On a busy motorway in central Istanbul’s Aksaray area, white coaches printed with Farsi slogans stood parked at the side of the road on Friday as travellers milled about smoking and drinking from bottles of water before taking their seats for the 36-hour ride to Tehran.
“It’s their home, what would you do if something like this happened in your country? You would want to go home,” says Abofazl, a coach driver from northern Iran.
He was making his third such journey after Israel began launching attacks attack on Iran on June 13, forcing the closure of airspace across the region.
“I am sad, it’s my country," he told The National. "They don’t care about the Iranian people. They are doing this for their own benefit."
Iran has retaliated by launching ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and the death toll and destruction on both sides continues to rise.
With airline services cancelled, Iranians are taking the overland route home from Turkey through one of the three crossing points along its 534km border with Iran.
According to travel company managers who spoke to The National, thousands of Iranians have made the journey already, paying between 4,000-5,000 Turkish lira ($100-126) for a ticket.
Nazmi Guven, a tourism and travel manager in Aksaray, said hundreds of Iranians had taken coaches home each day in the past week.
“It was 400-500 people a day at the beginning of the week, now it’s a bit less,” he told The National, as a worker beside him filled out a passenger manifest and fixed stickers to the back of each traveller's passport.
Passengers milled around travel company offices, whose windows were filled with signs offering “VIP” services, including coaches with Wi-Fi and beds. Many suitcases bore airport luggage tags, suggesting their owners were not returning home the same way they came.
In interviews, Iranians said they wanted to go home to be with their families, especially because internet shutdowns in Iran had made remote communication difficult. The majority of Iranian internet users had been without a connection for 36 hours, the London-based NetBlocks internet observatory group said on Friday morning. Most Iranians who spoke to The National did not want their names and personal information revealed, because of the sensitivity around talking to journalists.
A painter in his 20s who has been living in Turkey for eight years said he was going back to Golestan, a region on Iran’s border with Turkmenistan, to be with his family.
“I am only going back because of the war,” he told The National. “I haven’t been able to speak to my family for a week. My wife and parents didn’t tell me to come back, I wanted to go back.
"I don’t know what will happen, but if it escalates more then at least I am there.”
Iranians described relief at being able to return home to see their families, but also apprehension over an unknown future.
One of the waiting passengers said he arrived in Istanbul from Australia at 5am on June 13, planning to take a flight onwards to Iran to visit family members in Tabriz whom he had not seen in years. Just as he arrived, Israel began striking Iran, and the airspace was closed. A week later, the man in his 40s, who declined to give his name, is making the trip by coach.
“I am planning to spend just a few days in Iran. I feel stressed, confused, I don’t know what is happening,” he said. Asked what he would do if he could not leave Iran, he replied, “I honestly don’t know.”
Some of the Iranians going home were on holiday in Turkey. It is one of the few countries that Iranians can enter visa-free, and 3.3 million visited the country last year, according to Turkish government statistics. Other Iranians were abroad elsewhere when the conflict broke out. Their original travel plans foiled by airspace closures, they found themselves rerouted through Turkey instead.
Wearing a blue tropical print shirt, a 35-year-old chemical engineer from Shiraz said he was on holiday in Malaysia and Singapore when the Israel strikes began. His flight home through Sharjah in the UAE was cancelled, forcing him to take the land route home from Turkey instead.
“The bus journey is so long,” he said as he waited for his coach to depart. “I feel like a homeless person.”
For some, the war has prompted them to return home permanently after living and working in Turkey for many years. According to Turkish migration authorities, 74,000 Iranians have residency permits in the country.
“This is the end of my time in Turkey; it’s a good thing,” a carpenter in his 20s from the north-eastern city of Gonbad-e Qabus told The National with a smile.
“I am far away from my family. It has become much more expensive here. It’s not good,” he said. A loaf of bread that cost 1.5 lira when he arrived before the coronavirus pandemic has gone up to as much as 50 lira, he added. “Even if we lose our work, we are going back to Iran.”
Even those Iranians who do not support their Islamist government opposed Israel's strikes on their country, which have killed many civilians besides senior military leaders and nuclear scientists. Many see indifference towards Iranians’ suffering, or outright support for Israel, from western government officials.
“Israel, the UK and US don’t care about the Iranian people’s interests, they are looking out for their own interests - oil, gas and economic interests,” said Mr Sheikh, the travel company manager, said. “Their hearts aren’t bleeding for us."
