NEW YORK — A new wave of US attacks on Iran has plunged Iranians back into deep uncertainty and anxiety after a period of relative calm while a shaky ceasefire held.

Iranians contacted by Reuters via an encrypted messaging app said economic problems were mounting and they were consumed by worries over what will happen next.

Sharing a photograph of her weekly grocery shopping, Somayeh, 40, a photographer in Tehran, said the pre-war prices had almost doubled.

“The most important thing overall in the middle of the war is the economy. Every day our situation is worse and more difficult,” she said.

“The thing that’s the most stressful is the back and forth: one day it’s war, the next it’s peace. We don’t know what’s actually going to happen. We can’t even make plans for two days in the future.”

Like everyone else interviewed by Reuters, she spoke on condition of partial anonymity, declining to let her full name be used and citing fears of government reprisals.

Amir, a 30-year-old software engineer in Sanandaj in the western Kurdistan province, said he had married shortly before the war began with US-Israeli attacks on February 28.

He had been worrying about how to provide for his family and struggling to find work since Iran’s leaders cut internet connectivity during protests against the authorities in January.

“Within a month or so, when the internet was reconnected, the war began. The internet was cut off again, businesses were again severely impacted, there was a lot of trouble in my industry,” said Amir.

“I had crippling debt. There were no other pathways for me because I’m in Sanandaj and I’m a remote worker who relies on the internet. I couldn’t work at all,” Amir added.

He found work only a few days ago, but now hostilities have intensified again in the more than four-month-old war, with the ceasefire reached in June descending into daily attacks and counterattacks.

US forces hit Iran for the sixth consecutive night on Thursday with a wave of airstrikes on bridges. The strikes,........

© The Times of Israel