Talla Mountjoy has been sitting by her phone on a charger, waiting for calls from family in Iran since the U.S. and Israel attacked.Bombs razed the areas around the neighborhood in Tehran where her grandmother and other loved ones live, but so far they have been safe, said Mountjoy, a senior directo r at the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Her relatives reached out with a brief message saying they were OK after missiles started flying. Mountjoy and other relatives in the diaspora keep a system of shifts based on time zones, so someone is waiting for calls and messages somewhere in the world at any given time of day.She said due to communications blackouts, they can only occasionally make outgoing calls for about $3 per minute. Video calls often aren’t an option.“I just want to be able to connect with my family in real time again," Mountjoy said.On Sunday, Trump signaled he was open to talks with Iran's new leadership after U.S. and Israeli forces launched a major attack on the country over the weekend, killing its supreme leader and other high-ranking officials, the Associated Press reported. But the attacks on Iran showed no signs of relenting, and Trump told the Daily Mail Sunday that the war could go on for "four weeks — or less."Narimon Safavi, a Chicago-based Iranian-American, has been living in the U.S. for more than 40 years. He co-founded the now-closed Pasfarda Art Cultural Exchange, which was based in Chicago and aimed to build cultural bridges between the U.S. and Iran. Safavi said the split between the country he has lived in and the one he was born in has been tough to bridge, and it's only worsened by the Islamophobia that has festered in the U.S. after its decades of wars in the Middle East. The sympathies extended to other diasporas in America whose home countries are at war, such as Ukrainians, are not offered to Iranians, he said.“You have this dual identity,” Safavi said. “Having that linger all your life is a weight to carry.”Safavi was hoping to see more from Iran's people, as a women’s movement had gained rights in recent years. But protests over the last few months led the government to kill thousands of demonstrators in the streets. Still, he said, violence begets violence.“U.S. military action may gain surface level removal of a dictator, but they destabilized the region in ways we can't see right now,” he said. “I don't know if I want to be liberated by people like [Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Trump.” Ibrahim Abusharif teaches journalism and religion at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar.Provided Ibrahim Abusharif was on a flight to Qatar from Chicago when the war began over the weekend. Abusharif teaches journalism and religion at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. He didn’t know what happened until he got off his flight in Jordan Saturday and checked the news.Due to Iranian retaliatory strikes on American bases in Qatar, Abusharif — a lifelong Chicagoan who has taught at the Northwestern Doha campus since it opened in 2009 — was stuck in Jordan waiting for the airspace to reopen. He said classes will continue Monday, but virtually, and that his colleagues and students have been safe.Abusharif said Iran was willing to let go of its nuclear ambitions if they could get rid of the economic sanctions imposed on the country, and that the U.S. and Israel had once again instigated violence and destabilized the region — which he called "completely avoidable." He said he was especially affected by the strike that killed more than 100 school girls in southern Iran."It’s yet another American-Israeli war in the Middle East," Abusharif said. “It’s useless, a waste of life. People are noticing that [the American and Israeli strikes] are close to the Gaza playbook with health centers and schools being targeted. … It’s hard to believe that’s accidental. You’re trying to break people by doing that.”Safavi said he has been cooking Persian food to “try to forget everything and feed some family and friends.” His go-to is kuku sabzi, which he described as an herb quiche that's like a cake. He said he hopes to take more solace in Iranian culture as the Persian new year, Nowruz, approaches March 20.“I’m just hoping for peace,” he added. “I feel kinda helpless these days.”Mountjoy hasn’t been to Iran since 2014, where her grandmother and other loved ones still live, though she has never stopped dreaming of a different vision for the country guided by a memory from a 2002 family reunion in Spain. One of her cousins, who has since left Iran, wore her hair and clothes the “way she wanted to” for the first time.“I don't know what the right answer is to get to this state I have in my mind of a free Iran, I just know what's been tried before,” Mountjoy said. “I saw her taking a deep breath of freedom, and that is the emotion I want to build around."Contributing: AP ...read more read less