People want regime change,” said Mariam, a pensioner, as she collapsed into the back of a taxi with her husband. The couple had just dragged their heavy suitcases across a bridge over the fast-flowing Aras River that marks Iran’s remote northern border with the small nation of Armenia, in the southern Caucasus region.
“I’ve walked a long way and I’m exhausted. The atmosphere in Iran is not too bad, and not too good. Of course, people are anxious, but life goes on. Supermarkets, shops, and banks function.
She told me that Israel and the US were demanding “regime change. But I don’t know if they’ll succeed, or if the religious fanatics (in Tehran) will resist. We will see. The crossing point provides a tiny glimpse of Iran itself, at the moment when the internet is knocked out and most foreign reporters are excluded.
But it should be added that many of those who did speak to us were dual nationals with American, German and other passports. In that respect, they provide only an extremely limited snapshot of the mood among the Iranian people.
Individuals we spoke to tended to embrace the notion of a regime change – something President Trump floated following the US announcing it attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. The leaders in Iran, however, still retain their followers, and even among those who don’t support them there are differing opinions regarding the US-Israeli bombing of Iran.
On the crowded Agarak border crossing, whirls of hot, dusty gusts of wind whipped about the police vehicles, taxis, and passing lorries, as a stream of humanity flowed out of Iran, on foot, from behind a long fence of barbed wire and watched over by towers.
In a bitterly fought legacy of the Soviet era, Russian soldiers still patrol some sections of the border here. The crossing itself is surrounded by jagged, empty mountains and, where the riverbank meets the land, by a thin ribbon of lurid green fields.
A Canadian diplomat, in readiness to assist fellow nationals, reported he had tallied 80 individuals in one hour. The rate seemed, anecdotally, to pick up on Monday but barely constituted an exodus.
Vehicles passed in either direction. Most exiting refused to comment to us, fearing the safety of their families within Iran. Alenoosh, 63, who claimed to have been born in Iran to Armenian parents but raised in Paris, said she believed that “time is up for the regime”.
“Everyone is scared and everyone is tired of the regime,” she stated. “There was a lot of shelling in front of my home. A great many people are in motion. There’s traffic. They don’t know where to go, where to be safe.”
A Canadian-Iranian family informed us that they’d spent the night before at a Caspian Sea resort and described a sombre, but expansive country where much of the land seemed unbothered by the war.
A father from Iran whose family is presently residing in Germany spoke to us on the condition that his identity remain concealed. Sitting next to him was a young woman who was going to ride for hours in a taxi with him, over steep mountain roads and constricted gorges, first to the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, and then to adjoining Georgia. Two cats waited patiently by her side in a basket under the shade.
“I want to topple the Iran regime. Everything is shattered and harmed,” said the man, noting that its demise was “near. He chastised others who, he said, complained non-stop about their government but were not inclined to support foreign-led military intervention.
