Missiles overhead: Kashmiri biker rides through war-hit Iran

DEHRADUN: When Umar Iqbal rode into Iran on Feb 21, the war had not yet broken out, but the tension was already thick enough for strangers to greet him with warmth and then urge him to leave before it was too late. Over the next 14 days, the 27-year-old travel vlogger from Jammu & Kashmir would ride across near-empty highways under missiles streaking overhead, spend a night watching the sky flare above an ancient site near Damghan, and suffer injuries while helping rescue residents from a building damaged in a strike. Yet what has stayed with him most, he said, is not the fear or the spectacle of war, but the generosity of the Iranians who fed him, sheltered him, worried for him, and finally helped him get out.Iqbal, from Pulwama district, said he entered Iran on a 12-day visa after his route through the region began to close around him in Iraq. A BSc nursing graduate who took to motorbike travel and vlogging around three years ago, he had spent the past year riding across UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, intending to continue overland through Iran as part of a longer journey into Central Asia. But by the time his Iraqi visa was nearing its end, the military build-up had made the next step uncertain. “I was in Iraq on a one-month visa, and as it was about to expire, I started the process for an Iranian visa,” Iqbal told TOI over a social media platform from Herat in Afghanistan, where he arrived on Mar 7. “But the situation kept getting tense with the military build-up by the US and Israeli forces. The Iranian embassy in Baghdad refused to give me a visa because of the war-like situation.” That refusal, he said, left him with no practical alternative. Returning to Jordan meant riding another 900km to 1,000km, Turkey would not grant him a visa from Iraq, and Syria was out of the question because of the civil war there. “The only way forward on my itinerary was through Iran,” he said. Iqbal, who has more than six lakh followers across YouTube and Instagram, said he returned to the embassy and pleaded for a visa. After what he described as a lengthy enquiry, including checks of his travel-vlogging accounts, he was allowed in, though not without a warning. “They told me to be extremely cautious and leave the country as soon as possible because of safety concerns,” he said. He reached Khorramabad on Feb 21 and stayed there for about three days before moving to Qom, where he spent four more days meeting people and seeing what he could. Even before the war broke out, he said, people seemed to be living with the sense that something was about to change. “Each person who greeted me also asked me to leave as soon as I could,” he said. “There was kindness, but there was also concern for my safety.” According to him, the war finally broke out on Feb 28 while he was in Qom. On Mar 1, he resumed his journey towards Tehran, though he did not enter the city after friends from Jammu & Kashmir living there warned him against it because of the intensity of the strikes. A blast captured by Umar near his homestay in Damghan on March 5From there he rode another 400km towards Damghan, passing through a landscape that, in his telling, seemed to grow emptier and more exposed with every stretch. Near the ancient site of Tepe Hissar, he camped for the night and lay awake watching missiles pass overhead. “I saw missiles flying overhead through the night,” he said. By the time he reached Damghan on Mar 2, he said, the situation had worsened further. He checked into a homestay run by a local family and was there when a powerful blast landed a few hundred metres away. The noise sent residents running towards the site, and he ran with them. “A multi-storied residential building had been damaged,” he said. “We rushed there to help rescue people. I also got injured, but that felt insignificant before the love and affection people there showed me despite the war.”The family hosting him, he said, cared for him with a kind of urgency that deepened as the bombing intensified. When it became time for him to leave, they pleaded with him to stay put rather than risk the roads. “They kept begging me to stay because of the heavy bombing,” he said. “The mother of my host even cried and asked me not to go ahead.” But his visa was running out, and the delay carried its own risks. He said the family arranged a mini-truck so his motorbike could be loaded and taken towards Taybad, near the Afghan border, around 750km away. He and the driver set off at night, with the sky still flashing above them and the road largely empty. “I was scared because I thought missiles could target a moving vehicle,” he said. “The driver was even more frightened. His legs were trembling and he kept praying.” At one point, Iqbal said, he asked the driver to switch seats and drove the mini-truck himself for more than half the journey.They reached Taybad on March 6, he said, and the next day he left for the Afghan land border crossing about 25km away, by then having overstayed his Iranian visa by a couple of days. “Only when I crossed over did I feel a big sense of relief,” he said. That relief, however, carried its own irony. “Then another thought came to me,” he said. “Afghanistan too was in an ongoing conflict with Pakistan.” He reached Herat on Mar 7 and finally managed to contact his family after days of communication blackout in Iran. “When I called home, I heard them crying because they had been so worried,” he said.Iqbal said he planned to spend about a month travelling across Afghanistan before entering Tajikistan for the next leg of his journey through Central Asia. But for all the danger he described, it was not the missiles, the blackout or the empty roads that dominated his memory of Iran. “I will never forget the hospitality I received in Iran,” he said.