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Article: Iranians flee to Turkey. ‘I am in constant fear,’ says one.

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The article reports on escalating military actions and political statements in the ongoing conflict between Israel, Iran, and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel conducted strikes on a leadership bunker in Tehran and intensified bombardment in Lebanon, while President Trump rejected negotiations and demanded Iran's unconditional surrender. The coverage also notes shifting U.S. stances and Iran's retaliatory drone and missile launches against Israel.

Main Topics Covered: 1. Military escalation, including Israeli airstrikes on Iran and Lebanon. 2. Political rhetoric from U.S. President Trump demanding Iran's surrender. 3. Regional conflict dynamics involving Iran, Israel, and Hezbollah.

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https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/06/world/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanon/iranians-flee-to-turkey-i-am-in-constant-fear-says-one

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NYT > World News

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2026-03-06 16:52

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2026-03-06 14:00

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2026-03-06 14:01

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Tel Aviv/Beirut7:00 p.m. March 6
Tehran8:30 p.m. March 6
Live Updates: Trump Says There Will Be ‘No Deal’ as Israel Unleashes Wave of Attacks on Iran
President Trump repeated his call for the “unconditional surrender” of the Islamic Republic. Israel said it had struck a leadership bunker in Tehran, and sent thousands fleeing a bombardment in Lebanon.
- Reuters
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- AFP
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Reuters
- Agencia EFE, via Associated Press
- By Reuters
- Mahmoud Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Mahmoud Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Mahmoud Illean/Associated Press
President Trump on Friday demanded “unconditional surrender” by Iran, saying there would be no negotiated end to the war, while Israeli officials said their forces had destroyed a Tehran bunker that had been used by Iran’s supreme leader, in a fresh wave of heavy strikes on Tehran.
The Israeli military also pounded Beirut and issued more evacuation warnings in Lebanon as it intensified its campaign there against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.
Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social that there “will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” He made the post after Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, said that some countries had begun what he called “mediation efforts,” without elaborating on who was involved.
The comments highlighted the shifting U.S. stances in the war that began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran six days ago. Mr. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday, “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them.” And Iran’s intelligence ministry has reached out to the C.I.A. through intermediaries to discuss terms for ending the war, according to officials briefed on the outreach.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps launched a wave of drones and missiles at Israel, according to a statement from the force reported by IRNA, the country’s state news agency. Air-raid sirens went off in Tel Aviv, and the Israeli military said that it had detected missile launches from Iran, though there were no immediate reports of major damage.
Iranian state television reported attacks on a compound in Tehran where the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lived until he was killed in the initial bombing on Saturday. Hours later, Israel published video showing a series of airstrikes in roughly the same area as the compound, saying that the military had destroyed an underground bunker that had been used by Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior officials, and also released graphics that it said showed the layout of the facility.
Two Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details, said the bunker was beneath Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence, which had already been bombed. It was unclear whether anyone was killed in the attack.
Israel’s air forces shifted their focus back to Iran late Friday after a day of heavy bombardment of Lebanon, which was fast becoming one of the hottest fronts in the spreading regional conflict. With smoke plumes rising from new strikes in and around Beirut, the capital, the Israeli military told more villagers in the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah bastion, to move north, indicating airstrikes were imminent.
Hezbollah claimed a string of attacks on Friday against Israeli forces in Lebanon, and the Israeli military said that five soldiers had been severely wounded by projectile fire.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned on Thursday that the conflict could become a “quagmire for whomever chooses to pursue it.” U.S. and Israeli officials offered a different assessment, saying their ongoing campaign had greatly degraded Tehran’s military capabilities.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Gulf nations: As Iran’s retaliatory strikes hit U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, Qatar’s foreign ministry said Tehran had carried out an attack on buildings in neighboring Bahrain where members of the Qatari Navy were, but reported no injuries. Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry said that it had intercepted and destroyed three ballistic missiles launched toward a military complex south of the capital, Riyadh, while the United Arab Emirates said it had intercepted nine ballistic missiles and more than 100 drones on Friday.
Oil and the economy: Stocks fell sharply as trading opened in New York as the surge in oil and gas prices driven by the conflict set off fears of resurgent inflation. A senior official in Qatar warned in a Financial Times interview of lengthy disruptions to energy production, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed because of attacks. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in an interview on Fox News that the U.S. military would “escort ships through the straits and get the energy moving again” as soon as it was “reasonable” to do so.
