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Forced From Home Episode 1: The Human Cost of the War in Iran with Vali Nasr

In just a month and half, the US/Israeli war with Iran has been felt across the Middle East, and millions of people have been forcibly displaced within their country and across borders. From Iran to Lebanon, civilians are experiencing grave harm from constant bombardment on critical civilian infrastructure, including power plants, schools, health care facilities, and historical sites.

Vali Nasr is a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a New York Times bestselling author on Iran. Nasr is the author, most recently, of “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History by Vali Nasr.” We sat down to discuss the human toll of the conflict and how Iranians are experiencing the war; the risk that state collapse in Iran could spark mass regional displacement; and how the erosion of international humanitarian law is ultimately a threat to regional stability.

Access the full transcript here.

Notes:

[2:19] The outlook for the war
[7:12] Iranians are experiencing a deliberate “war against the people”
[12:44] “Gaza rules” and the implications for US strategic aims
[17:51] Is “state collapse” plausible?
[22:58] Displacement dynamics – where might Iranians seek refuge?
[25:09] Iran’s regional proxies and their links to humanitarian crises
[31:02] Setting the record straight: the risks of destroying social fabrics
[36:30] Roundup: Displacement in the news this week

Mentioned in This Episode:

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This episode of “Forced from Home” was produced by Refugees International. Our technical director and sound designer is Joshua Suhy. Our executive producer is Madison Cullinan. The show’s production team also includes Etant Dupain, Eliza Leal, and Sarah Sheffer. Our music is composed by Richard Adam Keyworth from Sound Pocket Music. And special thanks to Darya and Vali Nasr

Transcript

Jeremy (00:02)

Hello listeners, thank you for tuning in to the very first episode of Forced From Home. We’re so glad you’re here. We launched this podcast to explore the causes and consequences of global displacement and hopefully to bust a few myths along the way. Displacement sits at the center of a lot of today’s biggest news stories, but it’s often widely misunderstood. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, often with an agenda of stirring fear rather than hope. So much of the political discourse seeks to frighten people by dehumanizing refugees and pretending that there are no constructive solutions to displacement. We believe there’s no better antidote to that than hearing from people on the front lines of these issues directly: community leaders, humanitarians, and the global policymakers who shape how the world responds. So in the months ahead, I’m really excited to dive deeper with all of you into understanding the realities of displacement by talking firsthand to the people who are experiencing it and tackling it.

Let’s dive in. Hi, I’m Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International, and you’re listening to Forced From Home, a podcast about global displacement. In this episode, I’m sitting down with Dr. Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran, to talk about the current U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran and how it has displaced millions of people across the Middle East and increased humanitarian needs around the world. And hang on, after our conversation, for a quick roundup of other major displacement stories that we’re tracking this week. 

So with that, I want to welcome our guest today, Dr. Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, also a bestselling New York Times author on Iran, a former senior advisor to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke who is also a former board chair at Refugees International many years ago, and Vali is a long time close friend of ours here at Refugees International. So, Vali, welcome to the show and we really appreciate you helping to kick off our podcast as the very first guest on Forced From Home.

Vali (02:12)

Wonderful to be here. Thanks for inviting me. And it’s great to be engaged with the work of Refugees International.

Jeremy (02:19)

We hugely appreciate it. Let’s dive right in. Vali, there’s been a huge amount of coverage over the past month of what I’d call the geopolitics and the grand security strategy of this war. In our conversation today, we want to focus on a different dimension, one that hasn’t gotten as much attention. And that is the humanitarian and displacement impacts that this conflict is having both in Iran, but also in the wider region and the wider world. So in only a month and a half, this war has already displaced millions of people. There are estimates of more than 3 million people displaced inside Iran, millions more elsewhere in the region, over a million now displaced by the conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And one of the things that people may not realize about Iran is that it is one of the largest refugee hosting countries in the world as well. About 2.5 million refugees are registered in Iran by UNHCR.

