According to a report by Sky News, on Tuesday April 7, 2026, in one of the most raw and haunting statements to emerge from the ongoing conflict in Iran, Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery has told Sky News that the Iranian people were driven — by the failures and brutality of their own government — to the extraordinary position of welcoming American military strikes on their homeland.
Moaiery, who has been on the ground documenting the human cost of the war, broke down emotionally during a televised exchange with Middle East commentator Tara Kangarlou, following United States President Donald Trump’s alarming declaration that a “whole civilisation will die tonight.”
“I’m so sad because they didn’t have any choice,” Moaiery said. “They had to ask Donald Trump to bomb them.”
It is a sentence that demands pause. A people, she explained, who do not want war — who have never wanted war — reduced to appealing to a foreign power to strike their own cities, because every other road was shut in their face.
The photojournalist was unambiguous about where responsibility lies. The Iranian regime, she said, “didn’t want to step back” and outright refused to “accept the people’s demands at all.” Years of protest, years of sacrifice, years of Iranians taking to the streets demanding change — met not with dialogue, but with suppression.
Moaiery and Kangarlou also recalled Trump’s earlier promises, made before hostilities reached their current intensity, to champion the cause of Iranian protesters. The contrast between those pledges and the present-day bombardment paints a portrait of a crisis that diplomacy failed to contain.
For Moaiery, this is not simply a story of geopolitics or military strategy. It is a human tragedy — one in which a civilian population has been so systematically denied agency by its own rulers that foreign airstrikes became, in the minds of many, the only remaining language their government might understand.
“This is more than sad,” she said.
And in those four words, an entire nation’s grief….See More
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