ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Over the past month, the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran has disrupted global oil supplies, air travel and crucial fertilizer deliveries. Now, U.S. Marines have arrived in the Middle East as President Trump weighs his next move. Andy Kim, Democratic senator from New Jersey, said this on CNN today.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF THE UNION WITH JAKE TAPPER AND DANA BASH")
ANDY KIM: I want to take a moment to make a direct call to President Trump and congressional Republicans saying we cannot have American troops on the ground in Iran.
MA: And the House majority leader, Republican Representative Steve Scalise, told ABC news...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THIS WEEK")
STEVE SCALISE: We're having a lot of conversations about what could happen next, but I think most people - most civilized people recognize a nuclear-armed Iran is not an option that any of us want.
MA: Meanwhile, Iranian officials said a U.S. ground invasion would result in troops being, quote, "set on fire," unquote. Iran has rejected a U.S. proposal to end the war and made its own demands. Negotiations are expected to continue tomorrow in Pakistan. For more on these developments, we turn to NPR's Emily Feng, who's in Turkey near the border with Iran. Could you start by explaining more about these Iranian demands for ending the war?
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: So when Iran rejected the U.S. proposal to end the war earlier, it put forth its own five demands, and those include the U.S. paying war reparations to Iran and also ensuring the U.S. will never attack Iran again. And then this weekend - although this is not an Iranian government official speaking - a hardline Iranian newspaper that is funded by the office of Iran's supreme leader, published nine more demands in order to end the war. And among those are dismantling military bases the U.S. uses in the Middle East. The through line in all of this is that Iran's leaders are feeling confident enough that even after weeks of heavy U.S. and Israeli bombing, they're still negotiating aggressively with the U.S., and they've also threatened deadly force if the U.S. deploys troops on the ground in Iran.
MA: Is there any indication that the U.S. would accept any of these demands?
FENG: It is unlikely. And if anything, the war has been expanding this weekend. There are, as you mentioned, U.S. Marines now in the region. There are thousands of more troops on the way. The U.S. military has not said what these people will be doing or where. Over the weekend, the Houthis, which are an Iran-backed militant group in Yemen - they entered the war by firing two missiles at Israel. Iran's Parliament says it's preparing a law to charge ships a fee, possibly in the millions of dollars, for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. That's the narrow channel where so much of the oil and fertilizer that the world needs passes through and which Iran continues to block. This weekend, Israel's military said it launched about 140 strikes on Iran, targeting what they said were mobile command centers and weapons depots and weapons production sites. But Iran says Israel hit universities.
MA: What about Iranians? How are they feeling about the current situation?
FENG: This is difficult to get at because, Adrian, we don't have opinion polls or surveys that are public in Iran that we can access, and we cannot go to Iran right now. Very few Western journalists have been able to. So what I've been doing is having dozens of conversations with Iranians who have just left the country in this border town in Turkey where I am now. Many Iranians pass through here, and many say that they're supportive of the war. This Iranian man says war is terrible, but he told me it is the least bad out of bad options the Iranian people have.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: So he tells me, Iranian people don't have the tools themselves to overthrow the regime, which he opposes. So he welcomes foreign countries that do have the tools to overthrow that government, even if they're working for their interests and not for Iranians'.
And Adrian, none of the Iranians we interviewed wanted to be named because they all have plans to return to Iran soon. They could face severe legal consequences, even arrest, for speaking to a foreign journalist. Among the people that I spoke to who support Iran's regime - the few that do - they say that after these U.S. and Israeli attacks, they're actually hardening their views. One Iranian man told me - after hearing some of my interviews with people who are against the regime this past week, he walked over and he told me this.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He told me, "we are going to build a nuclear bomb now, now that there's no fatwa," referring to this rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons from Iran's former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. But an Israeli strike killed Khamenei at the start of the war, so this man is now saying Iran should be free to go nuclear now. And in general, no matter whether you're pro-regime, anti-regime, Iranians that I speak to have this sense that the initial hope they had about the war ending soon - that hope is waning.
MA: Say more about that. How so?
FENG: So it's becoming harder to talk to people. They're definitely more afraid of speaking than they were a month ago. Many worry that this war is not going to topple the regime. One Iranian journalist we interviewed here said to me, you know, the supporters of the regime are very few in the country, but they have guns. And they have this mentality that tells them if they survive this war, they are victorious, and if they die, they are victorious. And she told me that makes them almost impossible to beat.
MA: That's NPR's Emily Feng in Van, Turkey, near the border with Iran. Thanks, Emily.
FENG: Yeah. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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