Evacuations: The State Department is battling accusations from diplomats and travelers who say the Trump administration endangered U.S. citizens by beginning a war without adequate plans for helping Americans leave the Middle East.
Death toll: Hundreds of people have been killed in Iran since the start of the U.S.-Israeli attacks, according to the Red Crescent Society, Iran’s main humanitarian relief organization, including at least 175, many of them children, who died in the bombing of a girls’ elementary school. More than 200 people in Lebanon have been killed, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
The Israeli military said Friday that 50 fighter jets had targeted the underground bunker of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader killed in an Israeli airstrike last Saturday. The bunker, the military said, was located in the center of Tehran and was used by Khamenei as a “secure emergency command center.” The military said the bunker had meeting rooms for senior Iranian officials and many entrances.
Iranians trickling across the border into Turkey this week painted a picture of destruction and fear hanging over their cities under U.S.-Israeli bombardment.
Hasan Sadrae, a 55-year-old retired airport worker from Tabriz, a city in the northwest of Iran, arrived on Friday with his wife and two children in the Turkish city of Van, near the 300-mile-long border between the countries. “They hit day and night,” he said at the border crossing of Kapikoy. “It felt like a big earthquake in all of Tabriz.”
The family planned to stay with a friend in Van for a few days.
Hazal Alizade, 31, fled after her city, Urmia, was bombed earlier this week.
“We are scared of everything,” Ms. Alizade, a pharmacist, said. “I am in constant fear.”
Ms. Alizade said she plans to stay with an aunt who lives in Western Turkey until hostilities abate. She has closed her pharmacy for now. “Most of the pharmacies are shut down,” she said.
The drug distribution centers are closed too, disrupting the supply chain. “People are scared to go out,” she said.
Turkey has sought to stay out of the widening conflict in the Middle East but has not been entirely spared. Turkey’s defense ministry said a ballistic missile had been launched from Iran this week and intercepted by NATO forces. Iran denied firing the missile at Turkey. U.S. and other NATO forces are stationed at an air base in Incirlik, Turkey.
Iranians living in Turkey were also going back home to be with their families.
Leyla Rabet Nejad Saed, 27, was among them. She had been living in Istanbul and planning her wedding there later this month. The war has canceled those plans. On Friday, she said she was heading back to her family in Shiraz. “How can I be safe when my family is in danger,” she said.
“After peace, I will come back to Istanbul and marry.”
Major developments — March 6
Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany appeared to distance himself from the ongoing war with Iran on Friday, just days after offering his support to President Trump during a visit to Washington. In a statement released on Friday afternoon, Merz said that he was worried about the risks to Israel and other partners in the Gulf as combat operations continue. “An endless war is not in our interest,” he said, according to the statement.
Israel issued an evacuation warning on Friday for an industrial area in Iran’s Qom region, about 10 miles from the Fordo nuclear site, a heavily fortified uranium-enrichment facility that is key to the country’s nuclear program.
Signaling imminent airstrikes, the warning urged civilians to “immediately leave” a small cluster of buildings marked in red on a map posted to the Israeli military’s Persian-language social media account.
“Your presence in this area endangers your lives,” the statement said.
It was not immediately clear why Israel was targeting the area.
The Fordo site itself was attacked in June during the 12-day war involving Israel, Iran and the United States. At the time, American B-2 bombers dropped bunker-busting bombs in an attempt to penetrate the facility, which is built deep inside a mountain to withstand attacks.
The Qom region has been largely spared compared with Tehran and other parts of western Iran since the United States and Israel launched a sweeping military offensive against Iran last week.
The evacuation area is just north of the city of Qom, one of the most important cities in Shiite Islam and a center of religious learning for Shiite clerics. The city is home to the shrine of Fatima Masoumeh, a revered figure in Shiite tradition whose tomb draws pilgrims, and it hosts Iran’s most influential religious seminaries.
There has been no confirmed strike on the Fordo nuclear site since the current round of fighting erupted. An Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan, south of Tehran, that is suspected of storing a cache of enriched uranium, has also appeared to have avoided direct strikes.
Israeli leaders have long said that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat. The Trump administration has offered varying explanations for the decision to attack Iran last week, but it has said that preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was a major objective.
While Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, Israel argues that sites like Fordo could give Tehran the capacity to move quickly toward a bomb if it chose to do so. In 2023, nuclear inspectors from the United Nations detected uranium enriched to levels close to weapons-grade at the site.
