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Israel says it has killed a senior figure in the Iranian navy, who it says is directly responsible
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for the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has again claimed that Iran
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is begging to cut a deal, something tech ran to noise. In all of this, we've heard relatively
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little from ordinary Iranians whose lives have been upended since the war began almost a month ago.
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BBC correspondent Fergelt Keen has obtained testimony from people in different parts of the country.
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Now in order to protect them, their names have been changed, and other voices have been used
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to speak their words. Here's what one man had to say. My father, who until 20 years ago would have
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given his life a hamani, after his death brought sweets home to celebrate. This man, we're calling him
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Mahmoud, is furious with what's happening to his country. They are a group of savages with masks,
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chanting with loudspeakers, guns and vehicles constantly moving through the streets, shouting,
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and everyone is at home worried, afraid, with satellite signals full of noise and disruption
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and no internet. They've blocked the roads, they intimidate every car they see and behave
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however they want. A woman called Aisha in Fergelt's report had been shopping in the market for food
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to celebrate the festival of narrows which heralds the arrival of spring.
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Everything is supposed to become new, happy, fresh. I thought about how last year was,
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at this exact time, those people who have been killed came with us for e-shopping and now they are
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gone. There is war, everywhere is war. Iran feels very gloomy. In the past, in every part of the
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market, people sold things on the streets, flower pots, higher scents, vegetables, they sold fish.
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Now the streets have nothing, they are all empty. I think people's pockets are empty. Our economy
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is ruined and the biggest reason for it is the war. And we can talk now to Fergelt keen of the BBC.
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Fergelt, what else have people been saying to you about day-to-day life and about how it has changed
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over the past month? I think to really get a sense of what people feel, there is one word and that is
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trauma. And you go back to January when the regime brutally crushed the pro-democracy
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uprisings, the campaign on the streets by people against the hardline regime. They had just
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recovered, in a sense, physically, from that, when suddenly you get this war which is launched
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by the United States and Israel against Iran. Now what comes across to me over two weeks now of
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going through people's testimonies coming out of Iran is a sense that they feel caught between
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a regime which is increasingly repressive and airstrikes which don't discriminate
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when the missile lands, the bomb lands between the military building that might be on a street
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and all of the civilian buildings that might be around it. We saw that tragically at the very
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beginning of the war when you had this airstrike most likely now we know carried out by the United
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States which killed upwards of 180 children at a school in Minab south of Tehran. So
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people are dealing with two forces bearing down on them and they're trapped in the middle and as
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you heard in that testimony from the woman Aisha facing a situation in which basic household goods
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have doubled in price where people can no longer afford to put meals on the table in many, many
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cases and every night are going to sleep not knowing if an airstrike is going to kill them.
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And from listening to these testimonies do you get the impression that at the end of all of this
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that people expect any significant change? I think they hope they hope they will be changed but
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what the three people we spoke to in our report last night the sense that you know you get from them
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is we might hope what we don't expect us and one of the themes that's coming up in the last
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week is this fear that if the regime is defeated and that's still a big if and because they hold a
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lot of cards if the regime is defeated that you end up getting civil war so you might you know
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push out the clerics who are at the top of the power structure but they're very powerful support
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base and still very loyal support base isn't going to just vanish and we've had precedent we've
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seen what happens in a country like Iraq for example where you kind of decapitate the regime
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but all of the people who were part of it all of the people who made their living for example
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from the bath party in Iraq came back in a new form and that was a IS what became IS so the idea that
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you know the regime could be defeated and then suddenly everybody who worked for it who fought for
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it is going to melt away is absolutely fanciful and I think people on the ground in Iran know that
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they know what the potential for chaos is. Furgel thank you very much that was BBC correspondent Furgel