The majority of those are from Afghanistan, but there are people from all over the world there as well, and other non-Iranian nationals who are displaced, but maybe not counted in the official refugee figures. As many as 4 million refugees and migrants reside in Iran. Beyond just the displacement dimension, there’s a widespread expectation that this conflict is going to be felt and is now already being felt in wider crisis zones around the world. So the shocks to the global economy have been deeply damaging.

We’re seeing surges in the prices of oil and fertilizer, which will have very severe impacts in many crisis zones. Against that backdrop, obviously the longer this goes on, the more those risks are going to rise. We’re recording this episode now about a week into the ceasefire as of at least this morning, midday on Tuesday of this week, it is holding. Where do you see this going? How would you assess the chances that this truce holds together? And where do you see the wider conflict playing out from here?

Vali (04:14)

I think we’re at the stage in the war where the United States and President Trump realized that the initial expectations about the war, that it would be short, that it would be decisive, that we would have a very quick outcome in terms of a new regime and a different Iran, have proven to be false. And that also Iran was able to expand this war in ways that the United States was taken unaware by using the global economy and the global energy markets as a battlefront by closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking energy infrastructure and the Gulf economies. It changed the sort of character of the war. 40 days into the war, President Trump faced two dire choices. One was to escalate the war to a whole different level. And he threatened that he was going to annihilate Iran’s civilization, send it back to the Stone Age.

Or he has to go to the table and negotiate. Ultimately, he decided to go to Islamabad. I think those were substantive and important talks, but they didn’t arrive at a very clear resolution. So the two sides have gone back. They’re still in a ceasefire mode. The ceasefire could potentially be extended as President Trump decides to do it, but the choices in front of President Trump have not drastically changed.

So what he decided to do was not to bomb Iran again or threaten to bomb Iran, but actually put a naval blockade on Iran, which has a very peculiar impact, which is the Strait of Hormuz was closed and that’s caused a huge amount of pain for the global economy. So President Trump’s solution to that is to close the strait even further by putting a larger blockade on all trade in and out of the Persian Gulf, which will only aggravate the impacts of the economic dimension on the world even further. But I think even once this is played out, the two sides will have to go back to the table. Neither one wants a larger war. And there is no other way out of this war other than an agreement for cessation of hostilities. Now the terms can be debated. You can keep prolonging this. You can keep going back to exercising force to get more leverage.

But I think both of them have decided there’s not going to be an outright victory on the battlefield, not anytime soon, not at the cost level that they want. So their best option is still to go back to the table and negotiate a net.

Jeremy (06:43)

Yeah, one of the ironies of that is the wider humanitarian impacts that we’re very afraid of are related to things like fuel availability, fertilizer availability. A lot of the inputs for fertilizer production come from the Gulf and those are badly disrupted right now as many countries are heading into their spring planting season. Up until now, that had basically been from Iran blocking the Strait, but the U.S. now co-owns some of that disruption because of the president’s announcement.

This relates to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is the impact that this has been having on civilians inside Iran. By all accounts, from outside, it looks extremely brutal. The New York Times reported last week that they had been able to verify 22 schools and 17 health care facilities that had been damaged. They were very clear that’s a very low estimate. The Iranian Red Crescent has reported much higher numbers and credibly indicated damage to 700 plus schools, 300 plus healthcare facilities. Obviously, we’ve seen the Israeli attacks on energy infrastructure and the apocalyptic scenes in Tehran. The energy infrastructure and the gas on fire running through the streets. You spoke recently on another podcast about the strike on the Institute Pasteur as well, the medical research facility in Tehran. You’re an Iranian American, you’re very personally connected to what’s happening on the ground. What are you hearing from friends and contacts there about what they’re experiencing right now? How are Iranians experiencing this war in their day to day lives?

Vali (08:13)

I mean, from what you can get of talking to people periodically, Iran is such a vast country that you cannot say all of it is impacted the same way. So there are cities and towns in Iran that actually have not experienced firsthand bombing. But places which they have, Tehran, and the scale and the kind of bombing that they have, even though it’s again a very vast city, but it’s increasingly the sound of the bombs, the after effect of it, like acid rain on Tehran because of hitting oil depots.

