Tehran: It is almost three in the morning, and I am awake again, the way I have been most nights since this round of strikes began. There is a particular quality to insomnia in wartime – it isn’t restlessness, it’s vigilance. My phone sits face-up beside me, screen dimmed but never dark, because somewhere between two and six am is when the strikes on the south tend to come, and I have made a habit, almost a compulsion, of being awake to receive the news the moment it lands, rather than waking up to it.I used to think journalists were supposed to keep a certain distance from what they cover. I don’t know how to do that anymore, not this month, not with the south of the country absorbing missile after missile while the rest of us try to sleep through it in other cities. I keep the window open at night, which is a strange thing to admit, because nothing I hear through it will ever be the actual sound of what is happening to people in Hormozgan or Khuzestan or Bushehr. But I keep it open anyway. It feels like a way of refusing to sleep through something that other families are living through in real time – a useless kind of solidarity, but the only one I have.There is a particular guilt in this job that nobody warns you about. You spend the day gathering names and numbers – a fuel-tanker driver killed on a village road, a family of four caught in a car returning from a hospital visit, an environmental warden in Hajiabad who lost three relatives when his own home was struck – and then, at night, you go back to your own quiet apartment while the people behind those names go back to houses with someone missing from them. Iran’s health ministry said at least 50 people were killed and more than 500 wounded in strikes since July 6 alone, and that the wider war’s dead range from an eight-month-old infant to people in their late eighties. I read that line at four in the morning last week and sat with my laptop closed for a long time afterward, because I didn’t know what sentence could follow it.On July 23, a colleague of mine reached a young man named Hassan Chatrzarin in Nimeh Kar, Hormozgan, hundreds of kilometres south of where I sit in Tehran. He described the night he lost two brothers – Homayoun, 32, and Mazyar, 11 – on a bridge that no longer looks the way it did. I spent that night and several after it with the recording and the transcript, translating his words one by one, trying to carry them across a language without losing what was underneath them. I never heard his voice directly. I only had his words, rendered twice now – once by him, once by me – and the strange responsibility of making sure nothing was lost in that distance.One detail from that account has stayed lodged in me. Homayoun’s last phone call to their mother, in the seconds after the first explosion, was four words – “Mother, where are you?” – before the line cut out. It wasn’t really a question. It was reflex, the same reflex that makes any of us reach for the person who has always answered. She never got the chance to answer him.Most nights now, I am not working in any formal sense. I am just awake, thinking about how a place becomes a target – a bridge that was never anything but a road home, a desalination plant that left 10,000 people without water, a warden’s post meant to protect wildlife, turned into rubble around a family. None of it fits into the language of military briefings, which speak of infrastructure and capability and never once needs to explain why an 11-year-old who wanted to grow up to be a police officer, “because police protect people,” is no longer alive to become one.I can’t stop a missile from where I sit in Tehran. I can’t rebuild anything in Khamir County. What I can do, at three in the morning with a transcript open on my screen, is refuse to let a name become only a number before it disappears from the news cycle. Somewhere south of here, a mother is waking up to a house that is missing two of her sons. I don’t know what to do with that except stay awake with it, and write it down, and ask whoever reads this, wherever they are, to remember that these were never numbers. They were someone’s whole world.Sahar Dadjoo is a politics and international affairs correspondent for the Tehran Times, Iran’s leading English-language daily newspaper.