{"id":306,"date":"2025-07-12T02:40:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T23:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/?p=306"},"modified":"2025-07-26T01:07:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T22:07:30","slug":"she-fled-iran-years-ago-then-the-bombs-fell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/2025\/07\/12\/she-fled-iran-years-ago-then-the-bombs-fell\/","title":{"rendered":"She Fled Iran Years Ago. Then The Bombs Fell."},"content":{"rendered":"

Yasaman Heidarpour hadn\u2019t spoken to her parents in two years. When Israel struck Tehran, she feared she never would again.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

By Noah LaBelle<\/em><\/p>\n

The night of Thursday, June 13th, Yasaman Heidarpour was fast asleep in her Athens apartment when her husband shook her awake. Israeli bombs had struck Tehran, the city they fled nearly a decade ago. She immediately grabbed her phone. Her father\u2019s number, which she knew by heart, wasn\u2019t working. On Instagram, she sent messages to her parents, cousins, high school friends. None delivered; Iran was already experiencing an internet blackout that, days later, <\/span>the government extended nationwide<\/span><\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s only me and my husband here in Greece,\u201d Heidarpour told me recently. \u201cEveryone is back in Iran, and I couldn\u2019t find anybody.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After twelve days of conflict\u2014<\/span>which killed 610 Iranians and injured 4,746 more<\/span><\/a>\u2014Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on June 24th. The next day, while working at the <\/span>Melissa Network<\/span><\/a>, an Athens-based organization supporting migrant women, Heidarpour noticed her messages had gone through. Her father replied at once: all was well, the internet was back, and if she had time, they could talk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Heidarpour, who is thirty-one, hadn\u2019t spoken with her parents in two years. Still, she called straight after work. Once on the line, her parents downplayed everything, saying the airstrikes were nothing serious. Their faces, visibly frightened, told another story\u2014\u201clike they were ten years older,\u201d Heidarpour said. When she asked more questions, her father insisted there was no need, steering the conversation to daily life.<\/span><\/p>\n

The call brought back complex emotions of what she\u2019d left behind. \u201cI felt really relieved that they are well,\u201d Heidarpour told me, \u201cbut still, everything is the same.\u201d As her parents spoke, past memories of never having the right to complain or talk resurfaced.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

When she was ten, Heidarpour tried to tell her mother about a man who had harassed her on the streets of Tehran. Before she finished, her mother slapped her: \u201cYou don\u2019t say it to anybody\u2014not even to me.\u201d After that, she stopped talking about her feelings. \u201cI was not even saying that I was hungry,\u201d she told me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nine years later, her life changed rapidly. At a wedding, while studying accounting at university, she met her future husband, a second-cousin whose family had been estranged with hers for eight years. She quickly learned why. His father, brothers, and one of his sisters were members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Sepah, a force <\/span>tied to militant groups fighting Western and Israeli influence<\/span><\/a>. Her husband had refused to join for years, but the pressure escalated.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we got married, they had another option to threaten,\u201d Heidarpour said, referring to herself. \u201cThey were threatening us with death.\u201d In December of 2015, it took Heidarpour and her husband just a day to stuff necessities into a backpack and leave. They had no plan beyond Turkey, but found a smuggler who could get them to Greece.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The sea was frigid in \u00c7e\u015fme, at Turkey\u2019s westernmost end. Four plastic fishing rafts rocked in the surf. Women and children, babies among them, were told to get in first. If there wasn\u2019t space, the men would sit on the edges. Looking back for her husband, Heidarpour saw the smugglers holding guns and knives. Over all the crying and shouting, they growled that there was no choice: \u201cYou sit inside the boat, or you die.\u201d When seventy people had been crammed into each, the boats set off, and were soon separated. Water rushed through a hole in hers. As the boat began to sink, she blacked out.<\/span><\/p>\n

She came to under a large tent. Her husband told her they\u2019d reached Chios, a Greek island seventeen kilometers from the Turkish coast. Only their boat had made it.<\/span><\/p>\n

They reached Athens aboard a humanitarian vessel the next night, where they landed in Eleonas, a camp already packed with over a thousand refugees. \u201cThe first thing I did,\u201d Heidarpour said, \u201cI just removed the scarf, and then said, \u2018Okay, here I am, and I’m safe.\u2019\u201d They lived there, calamitously, for more than a year, until a chance encounter with an Afghan woman led Heidarpour to the Melissa Network in November of 2017. Heidarpour, who studied English for fifteen years in Turkey, had arrived just as Melissa\u2019s lone Farsi translator went on maternity leave. She landed the gig that January.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

What saved Heidarpour during the phone call with her parents was her two daughters, three and five, grabbing the phone. Besides calling to update her parents about their grandchildren two years ago, she kept her distance before the strikes, and hasn\u2019t contacted her parents since. \u201cI have more peace with myself when I\u2019m not in communication with them,\u201d she told me. \u201cOtherwise, I don\u2019t know if I will be such a good mother.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On a recent morning, her youngest was trailing her oldest around the house, per usual. The five-year-old had had enough. She turned around and begged for just five minutes of privacy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy daughter already started saying her needs and thoughts and feelings,\u201d Heidarpour said. \u201cYou cannot imagine how happy I was.\u201d She had just finished describing her own childhood\u2014robotic, she called it, lived exactly as programmed by her father.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, Okay, I think you’re doing well, Yasaman.\u201d \u2666<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yasaman Heidarpour hadn\u2019t spoken to her parents in two years. When Israel struck Tehran, she feared she never would again. By Noah LaBelle The night of Thursday, June 13th, Yasaman Heidarpour was fast asleep in her Athens apartment when her husband shook her awake. Israeli bombs had struck Tehran, the city they fled nearly a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “She Fled Iran Years Ago. Then The Bombs Fell.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6882,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-migration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6882"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}