Ultimately, this is creating both material and more importantly, traumatic shock to the population. Materially because they’re seeing entire neighborhoods, for instance, leveled in order to kill one Revolutionary Guard commander, or they’re seeing an impact on their lives because of the bombing. There is now increasing fear that they may be subject to the bombing or that if their windows are shattered or their lives have become unlivable because of what’s happened in a neighborhood, there’s not an easy solution for them.

Secondly, they are seeing also devastation to what you would call icons of their lives. So universities, the Institute Pasteur in Tehran, hospitals, the largest steelworks, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals in Iran. For instance, Iran, because it cannot buy most of its medicine, because it cannot pay for it, has been cut out of the world’s vaccine and pharmaceutical trade. So it actually manufactures most of its own medicine internally as well as manufacturers vaccines for varieties of ailments from smallpox to polio, et cetera. That’s what Institute Pasteur did. And to see these things attacked and damaged is hugely traumatic to them. Not only they have an attachment to it, but it really tells them that they’re no different than what happened in Gaza or is happening in Lebanon. In one way, you have to put, particularly in terms of what we think about the future of the Middle East as a whole, that the war in Iran is coming at the tail end of the Gaza war. It’s a continuation of the Gaza war, but we’re seeing a model that Israel and now the United States are implementing in the region, which is wars that are against adversaries associated with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, but in effect they become wars against the people. You’re trying to destroy Hamas, but you actually destroy the entirety of Gaza. You’re trying to destroy Hezbollah, but you destroy large areas of South Lebanon and Beirut. And now the Iranians feel that the same set of Gaza rules, South Beirut rules are being applied to Iran. There is obviously a moral issue here, an international law issue, but the consequences of it, particularly where Refugees International sits, is actually quite huge because this is a war of deliberately making people homeless. This is a war of deliberately making people move from where they are, make their lives uninhabitable, not only by hitting their homes, but also hitting things that actually sustain an economy and a society, which means universities, schools, hospitals. And then when you hit steelworks, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, you’re actually creating unemployment. You’re damaging healthcare systems. All of it is to make a country or a society much more unlivable. 

So Iran so far has been far more resilient. But I think the population is very well aware of what is happening. And it’s already, as you said, led to a large amount of displacement of people. So three and a half million people have moved. Maybe they have voluntarily moved from Tehran to the provinces, et cetera, but ultimately they have moved. Countries around Iran are very worried about a refugee crisis, particularly Turkiye is worried about millions of Iranians ultimately in a worst case scenario, pouring into Turkiye.

You mentioned that Iran is home to two and a half million registered refugees, but actually the number is much larger. At one point in time, the estimation was that Afghan refugees, some registered, some unregistered, maybe as many as about close to 10 percent of Iran’s population, which means eight to nine million people, a lot of them undocumented refugees. Now, in a situation where the economy begins to collapse and jobs begin to disappear, they are obviously at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to kinds of social safety nets that can protect them. Particularly Afghan refugees are being hugely impacted by the consequences of this war.

Jeremy (12:44)

What you’re describing is really more of an attack on the state and the society than on the regime per se. You’re a former government official. You’ve advised secretaries of state. You’ve advised presidents and white houses. The Secretary of Defense, Hegseth, has bragged about watering down U.S. rules of engagement. And as you say, what we’re seeing looks much more like Gaza rules or South Beirut rules.

Immoral, it’s likely illegal, but it’s also, I think, not very strategic. How do you think that the level of brutality that we’re seeing out of this military operation plays into some of the larger U.S. and Israeli strategic aims for the war?

Vali (13:25)

The strategy plays in two ways. One is that at a very local level with Iran. In other words, if you wage this kind of a war, ultimately you have to live with the consequences. So Israel may be happy for Iran to be a failed state. I don’t think Israel was particularly threatened when Syria was a failed state. It was everybody else’s problem other than Israel’s. It was the problem of NGOs around the world. It was a problem of Europeans with migration. It was a problem for Turkiye  with refugees.

