Iran War
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It’s not exactly a secret that war can have a debilitating, caustic effect on the economy.
So when Operation Epic Fury commenced over the weekend — which saw joint U.S. and Israeli forces successfully kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as much of Tehran’s leadership infrastructure — it was only logical for people to assume that the markets would have a volatile and negative weekend.
According to The Wall Street Journal, those wringing their hands were only half right.
The Middle East conflict lifted oil, and stocks rebounded from early declines Monday, with investors saying hostilities, if brief, are unlikely to severely hurt the economy. https://t.co/ZdDhCivC3c
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 2, 2026
Masih Alinejad returned to the headlines after posting an emotional video reacting to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. “Finally, you’re dead, finally, you’re gone, Ali Khamenei,” she said, her voice breaking. In the same clip, she is seen hugging strangers in New York. For Alinejad, those embraces were not theatrical. They were, as she later explained, acts of survival.Responding to comments about “hugging strangers”, she wrote that when you live in exile and cannot safely hug your own mother, strangers stop feeling like strangers. The people she embraced, she said, saw both joy and grief on her face. “That’s not performance. That’s survival.” She added that America had saved her life three times and that the people around her have become her new family. For Alinejad, developments in Iran are never abstract political events.
The Israeli government says it has authorised its forces to advance into Lebanon and “take control of additional areas” to prevent Hezbollah using them to fire into Israeli border settlements as part of Operation Roaring Lion, Jerusalem’s counterpart of the American Operation Epic Fury.
Israel is reacting to the decision “of the Hezbollah terror organization to join the campaign of the Iranian terror regime” and is moving forward to occupy land used to launch attacks against Israeli border communities, they said on Tuesday morning. Air raid sirens sounded in the north of Israel again on Tuesday morning as Hezbollah rocket attacks, launched from inside Lebanon, struck the Galilee area, The Times of Israel reported.
Despite there still being quite a bit of dust left to settle, it appears Operation Epic Fury is fully living up to its name.
The joint military effort between the U.S. and Israel successfully neutralized the now-deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the weekend — and that earth-shattering salvo appears to be just the tip of the spear.
According to Fox News, President Donald Trump spoke on the aftermath and fallout of Operation Epic Fury, and it appears there’s still a lot of work to do.
FOX NEWS REPORT: President Trump says Operation Epic Fury is progressing faster than expected as more than 1,200 Iranian targets have been struck, including the country’s entire naval fleet of 11 ships. Iran has responded with strikes on at least nine countries across the region,… pic.twitter.com/NGnuB6QbHW
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 2, 2026
“We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration believed that Israel was imminently planning to strike Iran before the US authorized Operation Epic Fury. “Was there an imminent threat? Did you tell lawmakers there was an imminent threat?” A reporter asked.
“There absolutely was an imminent threat,” Rubio said. “And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first, after they were attacked by someone else, [if] Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths,” Rubio said.
Police identified the victim as 30-year-old Jorge Pederson.
The Austin Police Department announced on Monday night that a third victim has succumbed to his injuries in the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting.
Police identified the victim as 30-year-old Jorge Pederson. Sources told KVUE that Pederson was taken off life support earlier in the day. The other victims who died in the shooting have been identified as 19-year-old Texas Tech student Ryder Harrington and 21-year-old University of Texas student Savitha Shan.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte voiced unequivocal support Monday for President Donald Trump’s military strikes on Iran, declaring that America’s allies stand united as Tehran escalates missile retaliation across the region.
“There is no sliver of light between us,” Rutte said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“The Europeans, Canada, Mark Carney, the United States, the American president… All for one, one for all, because everybody supports, here in Europe, the fact that [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei is gone, that the nuclear capability is gone, that the ballistic missile program has been now degraded,” he said.
One of Iran’s nuclear facilities was damaged in the strikes orchestrated by Israel and the United States over the weekend, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed on Tuesday morning.
The Natanz Nuclear Facility in Iran’s Isfahan province was targeted during joint military operations, said Reza Najafi, Iran’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA confirmed the subsequent damage from the strikes on Tuesday morning in a social media post on X.
Based on the latest available satellite imagery, IAEA can now confirm some recent damage to entrance buildings of Iran’s underground Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP). No radiological consequence expected and no additional impact detected at FEP itself, which was severely… pic.twitter.com/7CS7BRZo1s
— IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency ⚛️ (@iaeaorg) March 3, 2026
Secretary of State Marco Rubio expanded on the reasons why the Trump administration chose to launch Operation Epic Fury against Iran, including knowing that Israel already planned an operation.
“So, the United States conducted this operation with a very clear goal in mind. I haven’t gotten a chance to see a lot of reporting. I don’t understand what the confusion is. Let me explain it to you and I’ll do it, once again, as clearly as possible. Perhaps you’ll report it that way. The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets. That is what it is focused on doing right now and it’s doing quite successfully. I will leave it to the Pentagon and the Department of War to discuss the tactics behind that and the progress being made. That is the clear objective of this mission.”
