On March 18, 2026, during the MERIP Roundtable podcast episode titled “The Iran War Part II,” executive director James Ryan posed a central question to historians Naghmeh Sohrabi, Kaveh Ehsani, and Toby Craig Jones: how are Iranians enduring the ongoing bombardment by U.S. And Israeli forces, and how are they maintaining communication amid widespread infrastructure damage?
According to official Iranian sources cited in the discussion, over 1,400 civilians have been killed, 18,000 injured, and 61,000 civilian structures damaged in the first two and a half weeks of the conflict. The United Nations reported approximately 3.2 million people displaced within Iran due to the violence. These figures were presented by Ryan as contextual grounding for the roundtable’s focus on civilian experience, which he noted remains underreported in Western media compared to strategic assessments of U.S. And Israeli decision-making.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, the Charles Corky Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis University and director of research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, emphasized that Iranians are relying on decentralized, low-tech networks to share information, including satellite messengers, smuggled SIM cards, and word-of-mouth relay systems in urban neighborhoods. She noted that state television broadcasts have been intermittently disrupted by cyber and kinetic strikes, pushing citizens toward encrypted apps like Signal and Bridgefy, which operate via peer-to-peer mesh networks when internet access is severed.
Kaveh Ehsani, associate professor of international studies at DePaul University and a member of MERIP’s Board of Directors, drew parallels between the current humanitarian toll and the effects of sanctions regimes, referencing his 2020 Middle East Report Online article on how U.S. Sanctions have degraded Iran’s health sector. He argued that the combination of bombings targeting power grids, water treatment facilities, and medical supply chains has created a cascading crisis, with hospitals in cities like Ahvaz and Kermanshah operating at reduced capacity due to fuel shortages and damaged infrastructure.
Toby Craig Jones, associate professor of history at Rutgers University and a member of MERIP’s editorial committee, situated the conflict within a longer historical trajectory of foreign intervention in Iran, referencing the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion and the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War as precedents for external powers reshaping Iran’s territorial integrity. He cautioned against interpreting the war solely through the lens of U.S. Or Israeli objectives, urging attention to how internal Iranian institutions — including local councils, charitable foundations, and university networks — are adapting to fill governance gaps in affected regions.
The historians collectively stressed that Western media coverage often overlooks the resilience of civilian adaptation strategies, such as the repurposing of subway tunnels in Tehran as emergency shelters and the use of amateur radio operators to transmit medical requests across frontline zones. They noted that while casualty numbers remain contested by independent monitors due to restricted access, the scale of structural damage — particularly to residential buildings and clinics — exceeds that of Israel’s initial Gaza assault in October 2023, according to Iranian civil defense assessments shared during the discussion.
When asked how audiences outside Iran should contextualize incoming information, Sohrabi recommended cross-referencing official Iranian statements with data from humanitarian NGOs operating via third countries, such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which has reported limited but growing access to western Iran through Iraqi Kurdistan. Ehsani added that economic indicators — including sharp declines in pharmaceutical imports and spikes in black-market fuel prices — serve as indirect but measurable proxies for humanitarian strain.
Jones concluded by noting that the war’s impact on Iran’s cultural heritage sites, including the historic bazaars of Isfahan and the ancient water systems of Yazd, has not yet been systematically documented by UNESCO due to security restrictions, though local activists have begun uploading geotagged images of damage to preservation archives hosted outside Iran.
The MERIP Roundtable episode remains available for streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. As of the recording date, no formal ceasefire negotiations had been publicly announced by the U.S., Israeli, or Iranian governments, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had not issued an updated statement on access constraints within Iran.
