VAN PROVINCE — Dozens of Iranians have been crossing the border into Turkey on foot through snow-covered mountains to access the internet, after a near-total communications blackout descended on Iran following U.S. and Israeli strikes on the country. Iranian authorities cut internet access for most of the population and disconnected phone lines, prompting citizens to travel to the city of Van in Turkey, located about two hours from the Iran-Turkey border, to find a connection.

Iran's government has spent more than a decade revamping the country's internet infrastructure, centralizing it to a few entry points to enable shutdowns during protests or wartime. In January, Iranian authorities shut off the internet and began arresting and executing demonstrators. Since then, phone stores in Van have received increased requests from Iranian customers seeking SIM cards.

One man traveling with his wife and two children to Van province paid an exit tax and drove for hours to obtain Wi-Fi access for his son's work. The family planned to stay in Turkey for a few days both to use the internet and to rest from the bombing in Iran.

An Iranian woman has been making the trip from Iran into eastern Turkey approximately every three days to video call her son, who lives in western Turkey and studies at a university. Because of the distance between eastern and western Turkey, the two will not meet in person before her return to Iran.

Inside Iran, some residents have turned to the black market for connectivity. Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said friends in Iran pay high prices to buy minutes of Starlink connections or access white SIMs that provide limited bandwidth. Those black-market internet connections often cannot open web pages or social media, he said. "And it is extremely dangerous even to buy it because the regime has declared that this is a counter-revolutionary activity," he said.

Milani said the internet blackout constitutes a war crime because it leaves tens of millions of Iranians unable to receive warnings before Israeli or U.S. strikes.

"They feel — and I think they're right — that this is the most existential threat they have. That's why they have gone berserk. They are willing to pay any price, including bringing the entire global economy to a crisis if that's the price the world has to pay for their survival," he said.