on in the war, there were these Amazon data centers that were hit here in the UAE, as well as in Bahrain. And that did disrupt e-banking services for me and millions of people across the UAE - just being able to pay your bills online and connect that to your banking. So that does obviously raise concerns that it doesn't take a mass casualty event to disrupt life here.
FADEL: Ruth, I want to bring you in here because we have been talking about the way the region is feeling this war. It's not contained in Iran. But you're along that border, and you're talking to the people in the center of all of this, right? The start - this all started with U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran and then spread like wildfire through the region.
SHERLOCK: Yeah.
FADEL: What are you hearing from people that are coming across that border?
SHERLOCK: I mean, growing amounts of terror at this conflict as the bombardments intensify across the country and from Tehran. For example, just the other day, I spoke with this mother. She had baby twins and a 6-year-old, and they'd fled their home in the middle of the night kind on a whim. They'd managed to stay most of the week, but she said that night, the bombardments lit the sky red, and it was just too frightening for the safety of her children. She said they grabbed what they could. They headed to the border.
The journey to the border itself we're hearing is pretty terrifying. We've spoken to lots of people who've talked about airstrikes landing kind of close to the road as they tried to get out. We've seen people arrive at the border and just collapse in tears for what they've lived through in the past week and sort of relief at finally being safe. So, you know, this war is hitting government infrastructure, but we're hearing about many, many civilians killed in the conflict, too.
FADEL: What are they saying to you about this war itself, the fact that it's happening? Are you hearing support? Are you hearing anger? Like, what are you hearing from people? 'Cause we don't have the polling like we heard from Daniel in Israel.
SHERLOCK: What's interesting about standing on this border, spending 10 days speaking to people coming out, is that these are regular people, right? And we are hearing very little support for the Iranian government. I think the protests in January was a turning point where people say to us now, look, we just can't imagine continuing life under that regime. So there was some cheering for this war. At the very beginning, we were seeing people kind of going to their balconies in Tehran and, like, almost clapping when the bombs fell. But I've noticed a real change in approach in the past week where, you know, as more and more infrastructure gets hit - they hit this oil depot, and it rained black oily rain over Tehran - people are continuing to say, you know, what's going to be left of Iran after this war? So we're just really hearing this dual reality for Iranians. Most of the people coming out on this border neither support the regime or the war against it.
FADEL: That was Ruth Sherlock on the Turkish-Iranian border, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv and Hadeel Al-Shalchi in Beirut. Thank you all for your reporting throughout all of this and all of the danger you're living through as well. So be safe.
ESTRIN: Thanks, Leila.
AL-SHALCHI: You're welcome. Thank you.
BATRAWY: Thank you.
SHERLOCK: Thank you.
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