Johnatan Reiss and Samuel Granados contributed reporting.
Strikes in the Iranian capital on Thursday battered the iconic Azadi sports complex, home to a stadium that has hosted Frank Sinatra concerts, historic soccer matches and one of the most memorable moments of the women’s rights struggle in the Islamic Republic.
The Azadi is one of three sports centers in Tehran, the capital, that the municipality said were bombed, state media said. The strikes occurred on the sixth day of a U.S.-Israeli attack on the country that has killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials.
Any damage to Azadi, among the largest stadiums in Asia, will hit Iranians especially hard. It is the home of the national soccer team in a country that is passionate about the sport. The Azadi stadium was the site of the 2025 match that clinched Iran’s trip to the World Cup in North America this summer.
For decades, women living under Iran’s theocratic rulers have sought access to the stadium, which was only ever granted grudgingly. The Azadi was where a young woman, Sahar Khodayari, was arrested after sneaking into a match in 2019. Ms. Khodayari came to be known as “Blue Girl” — a reference to the jersey color of the team she supported — after she killed herself through immolation when she was sentenced to prison. Her death sparked protests in Iran.
The Azadi’s history dates back to the days before the revolution of 1979 that toppled Iran’s shah and brought the Islamic Republic to power. In 1974, Frank Sinatra crooned his beloved hits in front of tens of thousands of people at the stadium, in a performance remembered as part of a time when Iran was less isolated from the world than it has become after decades of authoritarian clerical rule and international sanctions.
Photographs and video showed the smoking wreckage of the stadium’s indoor complex.
It was not immediately clear who had targeted the arena complex. Asked whether the U.S. military had bombed the arena complex, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, Capt. Tim Hawkins, said, “Unlike Iran, we don’t target civilians but instead take all precautions available to minimize the risk of unintended harm.” Israel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ahmad Donyamali, Iran’s sports minister, called the attacks on sports facilities a “war crime.” The strikes on Thursday are among several that have hit sports and youth centers in Iran since the Israeli and U.S. assault began.
On Saturday, the first day of the war, the authorities said that an attack on a sports hall had killed 18 boys and girls as they were playing a volleyball match, according to the state news outlet IRNA.
A video of that apparent attack verified by The New York Times showed smoke rising out of the blackened exterior of a sports hall in the town of Lamerd, in the province of Fars in southwest Iran.
Sanjana Varghese, Helene Cooper and Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting
More than 200 people have now been killed in Lebanon since Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah escalated on Monday, and more than 700 others injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. After the last conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ended with a fragile cease-fire in November 2024, around 4,000 people in Lebanon were dead, marking the country’s bloodiest conflict in decades. Many here now fear a repeat of that devastation.
The chief executive of United Airlines, Scott Kirby, said that the price of jet fuel, one of the biggest operational costs for airlines, has risen 58 percent since before the start of the war. As a result, ticket prices may soon start to rise, Kirby warned.
Five Israeli soldiers were severely wounded by projectile fire near the Lebanese border on Friday, the Israeli military said. Three additional soldiers were lightly injured in the same incident. Hezbollah has so far claimed a string of attacks on Friday against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and across the border into Israel, using rockets and drones.
Stocks fell sharply as trading opened in New York. The S&P 500 sank 1.3 percent as investors grappled with weak labor market data, which would typically lead to interest rates being lowered by the Federal Reserve, while a sharp rise in oil prices intensified concerns about rising inflation, which would typically result in the Fed keeping interest rates elevated.
S&P 500
President Trump posted to social media that there “will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction.” He signed off with “MIGA!,” for “make Iran great again.”
Some of Trump’s former allies, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been sardonically throwing around the term “MIGA” (sometimes to mean “Make Israel Great Again”) during discussions about how the president has betrayed their isolationist world view. The cover of Time magazine this week is a photo illustration of a red hat that says “Make Iran Great Again.”
International oil prices touched $90 a barrel on Friday morning, putting them up about 24 percent since the war started. It’s a sign that traders are increasingly concerned about the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is severely restricting the flow of energy from the Persian Gulf.
