I survived war in Iran. These US bombs feel eerily familiar.

USA Today

4 hours ago

It's easy to speak of war in the passive voice. Collateral damage. Strategic necessity. Regime change. But there are millions like me – in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon – whose lives are not theoretical.
I learned what a bomb sounds like before I learned how to write my own name.
We lived in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, in a house with blackout curtains and tape on the windows. My brother and I slept on the floor beside our parents and grandparents during the air strikes, our little bodies still and quiet. I remember the way the entire house rattled from the distant blasts and the anxiety that never fully left us, even after we eventually fled.
On one of the last commercial flights out of Tehran, I watched through the window as anti-aircraft missiles flew by and feared they would hit us, despite my mother's reassurances. Later, in Tukey, a New Year's firework display sent my brother and me into hysterics. We thought Iraq's then-leader Saddam Hussein had followed us to Istanbul.
That war, and our escape from it, shaped every part of my childhood. It also makes me painfully attuned to the bombs raining down on Iran now – not just because they're familiar, but because the military actions are again being trumpeted by people with no understanding of what war actually means.
Now, following Israeli strikes throughout the country, the United States has joined with a June 21 salvo of terrifying airpower. And Iran is once again being spoken of not as a nation with 92 million human beings but as a problem to be solved. Another headline. Another potential target. The rhetoric from some American lawmakers, echoing past wars, feels eerily recycled: Iran is dangerous, on the verge of nuclear capability – a threat to be neutralized.
Nuclear weapons? Does this sound familiar?
We've heard all of this before.
We heard it in 2003, when intelligence was fabricated to support a war plan. When 'weapons of mass destruction' became the phrase that legitimized the invasion of Iraq – a lie that ended a million lives and destabilized an entire region.
That war didn't create peace, it created the conditions that birthed the Islamic State terrorist organization, mass migration and decades of pain still reverberating across the Middle East.
What's worse today isn't just the repetition, but the apathy. It's also the ease with which lawmakers throw around apocalyptic warnings of Iranian nukes – warnings not rooted in evidence but in direct contradiction to the assessments of international nuclear watchdogs and our own national intelligence.
Meanwhile, the editorial pages of Israeli publications are casually debating the 'partition' of Iran, as if dividing a 5,000-year-old nation is a thought experiment in a graduate school seminar.
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This kind of violence doesn't happen in theory. It happens in living rooms. In kitchens. In schoolyards and in hospitals.
And it doesn't begin with bombs. It begins with words. Words that dehumanize entire nations.
I grew up in the shadow of that dehumanization, and I live today in the West as a result of it. Like so many other refugees and immigrants – Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, Yemenis – my family is here because we were displaced.
We bear the consequences of decisions made in rooms far away from the blast radius. And we are asked, repeatedly, to be grateful for that displacement. To assimilate, to silence our pain and to watch as the cycle repeats again and again.
War spurs mass migration, suffering of people who aren't at fault
It's not lost on us that those who clamor for war are often the first to decry the presence of immigrants like me. But there is no separating the two.
The same people who express their gratitude to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and rail against immigration are often the ones urging us to drop bombs, as if there is no cause and effect between the two. We are here because you were there.
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Iran is not Iraq. Nor is it Syria or Afghanistan. It is larger, more populous, more geopolitically complex – but no less human. Its people are already suffering, trapped between a repressive regime at home and suffocating sanctions from abroad. What do we imagine will be left if we invade it?
War does not just destroy regimes or human lives, it leads to greater oppression, poverty, gender-based violence, human trafficking, child abuse, family separation and more. We in the West have learned this before. Or we should have.
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It's easy to speak of war in the passive voice. Collateral damage. Strategic necessity. Regime change. But I ask those who write or legislate in those terms to consider: What is the name of the child under the blackout curtain? Who is she, and what might she have become if you had let her live in peace?
I was that child once. And I promise you, there are millions more like me – in Gaza, in Iran, in Lebanon – whose lives are not theoretical.
They are real. They are watching. And they deserve to live in peace.
Yasmin Z. Vafa is an award-winning human rights attorney and advocate for young women and girls.
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