VAN, Turkey — Hüseyin Aşan, the 32-year-old manager of Queen Festa, a nightclub in this Turkish border town that caters to Iranian tourists, sat drinking a glass of tea on a black-glass table in a room of black mirrors as his customers began filing in around midnight. Couples arrived, and entire families arranged themselves at tables around a central dance floor. A group of men sat together on a sofa as bartenders placed bottles of Chivas Regal in buckets of ice.
“Morale is a bit better now,” Aşan said.
Donald Trump signed a preliminary deal last week to wind down the war with Iran, which began with U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28. While the truce is fragile — the U.S. launched strikes on Iran on Friday after Iran fired on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz — it promises Iranians an opportunity to exhale after a year of economic disaster, political repression and conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Just a few months ago, during the height of the bombing campaign, the Kapıköy crossing point in a mountain pass was one of the few ways in or out of Iran for civilians fleeing the bombing or rushing home to check on relatives trapped in a war zone. Now, it is beginning to return to something resembling its prewar normal as a gateway for traders and tourists headed to Van, a Kurdish-majority town in eastern Anatolia where Iranians shop for brand-name clothes barred by sanctions at home, relax by a nearby lake or party in nightclubs that their government would not allow.
“We just came from a war, so we’re going to have some fun,” said a 30-year-old social media manager from Tehran who stood in the sun outside the border crossing awaiting a car that would take her and a friend to Van for a week of shopping and clubbing.
Aşan, who was born in Van to a Kurdish family with ties on both sides of the border, said the club is the largest in Turkey serving Iranians. Before the war, it would host about 350 partyers, mainly tourists from Iran. Business dropped by 70% during the war, but it is now coming back, he said.
“In Iran there’s no dancing in restaurants,” Aşan said. “There’s something inside of them screaming out to dance.”
The war followed months of escalating tensions culminating in the Feb. 28 bombing campaign. MSI previously reported that the Kapıköy border crossing near Van became a temporary route for some Iranians fleeing the bombing after Iran’s airspace shut down, though relatively few had fled by mid-March.
A pathologist from Tabriz was on her way to the Mediterranean resort town of Antalya for a week’s vacation. The trip used to be possible by air, but flights are still recovering from the fighting. “We hope the war is over,” she said. “We don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
The trauma of the regime’s January crackdown — in which Iranian government forces shot dead thousands of their own citizens to crush antigovernment protests — and months of bombing has deepened Iran’s political divide. Supporters of the Islamic revolutionary regime are triumphant after Iran’s hard-line leaders held out under thousands of airstrikes, shut the strategic Strait of Hormuz and forced Washington to make difficult compromises to secure last week’s deal, the Journal reported.
Opponents are bitterly disappointed that the war did not topple the regime, one of the aims Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially put forward.
Resul Khurbani, a 51-year-old mechanic from Tabriz, said he volunteered to join Iran’s reserve forces during the war. “Iran won the war. Iran put America’s nose in the dirt,” he said. “We are very happy that we didn’t let Americans set foot in Iran.”
Another traveler, the manager of a Tehran shoe store, expressed disappointment. “Trump promised to help the Iranian people, but he didn’t keep his word,” she said. “What is the point of starting a war and then stopping suddenly?”
A man who had returned to Iran during the war to care for his mother said a bomb struck his building one floor up, breaking his arm and injuring his back and leg. Despite his injuries, he said he did not blame the U.S. or Israel for the bombing. “Not like this, not war, but something should have happened. They were killing people,” he said of the regime.
At the train station in Van, couples and families with children arrived in taxis and unloaded their suitcases before boarding a 9 p.m. train that would take them overnight to Tehran. A 27-year-old medical lab technician from the Iranian capital said he was relieved the bombing was over but had little confidence the ceasefire would hold.
“I don’t know who won the war, but the people lost,” he said.