When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iranian infrastructure and send the country “back to the Stone Ages,” he was perhaps being honest about his true intentions. Perhaps his intent is no longer just about fighting the Islamic Republic, degrading its military, or even trying to change the regime. It is about going after the systems that keep ordinary people alive. It is a war against Iranians, and not just the evil regime repressing them.

The U.S.-Israeli war may have resulted in tactical successes such as the destruction of military bases and infrastructure, but it has also injured and killed thousands of innocent Iranians and devastated civilian infrastructure needed to sustain human life in Iran. Trump’s war will alienate a major part of the Iranian population that hates the regime but is devoted to Iran as a nation.

When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iranian infrastructure and send the country “back to the Stone Ages,” he was perhaps being honest about his true intentions. Perhaps his intent is no longer just about fighting the Islamic Republic, degrading its military, or even trying to change the regime. It is about going after the systems that keep ordinary people alive. It is a war against Iranians, and not just the evil regime repressing them.

The U.S.-Israeli war may have resulted in tactical successes such as the destruction of military bases and infrastructure, but it has also injured and killed thousands of innocent Iranians and devastated civilian infrastructure needed to sustain human life in Iran. Trump’s war will alienate a major part of the Iranian population that hates the regime but is devoted to Iran as a nation.

In Iran, there is almost no distinction possible between the regime’s military infrastructure and the national infrastructure necessary to sustain life for 93 million Iranians. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its alliescontrolmuch of Iran’s economy and infrastructure, including Iran’s water systems, fuel depots, bridges, power plants, desalination facilities, ports, pharmaceutical factories, and industrial sites.

The Iranian state’s ability to provide basic services to the public was near collapse before the U.S. and Israeli war began. The country has been devastated by decades of sanctions, chronic water depletion, land subsidence, energy shortages and chronic blackouts, and decades of corruption and mismanagement. The current war will only hasten Iran’s trajectory toward state failure, though not necessarily the regime’s overthrow—leading to greater instability across the Middle East, including in Israel.

The U.S.-Israel bombings have also created a lot of public hostility toward the war, even among those Iranians who initially supported the bombings and hate the Islamic Republic. When the Qeshm desalination plant was struck in the first week of the war, many Iranians did not see just another military escalation. They saw an alarming sign that the systems necessary for daily survival were now in danger.

The attacks against the oil facilities around Tehran were particularly painful, as they spread heavy pollution in an already heavily polluted city and resulted in fuel rationing and a feeling of doom and entrapment for millions of Tehran’s residents.

When a major bridge in Karaj was destroyed on Sizdah Be-dar, an annual spring holiday, many families were celebrating the traditional way by picnicking outdoors. The attack not only destroyed the bridge but killed eight civilian holidaymakers. Many people did not see this as a strike on “regime assets.” They saw it as an attack on a bridge full of ordinary people.

U.S. and Israeli attacks against medical and educational facilities have been particularly devastating for ordinary Iranians. Some of these institutions, such as the vaunted Sharif (Aryamehr) University, are used by the IRGC to conduct military research. But Sharif University has also produced astounding engineers and scientists, many of whom have founded or worked for some of America’s top technology start-ups and firms.

The bombing of the Pasteur Institute, one of Iran’s oldest vaccine and biomedical research centers, will have major repercussions for public health in Iran. Iranian civilians do not experience the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure as “precision” strikes against the regime, but as a blow to their ability to stay alive.

Strikes on infrastructure do not simply weaken the state. They also reinforce the regime’s anti-American and anti-Israeli narratives. The United States and Israel control the skies, but the regime is ever-present on the ground and can weave a stronger narrative. Every blackout, fuel shortage, toxic plume, and broken water line gives the regime a chance to present itself, however fraudulently, as the defender of a nation under siege. A regime that many citizens would otherwise resist can use external attacks on civilian systems to redirect anger and justify repression by hiding behind an attack on the nation.

The Islamic Republic has survived for decades without earning real public legitimacy and has relied on coercion, fear, patronage, and ideological control, while draining aquifers, destroying wetlands, polluting rivers, hollowing out institutions, and pushing provinces toward water bankruptcy. But the U.S. and Israeli attacks against the regime have handed it a political gift.

That helps explain why even some people we have spoken with inside Iran now view the war more skeptically. Some never believed it was meant to help ordinary Iranians. Others hoped the strikes would stay focused on military targets. That hope has faded as attacks have spread to the systems civilians need to survive. In private, the mood is not one of liberation but anxiety. The question many now ask is simple: If this war is meant to help Iranians, why is it destroying the infrastructure their lives are dependent on?

For example, southern Iran will soon enter months of brutal heat. In harsh temperatures like these, power cuts are not a nuisance but a critical health risk and a threat to people’s survival. Below-average rainfall had already sharpened anxiety over water before the war had expanded. Now millions are heading into the hot season with less confidence in having both electricity and water.

Iran cannot be smashed and then neatly rebuilt with foreign help, as if Iran’s destruction is just a straightforward prelude to its modernization. Rebuilding Iran’s infrastructure will take enormous quantities of money, steel, cement, energy, fuel, machinery, and above all water. It comes with tremendous environmental and social costs, and a huge carbon footprint.

Iran will emerge from this war more import-dependent, indebted, and unequal than before—a burden that will, as ever, be borne by ordinary people, not the regime and its apparatchiks.

Trump’s war against Iran may produce the bedazzling illusion of military victories such as destroying IRGC bases with dramatic explosions. But it has already resulted in the devastation of Iran’s civilian infrastructure and the resentment and anger of many anti-regime Iranians toward the U.S. and Israel. The majority of Iranians may be anti-regime, but many are also patriots and will be devastated by the destruction of their country, especially if the regime stays in power.