“The second question that’s been asked is, why now? Well, there’s two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that, if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. The orders have been delegated down to the field commanders, it was automatic and in fact, it beared to be true because, in fact, the — within one hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to la launch. In fact, those are even pre-positioned.”
“The third is the assessment that was made that, if we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties and so, the President made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces and we knew that, if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”
BREAKING: Secretary of State Marco Rubio on why the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran…
“So, the United States conducted this operation with a very clear goal in mind. I haven’t gotten a chance to see a lot of reporting. I don’t understand what the confusion is.… pic.twitter.com/qu9bRli2n2
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 2, 2026
Because Iran has previously demonstrated its willingness to close the key trade route through the Strait of Hormuz, some media outlets are speculating that oil prices could soar to $100 a barrel or higher. They argue that this could cause a recession in the United States, which would spread across the global economy.
These fears are misplaced. Yes, the price of Brent Crude, the global benchmark, has climbed sharply to around $75 to $78 a barrel. But from the standpoint of economic activity, that is not a particularly troubling price. Several times in the past five years, Brent has traded above $90 a barrel without causing a recession in the U.S. or globally. World markets can weather oil prices in the $70s.
The Pentagon said that Iran is getting pummeled by suicide drones using technology that Iran itself developed and used against U.S. allies, including Ukraine.
The U.S. attacked leaders and commanders of the Iranian regime in a joint operation with Israeli forces beginning Saturday morning. President Donald Trump said Monday that the operation was planned to last four weeks but that the military was prepared to continue “for as long as necessary.”
Ndiaga Diagne killed two people and wounded over a dozen more after he opened fire at a bar in Austin on Sunday. During his murderous rampage, he chose a sweatshirt that said “Property of Allah” and a shirt similar to the Iranian flag. Common sense would tell you this was a blatant act of terrorism. Thus, this should be condemned by all elected officials for the sake of the matter that terrorism is bad. Jasmine Crockett, however, did not want to waste time with that and instead thought it was the perfect moment to blame white people for mass shootings.
First, she claimed that the “facts are the facts,” which she then proceeded to mention zero facts. All she did was repeat the leftist lie that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens. While she didn’t say “illegal immigrants,” the left uses the term interchangeably, which is why we know what she meant. This is disproven by the fact that they arrive here committing a crime by not following federal immigration laws. However, considering she’s so stupid and believes illegal immigration is not a crime, she said what she said.
As the joint US-Israeli Operation Epic Fury continues to defang the Islamic Republic of Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday evening and said it had to be done now — before it was simply too late.
President Trump fired back hard at political commentator Megyn Kelly after she claimed on her SiriusXM show that the U.S. service members killed in the ongoing Iran conflict “did not die for the United States.”
It is extremely unlikely that the Islamic Republic of Iran can survive both this decimation of its leadership and the hatred of its people. The world owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to President Trump, although the left continues to excoriate him for taking out one of its favorite tyrants. The left loves oppression and bloodshed and will bring both to the U.S. if it regains the presidency.
“Trump to Fox News: 49 leaders taken out in Iran,” Fox News, March 2, 2026:
President Donald Trump told Fox News that the U.S. and Israel killed 49 of Iran’s most senior leaders in the opening strike of Operation Epic Fury on Saturday morning….
Trump told Baier that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meeting with his inner circle for breakfast on the morning of the attack, thinking they were safe because it was in broad daylight.
“It was 49 leaders that were taken out. That was going to take four weeks, we thought, to get rid of the Iranian leadership. And it’s always, you know, if they hide, it’s a lot longer than four weeks. And they would have been hiding,” Trump told Baier. “We were shocked when we heard what was going on. We knew exactly what was happening and where.”
REUTERS—The United States will take action to mitigate rising energy prices due to a spike in the price of oil caused by the Iran conflict, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday.
Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Rubio said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright would announce the plans on Tuesday.
“Starting tomorrow, you will see us rolling out those phases to try to mitigate against that … We anticipated this could be an issue,” Rubio said.
Two more U.S. service members have been killed during Iran’s retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli strikes over the weekend.
U.S. Central Command said that the bodies of two previously unaccounted for soldiers were retrieved from a facility struck by Iran.
Read CENTCOM’s full update here:
CENTCOM Update
TAMPA, Fla. – As of 4 pm ET, March 2, six U.S. service members have been killed in action. U.S. forces recently recovered the remains of two previously unaccounted for service members from a facility that was struck during Iran’s initial attacks in the region.…
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 2, 2026
CENTCOM Update
TAMPA, Fla. – As of 4 pm ET, March 2, six U.S. service members have been killed in action. U.S. forces recently recovered the remains of two previously unaccounted for service members from a facility that was struck during Iran’s initial attacks in the region.