It was a problem for the United States with ISIS, but somehow, Israel was less threatened by Syria that was in chaos than it was when Syria was a coherent state under the Assads. So even if Iran becomes a failed state, it’s several countries removed from Israel. might not bother Israel. In fact, that might end up being Israel’s goal is to, if it can’t topple the regime, turn the state that the regime is ruling over into rubble. But for the United States, we found out that and for the Europeans and for the international community, that every time you have a failed state in the Middle East, it’s a larger problem for everybody else. It becomes the home for terrorism. It becomes a source of refugees. It becomes a source of drug trade. How many times have we watched this movie before? And those countries were far smaller. You’re talking about a country of 90 million people sitting on top of a very strategic waterway adjacent to a lot of other key vital countries.

That itself is not a strategically wise thing to be aiming for turning Iran into a failed state. Secondly, the United States is very rapidly losing Iran’s population. If there was a belief that the U.S. was liberating Iran, that it had a legitimate reason to go to war with their own government, the Islamic Republic, the Iranians don’t see any legitimate reason to destroy their bridges, to destroy their railways, to destroy their steelworks, to destroy Iran’s best university, to destroy its hospitals and healthcare system. And yes, you can have these things like, okay, Institute Pasteur was somehow involved in biological warfare. And a few think tanks and outlets in Europe parroted these kinds of after the fact justification that we also heard with the Gaza war. Everything is Hamas. But to Iranians, that doesn’t ring through.

That might be a justification to the outside, but Iranians know that they got their vaccine at Institute Pasteur, that the way it sits, the shape of the building, the size of the building could not possibly be housing and a sort of a secretive top secret biological weapons program, or that destroying Iran’s elite universities cuts very deep. In fact, it has created a tremendous amount of resentment that at some point in time would become a factor. 

Secondly, I think there’s a bigger strategic risk that the United States is running because the rules that are being written around Iran and the way in which Israel in particular is waging this war, like it’s legitimate to kill leaders of the countries, it’s legitimate to kill even somebody that you’re negotiating with. That the Pakistani Air Force has to escort Iran’s negotiators to and from because they may very well be killed on the way. That you could justify it by in the West by saying, okay, this is a rogue regime and some people would buy that. But in reality, you’re making this now the new norm. Other countries can do it. Large countries, small countries. Now, if you don’t like a neighbor, an adversary competitor, why does this not kill their leader? The international community basically is already okaying a kind of action that then can become a strategic headache for the United States. In other words,

Yes, I know that the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth have been particularly negative on international liberal order on the rules of law, but they also have strategically benefited from it for a very long time. That nobody is assassinating American generals and American leaders or the leaders or the generals of our allied countries. And that we may think that we’re the strongest animal in the jungle.

And therefore we’re perfectly happy with the law of the jungle. But managing a jungle could be much more tricky and costly for the United States down the road than it thinks right now. And that could be a strategic loss as well.

Jeremy (17:51)

Yeah, I think there’s a presumption in some of that behavior that somehow we can ignore these rules without ever worrying that’s going to splash back on the United States. And as you said, that’s pretty ahistorical to assume that. And you just touched as well on how this is playing with the larger Iranian public and the, how it’s undermining whatever support there may have been in parts of the Iranian public for the state, some of the stated aims of this war. How do you see things evolving from here in terms of public support and the cohesion of the state? I mean, there is a concern that if what Israel is pushing for in an unstated way is a kind of weak state or state collapse scenario akin to what we saw in Syria over the last 15 years, akin to what we saw in Libya, what does that scenario potentially look like in Iran? How would you evaluate the likelihood of that? Because one of the big concerns from a humanitarian perspective is if there is a state collapse scenario that plays out in Iran, as you say, this is a vastly larger country than Libya or even Syria. And the humanitarian shock waves from that would be much greater as well.

Vali (18:57)

So the scenario in which the bombing, particularly an air campaign, could cause a state collapse hasn’t materialized yet. And it requires a lot more, if you would, sustained bombing to either make the regime fall apart or to arrive at a state collapse level. Not to say it’s not doable, but the threshold in Iran is quite high. The other part is that if the war ends without any kind of economic opening for Iran, sanctions relief, compensation for the war, ability to rebuild the damage that the war has inflicted on Iran. Then yes, face a situation that becomes explosive in Iran. You know, there’s popular uprising against the regime, suppression, cycles of chaos. We saw that also in Syria, et cetera. But also endemic poverty could also bring a sort of a social collapse of its own.

