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The U.S. and Iran have officially signed a preliminary agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and negotiate an end to the war. The reaction inside Iran has been mixed, with hardliners wanting the war to continue and many opponents of the regime feeling betrayed by the U.S., as Durrie Bouscaren reports.
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: To some hardline supporters of Iran's clerical government, the memorandum of understanding is a capitulation.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in Persian).
BOUSCAREN: In this video released by Iran's Fars News Agency, which is linked to the country's Revolutionary Guard Corps, demonstrators in Mashhad call for the execution of Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, one of the architects of the deal. While state-controlled news outlets touted the agreement as a battlefield victory, some conservatives said it's a betrayal of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed in an airstrike on the first day of the war. Other government supporters framed it as a tactical pause to prepare for a wider war.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Persian).
BOUSCAREN: But in the desert city of Yazd, a retired bank manager mourns the memorandum quietly. She says it felt like a sledgehammer to her head and her heart. She asked NPR not to share her name out of fear of repercussions for speaking to foreign media.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Persian).
BOUSCAREN: She says she's participated in multiple protest movements, seen them all squashed with remarkable cruelty. In January, thousands of demonstrators were massacred by security forces in a coordinated crackdown across multiple cities. Iran's government has continued to execute people who participated in the demonstrations, and yet, none of the protesters' demands will appear in the memorandum of understanding, she says.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) What happened to our killed people? What happened to so many grieving families, the political prisoners?
BOUSCAREN: Many anti-government protesters hoped that a foreign intervention would topple Iran's clerical government. The U.S. and Israel bombed Iran constantly for six weeks. According to Iran's health ministry, the strikes killed at least 3,400 civilians and military personnel.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) There was a massive inflation and the high cost of living, the strange and overwhelming hardships and the lack of food. These are the things we endured in the war, and we were willing to endure twice as much, several times as much, just so they would go away.
BOUSCAREN: She said she fears that the agreement will include the release of frozen funds to Iran's government.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) They are not aware that they are making them stronger. The monster that hurt me and my people today, tomorrow it will catch up with you and devour and destroy you as well.
BOUSCAREN: Despite the deaths of dozens of top officials, Iran's postwar leadership is not much different than the one before it. The new generation is younger and more closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and this is exactly what the regime's opponents feared.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Persian).
BOUSCAREN: Speaking from Tehran, this man asked NPR not to share his name due to the risk of arrest. He says he saw the war as a small window of opportunity for the regime to be overtaken and for Iranians to create a better government for themselves.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Persian).
BOUSCAREN: "An agreement was reached and it was shown that the lives of people inside Iran were of no importance to any country," he says. "Now," he says, "thousands of people have been killed, and the same criminal regime is in power."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Persian).
BOUSCAREN: "The last thing that dies in a person is hope," he says, "if not for themselves, then at least their children could have a vision of a good life." For NPR News, I'm Durrie Bouscaren in Istanbul.
(SOUNDBITE OF CURREN$Y AND STATIK SELEKTAH SONG, "GRAN TURISMO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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