I HAVE two Iranian friends who live in the West. I’ve known them for 10 and 15 years, respectively. Both were born in Iran; one’s family left in the 1970s, the other left last year, alone. In the last two weeks, their messages have been arriving at odd hours, the way they do when someone is living in a different time zone of anxiety.

One of them wants the regime gone. She’s wanted it gone for years, with the particular exhaustion of someone who has watched hope rise and get crushed enough times to stop counting. When the strikes began, her first message to me was almost relief. Finally, she wrote. And then, three messages later: “I haven’t heard from my family.”

The other thinks the West has never done anything for Iran except take from it. She is not wrong. She was awake at 3am watching footage of her neighbourhood, trying to match the skyline to what she remembered of it. Looking for landmarks. Looking for her building.

Two Iranians. Two completely different answers to the question of what should happen to their country. The same terror about the same thing: whether the people they love are still alive.

The architecture of othering puts the soldier above the schoolgirl.

This is what gets flattened when Western coverage reaches for the convenient Iranian. It’s either the grateful dissident who vindicates the bombing, or the faceless enemy who justifies it. Real people do not hold still for either role. They check their phones at 3am and they wait.

While they waited, I watched. I turned to the news the way you do when you need the facts to get a shape, a sequence, something to hold on to. What I got instead was a lesson in whose fear counts.

The coverage was not absent. It was everywhere. But it was being told from every city in the Arabian Gulf region except the one that was burning. Western journalists, who had raced to Kyiv to broadcast live from the streets when Russia invaded Ukraine, were watching Iran from neighbouring countries, piecing the story together from government statements and grainy social media clips.

The geography of where a reporter stands is never neutral. It determines whose rubble gets a close-up and whose gets a dateline.

Then there’s the language. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the word ‘unprovoked’ appeared so frequently it became a fixture of the coverage; a moral verdict embedded in the reporting itself. I have searched for it in coverage of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. I am still searching.

In Ukraine, civilians were human immediately. They had names, neighbourhoods, professions. We knew what they did before the war. The camera went to the teachers, the architects, the grandmothers who refused to leave their pets. The microphone followed. Their suffering was not context; it was the story.

In Iran, civilians are backdrop. When 165 girls between the ages of seven and 12 were killed in Minab, the BBC led its coverage that day with the deaths of three American soldiers. Three American soldiers versus 165 Iranian schoolgirls. The news organisation made its choice. It did not discover the girls after it led with the soldiers. The reports were already there. The hierarchy was not incidental. It was editorial.

The words the BBC’s correspondent used from Tel Aviv — Tel Aviv! — was that the US and Israel “seek to transform Iran”. I have been mulling that phrase over ever since. Transform. As though what is happening is a renovation. As though the girls in Minab were a necessary disruption on the way to a better floor plan. Could you imagine an international correspondent describing Russia as seeking to ‘transform Ukraine’? The question answers itself.

This is the architecture of othering. It does not announce itself. It does not say: these lives matter less. It simply puts the soldier above the schoolgirl. It sends the reporter to Tel Aviv. It finds the dissident and quotes her saying ‘finally’ and does not find the woman awake at 3am trying to recognise her uncle’s house street.

France said nothing about the strikes. Germany said nothing. Britain condemned the retaliation. The aggression, apparently, did not require comment. Under international law it has a name and it’s not ‘transformation’, not ‘liberation’, not ‘pre-emption’. The UN secretary-general said it plainly. The word is ‘aggression’.

My two friends are still on their phones. One of them heard from her cousin. The other’s uncle has not left his building in 12 days.

Western coverage has given them two roles to choose from: the grateful Iranian and the enemy Iranian. They have declined both. They are just waiting, the way people wait when the world is on fire and the people with microphones are somewhere else, describing the flames as a new dawn.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2026