People at the Kapikoy border crossing between Turkey and Iran, in eastern Van province, Turkey, March 2.Pavel Nemecek/APhide caption
VAN, Turkey — Dazed by the sun and tired by more than a dozen hours of travel by bus, the woman from Tehran, Iran's capital, crossed into eastern Turkey.
Her first stop? Somewhere with Wi-Fi.
"I only want to make a video call and go back [to Iran.] That is it," she told NPR.
For the last month, she has been making the hours-long drive to Iran's border with Turkey every three days in order to use the internet for a few hours to contact her son, who is studying at a university in western Turkey.
Like most Iranians interviewed for this story, she requested total anonymity because she fears arrest and her assets being seized in Iran for speaking to foreign media.
Since the beginning of the war more than a month ago, Iran's governmenthas blockedits citizens from accessing the global internet, leaving only a few phone lines and select, government-approved "white SIM" phone cards functioning. Now, nearly 90 million Iranians find themselves isolated from basic information about what is happening amid daily U.S. and Israeli strikes on the country.
NPR has been interviewing Iranians transiting through eastern Turkey, along the country's border with Iran. Iranians crossing the Turkish land border — arriving by train, and speaking from Van's many restaurants, hotels and lowkey tea shops catering to Iranian visitors — told NPR about how they are trying to skirt Iran's internet controls.
"The only voice is the voice of the Iranian regime now, because they have cut the internet. They have shot our voices and cut our tongues," a second Iranian woman told NPR, while traveling in eastern Turkey.
Some can afford to buy precious minutes of Wi-Fi or phone time from a black market of Starlink bandwidth and phone SIM cards, but many Iranians say the connections are glitchy, unable to load most web pages and social media sites.
Source: Drudge Report