In other words, if hundreds of thousands of laborers no longer have jobs because factories can’t buy steel because the steelworks have been destroyed, that either it causes a greater amount of refugees. Already a lot of Iranians had been leaving Iran because of lack of opportunity. That can become a much larger exodus or that it can also create a situation where you don’t have a spectacular state collapse, but you have a gradual, if you would, the state withdrawing from parts of society or unable to provide critical security, healthcare, education, et cetera, to the population. And then you basically have a scenario we’ve seen in many parts of Africa where you have a gradual state collapse, like countries in West Africa have gone through this. It could lead to civil conflicts in Iran between regions, between territories, and lawless behavior that is no longer controlled from Tehran anymore. We saw that in parts of Syria, we’ve seen it in parts of Africa, you call it warlordism, you could call it social disintegration, all of which then countries around Pakistan, Turkiye, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the Gulf countries cannot remain immune to.

Jeremy (21:04)

I think there’s a tendency from outside and particularly from the U.S. to see Iran as a monolithic society. You’ve made the point elsewhere that it is not. What are some of those dividing lines within Iranian society? Whether it’s a fast deterioration or a slow deterioration were to set in, how might that play out internally?

Vali (21:22)

We often think in terms of ethnic divisions, and there are two areas that are particularly hot. One is Baluchistan on Iran’s southeast that borders on Pakistan. And one is the Kurdish region that borders on Iraq’s Kurdish region. There’s also a very large Azeri population in Iran, but Azeris are very well integrated into the center. Iran’s rulers for 500 years have been predominantly Azeri.

So I don’t see them necessarily as being separatists, but still there could be power centers that emerge in Iran around ethnic/separatist or ethnic/IRGC command, political coalitions, et cetera. So you could either have separatist movements emerge in Iran, but you also could have local power centers emerge if the center begins to lose coherence and capability. We’ve seen networks of military/oligarch/political units emerge that can essentially assert control when the center becomes weaker. So some of those things may be there. Some of those fissure lines are not very clear right now. But if you ended up with a situation where Tehran cannot control large areas of the country, you would have to think, where is it that these kinds of coalitions of money and guns and political heft can actually carve out territory. Sometimes it may be along administrative lines that exist, but sometimes it might be its own, if you would, turf lines.

Jeremy (22:58)

That’s absolutely fascinating. If we do see larger scale outflows of refugees, again, whether that’s in an internal conflict scenario or even just in a long-term erosion of the state and economic collapse scenario, where do those people go? There are many countries surrounding Iran. It’s a real geographic hub. But most of those neighbors would not presumably be very hospitable to Iranian refugees. So how would you see that playing out? And what would that mean for some of the neighbors?

Vali (23:28)

Some of the neighbors may be better capable of preventing refugees than others. It’s also a matter of geography, like Iran’s borders with Azerbaijan are much more difficult to cross because of high mountains and a river. Even though Azeris could be much more easily think about going to Azerbaijan, so some might. Or in Iran’s east, most likely they might go into Afghanistan even in certain ways. Not that Afghanistan has much to offer, but let’s say it’s secure.

For security reasons, they may do that. The Baluchis may move into Pakistan. The countries of the Gulf may try to prevent people coming over with boats, et cetera, but to some extent. In a way, the country that most likely may get refugees is actually Turkiye. And then followed by Iraq. Kurds may move across the border into Iraq’s Kurdistan. In the south, there is a border between Iran and southern Iraq.

A lot of these countries either won’t welcome Iranians in large numbers or they may not be able to actually offer anything that’s attractive to Iranians. But ultimately, I think the pressure would be if large numbers of Iranians begin to leave, the pressure will be on traditional destination, which would be Europe. And I was in the refugee camps that are already are sweltering on the borders of Europe will even have more Iranians.