Major combat operations continue. The identities of the fallen are being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification.
The Washington Post and New York Times are facing a furious backlash after publishing glowing eulogies for the Iranian regime’s slain dictator, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Post, opening its obituary of Khamenei with language that softened the image of a brutal regime figure responsible for decades of repression and bloodshed.
Khamenei, who was killed Saturday during “Operation Epic Fury,” a coordinated U.S.–Israeli strike on Tehran, was described by the Post as having a “bushy white beard and an easy smile.”
Two Iranian drones attacked the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on Monday night.
Since the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes wreaked havoc on Iran, killing many Islamic Republic military leaders including the country’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Tehran has hit back with a series of counterattacks on U.S. personnel and allies in the region.
Little information on the attack is available as of yet, though CNN’s Nic Robertson was live reporting on the incident Monday night from Riyadh.
BREAKING: The US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has just been hit by multiple Iranian drones.
Good Tuesday morning.
Here is what’s on President Trump’s agenda today:
8:00 AM THE PRESIDENT participates in Executive Time
11:00 AM THE PRESIDENT participates in a Greeting with the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of German
11:15 AM THE PRESIDENT participates in a Bilateral Meeting
Tehran is demanding unity and projecting strength after the confirmed killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But Iran’s women’s national soccer team just chose silence during the anthem of the Islamic Republic.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is warning that Islamic extremists may launch lone wolf terror attacks as President Donald Trump’s administration intensifies its military campaign against the brutal Iranian regime.
Meanwhile, the FBI remains on heightened alert as U.S. forces deploy to the Middle East.
A senior FBI official said the Bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) remains on high alert nationwide, with all resources prepared to respond if requested by law enforcement partners.
President Trump and Israel have decapitated Iran—literally. Its ballistic missile capabilities have been severely degraded. Its political leadership was annihilated, and its military command structure was eliminated. It’s a rogue state for all intents and purposes. The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism is no more, its nuclear weapons ambitions buried under the rubble of its dead leaders, and only the Democrats are complaining.
Even if these talks happen, it is virtually certain that the president will not lose sight of the ultimate goal, which remains to topple the Islamic regime in Iran once and for all. If the regime survives in any form, it will gather its strength and once again menace the U.S. and Israel as quickly as it possibly can. The only way to ensure peace in the region is to end this evil regime.
“‘I Have Agreed’: Trump Says Iran’s New Leaders ‘Want To Talk,’” by Mark Tanos, Daily Caller, March 1, 2026:
President Donald Trump said Sunday that Iran’s newly installed leadership wants to resume negotiations, one day after a massive U.S.-Israeli military operation killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” Trump told The Atlantic in a phone call from Mar-a-Lago. “They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”
Trump faulted Tehran for stalling weeks of diplomatic efforts and acknowledged that several Iranian officials who participated in those discussions died in the strikes. “Most of those people are gone,” he told the magazine. “They played too cute.” He declined to specify when negotiations would begin.
If you thought The Washington Post’s infamous decision to describe ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” was a once in a lifetime lapse in editorial judgement, you were mistaken. With the death of Iran’s brutal dictatorial supreme leader, both The New York Times and The Post are back to remind you that legacy media still has no shame.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s longtime supreme leader responsible for executions, censorship, repression, and sponsoring terrorist groups worldwide, was killed in an airstrike on Saturday. His death comes weeks after his regime oversaw the execution of tens of thousands of Iranians who took to the streets to protest his very rule.
President Donald Trump stated Monday that the “big wave” of U.S. military strikes against Iran is yet to come, indicating that the most intense phase of Operation Epic Fury is imminent.
The joint U.S.-Israel military operation was launched on Saturday, targeting Iran’s military and leadership infrastructure. Under the direction of President Trump, the operation began with coordinated strikes on key Iranian sites using precision munitions from air, sea, and land platforms, including Tomahawk cruise missiles and low-cost LUCAS drones.
Key objectives of Operation Epic Fury include dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile capabilities, eliminating regime leadership, and achieving regime change.
In a moment few would have predicted in one of America’s most reliably Democratic strongholds, ABC7 Los Angeles reported that support for President Donald Trump is growing among some Iranian Americans following the U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader.
During a weekend broadcast, ABC7 Eyewitness News showed hundreds gathered outside the federal building in Westwood, waving American, Israeli, and pre-1979 Iranian flags. The rally came after coordinated U.S.–Israeli strikes targeted senior Iranian leadership and military infrastructure in Tehran and other key cities.
President Donald Trump declared Monday that the joint U.S.–Israeli military campaign against Iran represents “our last, best chance to strike” and eliminate what he called the “intolerable threats” posed by the regime in Tehran.
The operation, launched Saturday under the name Operation Epic Fury, has already reshaped the strategic landscape.
Major Iranian leaders were killed in the opening phase, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Trump vowed the United States will continue the campaign with “ferocious, unyielding resolve.”