At the Grand Mosalla of Tehran, a mosque in Iran’s capital, pro-government supporters gathered for the first Friday prayers since the start of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, which killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Crowds of people were seen marching through the streets of Tehran, carrying portraits of Mr. Khamenei and the country’s flag.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in an interview on Fox News that the U.S. military would “escort ships through the straits and get the energy moving again” as soon as it was “reasonable” to do so. Oil prices have been climbing as the flow of ships and tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has plummeted, and U.S. crude futures rose to their highest level in almost two years.
Nine ballistic missiles and more than 100 drones were intercepted over the United Arab Emirates on Friday, according to a statement from the Emirati defense ministry. Iran has been targeting the Emirates since Saturday, and the ministry said that, so far, almost 1,200 Iranian drones and over 200 ballistic missiles had been detected and mostly intercepted. The statement said that three people – nationals from Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh – had died as a result of those attacks.
Several airlines in the Middle East restored flights on a limited basis Friday but air travel across the region remained severely disrupted, as fallout from the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran kept airspaces closed.
Over 20,000 flights to or from the Middle East have been canceled since Saturday, seriously disrupting global aviation. The region accounts for about 5.5 percent of all flights worldwide, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
Here is what to know about passenger flights in the region on Friday:
United Arab Emirates: Etihad Airways, a major airline based in Abu Dhabi, announced that it would organize a limited flight schedule from its hub to several “key destinations,” including New York City. Emirates, the other major carrier based in the Emirates, resumed some flights from its Dubai hub on Monday. Traffic at Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, remains far below its normal capacity, according to Flightradar24, a flight tracking website.
Qatar: Qatar Airways, another major carrier in the region, said its operations remained on pause, with the country’s airspace closed to civilian air traffic.
Saudi Arabia: Saudia said that flights to and from regional destinations like Amman, Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Bahrain were still canceled. Several airports across the kingdom appeared to be operating at diminished capacity, according to Flightradar24.
Airspaces in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait remained closed as of late Thursday, according to Flightradar24.
Israel: El Al, the country’s flag carrier, resumed a limited number of flights to bring back Israelis who were stranded abroad. But not all has gone smoothly. A flight from Geneva circled in midair for about half an hour Thursday night before landing at Ben Gurion Airport while air-raid sirens sounded in the area warning of imminent strikes, according to a spokeswoman for the airline. Israel’s transportation minister said on Friday that FlyDubai, an Emirates-based budget carrier, would operate several flights to return Israelis stranded there.
Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, said in a post on social media that some countries had begun what he called “mediation efforts,” without elaborating on who was involved in those efforts. He said that Iran was committed to “lasting peace in the region” but that mediation should “address those who underestimated the Iranian people and ignited this conflict,” likely referring to the United States and Israel.
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam of Lebanon said Friday that the country was being “dragged further into an abyss” and had been drawn into a conflict that “we did not seek and did not choose.” Although he did not name the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, it attacked Israel earlier this week, and the Israeli military responded by bombarding Lebanon. Salam warned of a looming humanitarian disaster as hundreds of thousands flee under Israeli evacuation orders in Beirut and southern Lebanon.
European stock indexes were in the red early Friday at the end of a tumultuous week for markets, as a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict set off fears of resurgent inflation.
The Stoxx Europe 600 index has fallen by nearly 5 percent this week, the steepest weekly decline since last April when President Trump announced sweeping tariffs. The S&P 500 was also set to open about 0.3 percent lower when trading begins on Friday in New York, according to futures markets.
Oil and gas prices were rising further after Qatar’s energy minister warned of lengthy disruptions to energy production as the conflict roiled Persian Gulf nations. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose by 2 percent on Friday to $87 a barrel. The price has risen nearly 20 percent this week. European natural gas prices have surged by 60 percent this week.
Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi of Qatar, a major exporter of liquefied natural gas, told the Financial Times that even if fighting stopped immediately, it would take the country “weeks to months” to resume normal deliveries.
The increase in energy prices raised expectations of higher inflation. One of the clearest signs of those concerns is in the government bond market, where prices are falling. That pushes bond yields higher, reflecting investor expectations that interest rates might need to rise. Traders are now betting that the European Central Bank will likely raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point by the end of the year to combat higher prices.
Qatar’s foreign ministry said Iran had carried out an attack on buildings in neighboring Bahrain, where members of the Qatari Navy were present. It said no injuries were recorded among the members of the Qatari navy, who were participating in a joint operations center associated with the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Iran did not immediately comment on the statement.