I wouldn’t say necessarily it will be a repetition of what we saw with the Syrian refugee crisis, but at least the pressures would be similar in the sense of on Turkiye, on Iraq, of large numbers of population moving across the border in order to run away from conflict or look for an exit way to Europe.

Jeremy (25:09)

I want to turn to some of the wider regional effects of this as well. I worked at USAID and the Obama administration overseeing humanitarian response there. And this was in the years following the Arab Spring uprisings. There was conflict, displacement, instability throughout much of the region. And that spawned a lot of refugees. It spawned a lot of internal displacement. And in a lot of those instances, we were responding to humanitarian and displacement crises in places where a key player in the conflict was an Iranian proxy or an Iranian ally group in the region, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Syrian regime, the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen. And at times it felt as a U.S. government official, like the kind of the Iranians were just behind the curtain in many of these crises that we were dealing with. And particularly on Yemen, this kind of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry in that era around 2015 really playing out there in the conflict in Yemen and even in some of the wrangling over humanitarian access to Yemen. 

You’ve talked quite a bit about the security doctrine that underpins these proxy alliances that Iran has leaned on for many decades across the region. Where do you see those going in the wake of this war? They’ve taken a beating over the last few years, they’re much weaker than they had been, but perhaps as we’re seeing now in Lebanon, maybe more resilient than had initially been assumed a year or two ago.

How do you see that playing out? Do you think that Iran will, coming out of this war, reevaluate that at all? Will they reinforce those alliances? And how might that play out in future humanitarian and displacement crises in the region?

Vali (26:48)

Iran, in my opinion, had a strategic logic in the past of supporting proxies because it thought it would be a line of defense that would deter American and Israeli attack directly on Iran. There’s the kind of war that we are seeing. They were hoping to avoid that. And in fact, this war that we are seeing is only facilitated because they lost Syria and they lost Hezbollah. So long as it did have those proxies, it was able to defend itself.

Now it was able to do so because the opportunity arose, opportunity every time arose when somebody broke the state. Israel went into Lebanon in 1982 to expel the PLO. It ended up leaving a massive vacuum as a result of which Hezbollah was born. Then the United States broke the state in Iraq and in that rubble of Iraq, Iran was able to put together the Hashdash Shabi.

Then the Arab Spring destroyed the state in Syria and then in Yemen. And out of the rubble of Syria and Yemen, Iran created the Houthis and militias in Syria. So it was a strategy that made sense to Iran that if we set up these proxies, we can deter Israel and the U.S. and put pressure on them. But it couldn’t have done that if Israel and the United States and then Arab Spring had not created all of these opportunities for them to do that. Now in an ironic way, Israel is trying to do that to Iran itself by breaking the state. 

But I would say that the value of the proxies to Iran has diminished as a line of defense. Yes, it still sees values in the minutia. It’s not going to abandon Hezbollah. It sees these alliances, but it’s very clear that these proxies are no longer able to deter a direct American-Israeli attack on Iran. So the kind of strategic value that they had in the past, they no longer have. 

But also I would say that we’re always focused on Iran, but we forget that what Iran started has now become a kind of a ubiquitous strategy of everybody. You could say that the HTS that became the government in Syria was a Turkish proxy. They also were grooming it, they were leading it, and they actually successfully took over the state. Now obviously they’re transforming it into a state, but it was a proxy or that the Emiratis are now using proxies in Yemen. They’re using proxies in the Sudan. They’re using proxies in Libya. So in a way we use this word with Iran, but it’s now in the situation that the Middle East becomes more and more divided and the states are becoming more and more broken. That this has become a strategic tool of everybody and everybody uses it, but the value of it is only what does it give you?

In the end, if it doesn’t give you anything, there’s no value to it. So why would the Emirates support the RSF in the Sudan? It obviously saw benefit in what the RSF could deliver. And then again, much like with the proxies elsewhere, proxies are a dirty, unsmooth, and very dangerous weapon because you can’t wield it very cleanly. It creates political sets of issues for you. And then as the case of RSF in Sudan, it could also lead to a huge humanitarian and international law disasters that then you have to clean up after, or in the case of Iran with Hezbollah or the Syrian proxies, it could invite greater conflict. It worked against U.S. and Israel, but at the cost of alienating the Arab world. Which we’re not past that phase in the Middle East, unfortunately. And it’s also not bigger than Iran.

