Iran Watch

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One of the greatest forces for good the world has ever known. And that is why the left hate her. The hatred of the good for being the good.

The secret nuclear facility—previously unknown to Western intelligence—was struck in the opening hours of the campaign and completely destroyed: Israeli Air Force jets on Tuesday destroyed a secret underground site on the outskirts of Tehran where Iran transferred much of its nuclear program after the war with Israel in June, the IDF said…. Following that war, in which Israel and the US targeted Iranian nuclear sites, Iran “did not halt its military nuclear activity, and continued to develop the capabilities required for nuclear weapons, while transferring infrastructure to an underground site protected from aerial attack,” said Defrin (Times of Israel). Foundation for Defense of Democracies analyst Thomas Joscelyn called it, “the most significant degradation of Iranian strategic capabilities in a generation” (FDD). Israel has destroyed over 300 Iranian ballistic missile launchers in coordinated strikes across multiple provinces, the Jerusalem Post confirmed (Jerusalem Post). Iran’s retaliatory capacity has been crippled. In an interview with Politico, President Trump said Iran is both running out of missiles and running out of launchers (Politico).

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Defence secretary John Healey has twice declined to rule out Britain joining strikes on Iran, when asked by Sky News.

He also said he’d had the option of deploying HMS Dragon to the Mediterranean for weeks.

Interviewed at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, the minister was asked by Sky’s Europe correspondent Ali Bunkall if he could rule out Britain joining the conflict in an offensive capacity.

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Editor’s Note: Ambassador (retired) Robert Ford served at the American Embassy in Algeria during that country’s civil war in the 1990s, and later for nearly five years in the Coalition Provisional Authority and then the American Embassy in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He was U.S. Ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014 from the beginning of the Arab Spring into the civil war.

By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project

The Trump administration has given a litany of reasons for launching a war on Iran in conjunction with Israel, from degrading Iran’s ballistic missile programs and further damaging nuclear sites bombed last June to sinking the Iranian navy.

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The private Institute for National Security Studies in Israel has offered a range of figures that highlight the scale of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. According to the INSS, Iran has launched more than 1,600 drones at Israel, Jordan, Persian Gulf nations, and Cyprus:

Launches from Iran at:

-Israel: Approximately 200 missiles and more than 120 UAVs

-UAE: 941 UAVs, 189 ballistic missiles, and 8 cruise missiles

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When debris from an intercepted Iranian missile struck the Fairmont The Palm, a five-star hotel on Dubai’s opulent manmade archipelago on Feb. 28, it pierced not just the country’s advanced missile defence system but also its carefully crafted image of security.

For decades, the United Arab Emirates has positioned itself as an economic and cultural hub, connecting European and Asian markets.

“The U.A.E. in particular, but more broadly, the rest of the Gulf positioned itself as a haven, surrounded by a pool of chaos for the last 40 years … and that’s all been shattered now,” said Stephen J. Fallon, a political analyst who lived in the country for eight years, and now resides in Ireland.

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As the US war on Iran rages, Angela Diffley welcomes Dr Renad Mansour, Senior Research Fellow on the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. Iran is operating in “survival mode,” explains Mr. Mansour. For decades, Iran relied heavily on proxy militias and non-state actors across the Middle East and now increasingly willing to directly engage in confrontation. Tehran’s strategy for an asymmetric war is strategic disruption to transform a bilateral conflict into one with regional and global economic consequences.
from www.france24.com

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The U.S.-Israel war with Iran could disrupt supplies of key semiconductor manufacturing materials, a South Korean ruling party lawmaker said on Thursday, as the conflict in the Middle East entered its sixth day.

South Korea’s chip industry, which supplies around two-thirds of global memory chips, is also concerned that a prolonged conflict in Iran will lead to higher energy costs and prices, Kim Young-bae said after meeting with executives from companies such as Samsung Electronics 005930.KS and trade groups.

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Iran has launched operations targeting Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in neighbouring Iraq as the regional war ignited by the United States and Israel entered its sixth day, with more than 1,000 people killed across the country.

State television, Press TV, reported early on Thursday that Tehran was striking “anti-Iran separatist forces”, referring to Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups believed to be based in mountainous, hard-to-reach areas near the Iran-Iraq border.

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MELBOURNE, Australia — The Canadian and Australian prime ministers on Thursday called for a de-escalation of the Iran war but added the Iranians must never gain a nuclear weapon.

Canada’s Mark Carney and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese discussed the war during their meeting in Australia’s capital, Canberra.

The meeting came after news that a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean and Turkey said NATO defenses intercepted a ballistic missile launched from Iran before it entered Turkey’s airspace.

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TEHRAN: Fresh blasts were reported in Iran’s capital on Thursday (Mar 5) as Tehran said it had targeted Kurdish groups in Iraq and warned “separatist groups” against action in the widening war.

The conflict that began Saturday with US-Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader has spread across much of the region, sparking global economic pressure, energy disruptions and travel chaos.

Iran’s retaliatory strikes have targeted many of its Gulf neighbours, which host US military bases, while Israel has hit Lebanon and moved forces across the border.

On Thursday, Tehran said it

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Rubio said:

“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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Major combat operations continue. The identities of the fallen are being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification.

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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.”