US taps 172 million barrels reserves to cool oil price fears.
Spain recalls envoy; Switzerland closes Tehran embassy as tensions rise.
The alarm on my phone blares at 4:30 AM, a sound that has become the reluctant heartbeat of my days. My name is Samira, and for the past thirteen mornings, I have woken to the smell of dust and the low, constant hum of anxiety that now lives in our Tehran apartment. My husband, Reza, is already gone, his side of the bed cold. He’s a civil engineer, but for the last two weeks, he’s been volunteering with the neighborhood relief teams, helping to reinforce shelters and check on the elderly in our building who have no one else.
I shuffle to the kitchen to make tea, my movements mechanical. Through the window, the city is slowly emerging from the darkness, but it’s a different city now. The usual pre-dawn bustle is gone, replaced by an eerie quiet, broken only by the distant, thunderous rumble of another air strike. The government says it’s our military infrastructure being hit, but all I hear is the sound of my children’s future trembling.
My daughter, Leila, is seven. She has stopped asking if we can go to the park. This morning, she tugs at my sleeve, her eyes wide. “Maman, is the sky sick? I don’t know how to explain geopolitics to a child. I just pull her close and tell her the sky will get better soon. I’ve learned that a mother’s lies are the kindest ones.
I think of my cousin, Farid, who lives in the south of the city, closer to the areas that have been hit the hardest. His wife, Maryam, is due to give birth next month. Yesterday, he sent me a voice message, his voice shaky, telling me they had to flee their apartment after a nearby explosion shattered all their windows. They are staying with us tonight. I need to figure out how to stretch the few groceries I have to feed four adults and two children. The prices at the corner store have doubled, if the owner can get supplies at all.
Meanwhile, in a boardroom thousands of miles away, men in suits decided to release 172 million barrels of oil. It sounds like a solution, a lever to pull. But here, in our kitchen, it feels like a footnote. The price of bread has already climbed, not fallen. The subsidy on our cooking gas was cut yesterday. The oil they are releasing from their reserves won’t change the fact that Reza has to walk to his volunteer post now because we can’t afford the fuel for the car, and the buses are unreliable.
The television in the living room is on low, a habit we’ve formed to catch any civil defense instructions. The news anchor speaks of “surging global energy prices” and “market stability.” He announces the IEA’s coordinated effort. It’s a world away. To us, stability is not a market graph; it’s the sound of Leila’s laughter, which we haven’t heard in days. It’s knowing that my brother, a pharmacist in Isfahan, was able to get to his pharmacy despite the roads being blocked.
The “war on Iran” they speak of on the news is not just a conflict of missiles and drones. It is a war on our sleep, a war on our savings, a war on the simple dignity of buying a loaf of bread without a knot of fear in your stomach. The numbers are staggering: 6,000 air strikes, 5,000 targets, 11.3 billion dollars. My mind can’t process billions. It can only process the thousand small, human dramas unfolding around me.
Last night, our elderly neighbor, Mr. Esfahani, knocked on our door. He is a retired history teacher, a man of immense pride. He stood there, holding an empty cup, and asked if we had any extra drinking water. His hands were shaking, not from the cold, but from the shame of having to ask. His building’s water pump was hit. Reza filled his entire container and walked him back home. That is the real economy of war—a barter system of kindness and necessity.
They say the US used four billion dollars worth of munitions in the first three days. Four billion. I think of all the schools that could have been built, the medicines that could have been bought, the futures that could have been secured. Instead, that money turned into fire and noise over my city, over my head. It paid for the precision that is supposed to avoid civilian casualties, yet the window in our guest room is now covered with cardboard because of a shockwave.
As I pour the tea, I hear the faint sound of a plane. It’s high, but my body reacts before my mind does, a physical flinch that I can’t control. Leila looks at me, and I force a smile. On day thirteen, we are all learning a new language. It’s a language spoken in the quiet moments between the news bulletins, in the shared glances of strangers on the street, in the desperate grip of a mother’s hand on her child’s. It’s a language of survival. And in this language, a 172-million-barrel oil release is just background noise to the human heart.