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Tehran: It is almost three in the morning, and I am awake again, the way I have been most nights since this round of strikes began. There is a particular quality to insomnia in wartime – it isn’t restlessness, it’s vigilance. My phone sits face-up beside me, screen dimmed but never dark, because somewhere between two and six am is when the strikes on the south tend to come, and I have made a habit, almost a compulsion, of being awake to receive the news the moment it lands, rather than waking up to it.

I used to think journalists were supposed to keep a certain distance from what they cover. I don’t know how to do that anymore, not this month, not with the south of the country absorbing missile after missile while the rest of us try to sleep through it in other cities. I keep the window open at night, which is a strange thing to admit, because nothing I hear through it will ever be the actual sound of what is happening to people in Hormozgan or Khuzestan or Bushehr. But I keep it open anyway. It feels like a way of refusing to sleep through something........

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