Avichay Adraee, an Arabic language spokesman for the Israeli military, ordered on Friday several villages in the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah bastion in Lebanon, to evacuate to the north. On Thursday, the Israeli military ordered three other villages in the Bekaa Valley to evacuate.
Four men were arrested in Britain on Friday on suspicion of spying for Iran on locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area.
One Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals were arrested shortly after 1 a.m. in areas north of the capital as part of a preplanned operation, counterterrorism police said.
The men were detained on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service. “The country to which the investigation relates is Iran,” the police said in a statement.
“Today’s arrests are part of a long-running investigation and part of our ongoing work to disrupt malign activity where we suspect it,” Cmdr. Helen Flanagan, the head of counterterrorism policing in London, said in the statement.
“We understand the public may be concerned, in particular the Jewish community, and as always, I would ask them to remain vigilant and if they see or hear anything that concerns them, then to contact us.”
The four men arrested included a 40-year-old and a 55-year-old arrested at addresses in the Barnet area, police said. Searches continued at those locations and another address in the area. The other two were a 52-year-old arrested in Watford, northwest of London, and a 22-year-old arrested in Harrow. Both locations were being searched, as was a location in the Wembley district.
Six other men who were not targeted in the operation were detained in the Harrow area on suspicion of trying to assist one of the men who was being arrested.
Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer offered his thanks to “the police, the security services, and everyone involved in keeping Britain safe.” In a statement on social media he added: “People will be worried after today’s arrests, especially those in our Jewish community. Our world-leading security services will not hesitate to protect you.”
Despite the outbreak of war in the Middle East, there has been no change to Britain’s national terror threat level, which stands at “substantial” — meaning an attack is probable. (There are two higher levels — “severe” and “critical.”)
On Sunday, the British defense secretary, John Healey, highlighted the increased risk of indiscriminate retaliatory attacks by Iran and its proxies, adding that the domestic threat assessment was under review and that vigilance in Britain was high.
Britain’s intelligence services have previously named Iran among the three countries posing the greatest threat to the country, alongside Russia and China.
Iranian reporters and broadcasters based in Britain have suffered physical attacks, threats and surveillance. In October Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, the domestic security service, said his organization had “tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in just the one year.”
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, told a news conference last year that Iran had been “relying on criminal proxies” — a network of groups and individuals paid for their services — to target people in Britain.
“Iran really does continue to project a very real physical threat to individuals in this country,” he said. “We know that they are continuing to try and sow violence on the streets of the United Kingdom.”
The U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, called Friday for restraint, de-escalation and a return to negotiations to contain the fighting in the Middle East. “It’s uncontrollable, it’s chaos, it’s disarray, disorder and the world absolutely cannot afford it,” he said urging government leaders to defend international law and the U.N. charter. In particular, he pointed to Israel’s mass displacement orders affecting hundreds of thousands of people in southern Lebanon and called for an investigation into the deadly strike on a school in southern Iran.
Live news agency video captured smoke plumes rising from several strikes in the Beirut area on Friday morning . The Israeli military said it was launching a new wave of strikes in the Beirut area, targeting infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not just the supreme leader of Iran but also a widely respected religious figure among followers of Shiite Islam. In Pakistan and India, both home to millions of Shiites, there was an outpouring of anger and grief after he was killed during U.S.-Israeli strikes on Saturday.
Thousands took to the streets in India and Pakistan, many chanting slogans against the United States and Israel. Some demonstrations spilled into violence in Pakistan, where the authorities say at least 25 people were killed during unrest on Sunday.
Mr. Khamenei, who died at 86, was considered the leader of all Shiites, not just Iran, said Nawab Masood Abdullah, a Shiite community leader in the city of Lucknow in India. “His status is similar to what the Pope means to Christians,” he added.
For more than three decades as Iran’s supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei cultivated the image of a resistance leader who united people opposed to the United States and Israel. For Shiites outside Iran, experts said, Mr. Khamenei symbolized the power of the world’s biggest Shiite country.
That influence extended to Shiite communities in India and Pakistan. In India, estimates of the Shiite population vary, but some experts and community leaders have put it at above 40 million. Many Shiites live in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region with cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.
“Iran may be far away, but for many Shiites the bond is spiritual,” said Areeba Zahra, a college student in northern Kashmir. “When something happens there, people here feel it too.”
Many schools across the region have been closed this week as officials try to prevent further unrest.
On Monday, protests in Kashmir over Mr. Khamenei’s death escalated into clashes with police.