Jeremy (30:23)

Yeah, I think the point on UAE is a really important one. They seem to have adapted a version of exactly what Iran has done across the region. And they’re now running a version of that in Sudan, running a version of that over the past few years in Libya and encountering some of those same problems. And the RSF has been just absolutely horrific committing genocidal violence with Emirati weapons. And my sense is you have different parts of the Emirati state, which are alternately all in but also other parts kind of horrified by what they’ve created and can’t now figure out how to assert themselves and restrain it, but also can’t fully pull away. So I want to close with a question that kind of cuts to what we’re trying to do with this larger project, which is really address and be an antidote to a lot of the disinformation and misinformation, misunderstanding that is out there in the world on global displacement issues. So when you look atthe conflict in Iran, the conflict with Iran, the conflict in the region. Is there a particular wrong assumption you’ve seen circulating that you would want to counter, that you wish people understood better?

Vali (31:31)

Some of the most obvious sort of wrong assumptions is about what motivates Iran and why is Iran has been in this fight and why is it resilient and why is it that it’s willing to accept so much pain. And my own view is that you cannot explain Iran based on that it’s a theocracy and it’s driven by Islam, that it has a very clear sort of national security outlook, sees U.S. and Israel as enemies that want to overthrow Islamic Republic and subjugate Iran. And it’s willing to go to great lengths to assert Iranian independence and prerogatives. And unless you understand the mindset and the set of assumptions over there and not get bogged down in this is a religious state and the most powerful person in the state has a turban on its head. And therefore there’s some kind of irrational ideological religious argument at play. You’re not going to be able to understand.

Secondly, I would say that what this war shows is that we could very easily get bogged down on focusing on state behavior. Iran is pursuing nuclear capability. Iran is doing this in Lebanon. Iran is doing that in Iraq, is doing this to the Americans. Or the Israelis get very focused on only Hezbollah and Hamas. Or alternatively see everything through the lens of people versus bad governments, that this is about democracy in Iran. This is about freedom,which it is at some level. But when you look at this war, you look at the Gaza war, you look at Sudan, you look at Lebanon, you also realize that there is something that we have to focus on, which is what is the cost of destroying social fabric? What is the cost of destroying the economies? That the greatest achievement of Lebanon or Iran or Sudan should not be reduced to that they have bad governments or Hezbollah is there.

You have to realize that there is 50 years of building institutions and economies and state capacity that keeps people tethered to a community so that they function. And if you don’t see that, and basically that becomes the collateral damage of your war against a few bad guys, then essentially you are creating a situation where you create refugee crises and human disaster.

And not all wars, in the case of Iran shows, are just with hot weapons. Sanctions is also a form of warfare that is being waged on the region. The case of Iran, since President Trump came out of the Iran nuclear deal and imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, in the first year and a half, 20 percent of Iran’s middle class fell below the poverty line. More Iranians migrated or became refugees in the past five years as a consequence of that economic pressure than because of the war. The refugee camps in Europe, Turkiye began to swell with Iranians, angry at their governments, but also really refugees of an economic situation that became much, much more aggravated as a consequence of maximum pressure. So we get all fixated on the high politics of we’re pressuring the government. We’re trying to control its bad behavior or we’re at this war against a few authoritarian leaders here and forgetting that ultimately the methods that we are using is actually destroying society. And you’re basically undoing 50, 60, sometimes a century of development in Iran or in other countries in Lebanon, Iran, these old countries. And the consequence of that can only be social disaster, which translates into refugee flows.

