I HAVE two Iranian friends who live in the West. I’ve known them for 10 and 15 years, respectively. Both were born in Iran; one’s family left in the 1970s, the other left last year, alone. In the last two weeks, their messages have been arriving at odd hours, the way they do when someone is living in a different time zone of anxiety.

One of them wants the regime gone. She’s wanted it gone for years, with the particular exhaustion of someone who has watched hope rise and get crushed enough times to stop counting. When the strikes began, her first message to me was almost relief. Finally, she wrote. And then, three messages later: “I haven’t heard from my family.”

The other thinks the West has never done anything for Iran except take from it. She is not wrong. She was awake at 3am watching footage of her neighbourhood, trying to match the skyline to what she remembered of it. Looking for landmarks. Looking for her building.

Two Iranians. Two completely different answers to the question of what should happen to their country. The same terror about the same thing: whether the people they love are still alive.

The architecture of othering puts the soldier above the schoolgirl.

This is what gets........

© Dawn