Mr. Khamenei’s killing set off a wave of protests in Pakistan, too, where Shiites are estimated to be around 15 percent of the population, or around 35 million people. Sunni Muslims are the majority in Pakistan.
On Sunday, thousands of people took to the streets across Pakistan to protest against the U.S.-Israeli strikes. In some places, there were deadly clashes with security forces. The unrest prompted the authorities in Pakistan to impose temporary curfews in some areas.
In Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, 10 people died after protesters tried to storm the heavily guarded U.S. consulate, a police surgeon at the city’s main hospital told The New York Times.
“When Iran is attacked, we feel our faith, our identity and our very existence are being targeted,” said Asghar Jaffer, a Shiite student activist who joined the demonstrations in Karachi on Sunday.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 that brought clerical rule to Iran, the country’s leaders have sought influence among Shiites in other countries like Pakistan and Lebanon, often to counter the influence that its longtime regional rival, Saudi Arabia, has among many Sunni Muslims in those countries. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have been accused of recruiting Pakistani Shiites for proxy warfare in other countries, including Syria.
Shiite Muslims have for decades been frequent targets of deadly attacks by Sunni militant groups.
For Pakistan’s Shiites faced with this threat, “Iran was turned into a symbol of power, strength, and dignity that they could rely on,” said Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, a professor of Islam in South Asia at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Pakistan has long sought to balance its relationships with Saudi Arabia, a close ally, and Iran, with which it shares a long border, because it does not want to take positions that might inflame sectarian tensions at home. So far, Pakistan’s government has condemned both the attacks on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory strikes on targets in Gulf countries.
The mood was far from neutral at the protests in Pakistan on Sunday.
“Khamenei’s assassination feels like an assault on the spiritual and political voice of the Shiite community worldwide,” said Azhar Naqvi, a banker who joined a protest in Islamabad, the capital
Around him, demonstrators chanted a line heard often at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests: “Death to America, death to Israel.”
Four people were arrested by counter-terrorism police in London on suspicion of aiding Iran’s foreign intelligence service, the Metropolitan Police said on Friday. The investigation relates to suspected surveillance of locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area, the police said.
Iran’s state television said the intense airstrikes and bombing campaign on Tehran early this morning had also targeted the compound of the slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, an area near other seats of power, including the presidential palace and National Security Council. Ayatollah Khamenei was killed last Saturday, and his son Mojtaba Khamenei, is considered the leading candidate to succeed him.
Three Australian personnel were on board the U.S. submarine that sank an Iranian warship, Australia’s prime minister confirmed on Friday, prompting concerns that the country’s close military cooperation with the United States could draw it into the broadening conflict in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said the Australians did not participate in “any offensive action against Iran.” They were required to act in accordance with Australian law and policy despite being embedded with the U.S. military, Mr. Albanese said in an interview with Sky News.
Asked whether he was “comfortable” with the way the Iranian destroyer was sunk near Sri Lanka in terms of international law, Mr. Albanese said that was a question for the United States. Mr. Albanese was among the first U.S. allies to offer full public support of the attack on Iran.
The Australian submariners were aboard the U.S. vessel as part of the increasing cooperation and integration between the countries’ navies aimed at countering China in the region. Under a pact known as AUKUS, which also involves Britain, Australia is set to receive sensitive nuclear technology and nuclear-powered submarines from the United States in the coming years.
U.S. military officials have said that as a part of the integration, two to three Australian officers would eventually be on board many U.S. attack submarines to be trained.
Australia’s defense department said late last year that one in 10 of the people on U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines is Australian.
Critics of the agreement have warned that the increasingly close ties will embroil Australia in U.S.-led conflicts, a concern that has been heightened with the actions of the second Trump administration. On Friday, David Shoebridge, a senator with the Australian Greens, said the presence of Australian personnel on the U.S. ship involved in the Iran conflict was “an inevitability of AUKUS.”
“We have been dragged into this war without even a decision being made inside the cabinet room,” Mr. Shoebridge, who has long been against the agreement, told reporters in Canberra.
Australia last year severed diplomatic ties with Iran, accusing its military of orchestrating at least two antisemitic attacks against Jewish institutions and businesses in Sydney and Melbourne.
That attack made it clear to Australians that Iran was “prepared to reach across the other side of the world to promote an attack on Australian soil to promote division here in Australia,” Mr. Albanese said in the interview with Sky News on Friday.