And I will finish with this, like the Institute Pasteur that was destroyed in Iran was established in 1920 as the very first step in modernization of Iran of creating a healthcare institution that can provide healthcare. That means vaccination, basic healthcare, I mean, a hospital, healthcare services, public health services to the Iranians. So when you destroy that under than six years later,

You basically are saying that your policy is destroying hundred years of state building in Iran. Refugees are a product of state collapse, of economic collapse. And we have to be mindful that in addressing sometimes legitimate foreign policy issues, security issues, we are not creating a much greater security crisis by basically undoing decades and decades of state building in the region.

Jeremy (36:06)

I think that is a perfect point to end on. It really ties this whole conversation together. Vali, thanks so much for joining. It’s such a privilege to speak with you, to learn from you. And I think everyone who listens to this is going to come away a lot smarter about this deeply important, but often overlooked aspect of the war. So thank you so much.

Vali (36:25)

Thank you for inviting me. Great to have this conversation.

Jeremy (36:30)

With Iran dominating the headlines, we don’t want you to miss some of the other ways that displacement is shaping our world. Here’s a roundup of three things that we’re tracking this week at Refugees International. So first, the world just passed the six-month anniversary of the truce in Gaza. And remember, this was built around President Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war, a big part of which focused on civilian protection and humanitarian action. And there was a lot of promise and a lot of hopefulness in the early days of that, that it would enable a really significant turnaround in the humanitarian situation. So last week, Refugees International and four partner organizations released a scorecard that grades whether the plan is living up to that potential. And sadly, it is not. When it comes to humanitarian action, when it comes to return of displaced people to their homes inside Gaza, when it comes to recovery and some economic reconstruction, we see mostly failing grades across the board. The plan is not delivering for Palestinians in Gaza. And that’s concerning because, of course, it’s bad for Palestinians, it’s bad for the residents of Gaza, but it’s also a pretty bad sign for some of the larger and more difficult elements of the peace deal that are yet to come. 

So our scorecard calls on the administration and calls on the other countries who are guarantors of that peace deal to put pressure on the partiesand primarily when it comes to the humanitarian piece, pressure on the Israeli government for their continued obstruction so that the people of Gaza can finally get some of the humanitarian release that they so badly need and deserve. You can find a link to that scorecard in the show notes and on our website, and we’d really encourage you to read it. 

Next, here in the U.S., we’re tracking some really concerning reports that the Trump administration is planning to begin deportations of third country migrants to the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the latest deportation in a series of the administration’s legally questionable  and frankly pretty shady transfers of people who need protection to countries where they face real risks of harm, which aren’t their own home countries. 

That’s important because this whole exercise in third country deportations is basically a way that the Trump administration is trying to circumvent their obligations under U.S. asylum law. They’re arguing that they’re barred from sending people to their home countries involuntarily, but that doesn’t mean they can’t send them somewhere else. That’s very legally questionable. It’s morally pretty abhorrent, but they’re going ahead and doing it. And we’re pulling the curtain back and trying to expose it wherever we can. To learn a lot more about this, you can go to a website that we have set up jointly with Human Rights First to track these deportation practices. It’s called www.thirdcountrydeportationwatch.org and you can learn a lot more about these agreements and the harm that they are causing. And we will talk about this in much more detail in a future episode.

And finally, we’re recording this episode a day before the three-year anniversary of the devastating war in Sudan. It’s a solemn milestone of what has become the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. And as we heard earlier in the conversation with Dr. Nasr, it’s being fueled in part by external actors like the United Arab Emirates, who have been supporting the Rapid Support Forces militia, a group that grew out of the Janjaweed and was responsible for genocide 20 years ago and is committing genocide in Darfur again today. This is a really important one for you as our listeners to get involved in and we’d encourage you to go to the Get Involved tab on the Refugees International website. You can find actions you can take there to call on your congressional representatives to hold the UAE accountable for what it’s doing. There’s a link to that in the show notes and we will be joined next week by Congresswoman Sara Jacobs of California who has been one of the leading voices in Congress on this issue and we’ll talk with her a lot about Sudan, UAE, and what needs to happen in Congress. In the meantime, please go to the website and take action now. 

Thanks so much for joining us today. Don’t forget to subscribe to Forced From Home on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the episode, consider donating to support our work at refugeesinternational.org or the link in our show notes. For more, follow Refugees International on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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