Tehran, Iran – Roya, a 62-year-old resident of Iran’s capital, was jolted awake just after 3am on Friday morning by the sound of explosions in her Marzdaran neighbourhood in western Tehran.“It was absolutely terrifying, my heart was beating out of my chest,” she recalled. “I saw smoke on the horizon and at first thought all the strikes were farther away, but when the images came out, I found that a home just a few streets from us was hit too,” she told Al Jazeera.
Across Tehran, residents on Friday were grappling with the shock of the first air strikes on heavily populated residential areas across the city since the eight-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
The building close to Roya’s house – she requested that only her first name be used – was among many residential units targeted by Israeli warplanes during at least five rounds of air strikes that lasted several hours.
At least six nuclear scientists and physicists, including a former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, were assassinated in the attacks. Several of the country’s top military commanders were killed as well, including the armed forces chief-of-staff Mohammad Bagheri, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander-in-chief Hossein Salami, and IRG …
