ROB SCHMITZ, HOST: As the U.S. promises to ramp up its economic isolation of Iran, ordinary Iranians are already paying a heavy toll for the ongoing war. Many are heading across the border into Turkey - some for a brief escape, others looking for a way out for good. NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi is in the Turkish city of Van and brings us this report.
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: Twice a week, a train from Tehran brings dozens of Iranian visitors to Van in Eastern Turkey near the Iranian border.
Taxi drivers call out to the Iranian families spilling out onto the platform. The sun is blazing. Van is a place where Iranians who can afford it come to take a respite from the war. A 53-year-old commercial manager is in Van to meet a friend from the Netherlands. He says it's become a place for him to escape the tragedy inside Iran. Like everyone else NPR spoke to, he asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the regime.
It's been more than five months since the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran, but the Iranian regime has survived everything the U.S. has thrown at it, and it's willing to drag the war out. President Trump's administration is now vowing to hit the country even harder economically. Iran was already facing severe economic distress. And here in Van, Iranians say they are paying the price for a protracted war.
A nursing student steps off the train with a large suitcase and waits for a taxi.
NPR spoke to her at the noisy station. She says, nobody feels good mentally or psychologically, that it's become impossible for people to buy goods or invest in things like apartments. She says she's hoping to eventually find work in Turkey.
Most people are thinking about emigration, she says. Whoever has the skills or possibility is trying to leave. A personal trainer and her fiance try to hail a cab from the train station in the heat. They remember the fear of the bombing and taking shelter in their building's underground garage.
The couple says now that things have become unbearably expensive in Iran, they, too, are trying to find a way to emigrate.
Van's streets are bustling with shoppers, jostling each other on the sidewalk, stopping to take a look at the sales. A woman takes a rest in the shade while shopping. She says she feels for Iranians who aren't as lucky as her and who can't travel for an escape.
The economic pressure is on the people, especially the vulnerable, she says. Many are willing to tolerate it, she says, with the hope that the Iranian government is defeated, but she knows it's at a high price.
"Think about the executed," she says, "and our voices don't get anywhere." The United Nations has said that there's been a sharp increase in executions and death sentences in Iran since the beginning of the war. It said that Iran was continuing to use capital punishment to suppress dissent.
Across town in a hotel cafe, a beauty salon worker lights up a cigarette and stirs sugar in her black tea. The 30-year-old works in Turkey to send money back to her family in Iran.
"I'm really tired," she says. "I want to work in my own town, my own country." She says that she knows some Iranian women who have become so desperate, they're forced to sell their bodies.
For these Iranians, it's a reality far from the political talk in Washington or Tehran. They say the cost of this war isn't about politics. It's just about people trying to survive. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Van, Turkey.
