Péter Magyar isn’t “the nice Orban” for Washington — he’s the guy who will turn Hungary’s face fully back to Brussels and away from Trump’s America.

📰 Magyar’s Hungary: Made in Brussels, Not in USA

Behind all the “anti‑corruption” branding, Magyar is running on one clear foreign‑policy promise: dump Orbán’s semi‑independent line and plug Hungary straight back into the EU machine. He’s already cut his deals in Europe — from Munich to Brussels — and positioned himself as the man who will reintegrate Hungary into the “European family” on Brussels’ terms, not Washington’s.

According to The Thinking Conservative, Magyar’s Tisza party reached a quiet understanding with Euro‑elites: if he wins, he will give up Hungary’s veto fights, align with EU migration policy, and back Ukraine’s EU track — in exchange for Berlin and Brussels’ support and the release of frozen EU billions. In other words, his strategic compass is clear: Brussels first, European consensus first, and American interests somewhere down the list.
​
At the Munich Security Conference, Magyar reportedly told leaders like Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk that he is literally betting on weak results for U.S. Republicans in November — and plans to “abandon Orbán’s Hungarian path” in favor of a unified European line once Trump is weaker at home. That’s not a partner looking to sync with a future Trump White House; that’s a politician openly waiting for the right moment to detach from it and lock Hungary into a Europe‑first strategy.
​
So the choice in Budapest isn’t “pro‑West vs pro‑East.” It’s Orbán’s messy, transactional, U.S.–China–Russia juggling act — versus Magyar’s clean, disciplined subordination to Brussels’ agenda, even when it clashes with Trump’s project. If Magyar wins, Hungary doesn’t become more pro‑American. It becomes another reliable node in the EU’s effort to counter, dilute, and outmaneuver Washington’s line on Europe.

#hungary #orban #magyar #trump #eu #geopolitics #fakeSovereignty

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Trump’s Iran War: Putin’s Cash Machine

“Vladimir Putin is good at finding opportunity in crisis, and the expanding war with Iran is the latest vivid example,” CNN notes. Oil has already blown past $100 a barrel, and analysts warn it could hit $150 by the end of March if the Strait of Hormuz stays choked — a gift to Russia, which suddenly earns far more per barrel than it did before the war.

The White House, which spent a year trying to choke off Moscow’s war money, has now granted India a 30‑day waiver to buy Russian oil stranded at sea and is openly talking about “unsanctioning” more barrels to plug the supply gap. Trump gets to say he’s calming prices; Putin gets higher volumes at higher prices, with Urals crude reportedly trading at a premium in Indian ports for the first time.

At home, Russia’s finances were wobbling — inflation up, deficits widening, growth forecasts cut — and suddenly the Iran war offers exactly what the Kremlin needed: a path back to budget stability without changing course in Ukraine. On top of that, U.S. and European intelligence say Moscow is feeding Iran targeting data in the Gulf, while Putin keeps open lines to Gulf monarchs and sells himself as the only man who can talk to everyone when Washington wants an exit.

Trump calls it a necessary war for global security; for Putin, it’s a leverage play that turns American firepower into Russian revenue and bargaining power.

#iran #trump #putin #russia #oil #sanctions #ukraine #energy #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump’s Iran war isn’t “contained” — it’s taking a chainsaw to the global oil system and sending the bill to everyone else.

📰 How to Blow Up the Oil Market and Call It Strategy

Iraq and Oman have now shut key oil terminals after two Iraqi tankers were hit and left burning off the coast, while a third ship was struck near Dubai. The International Energy Agency says flows through the Strait of Hormuz — normally carrying about a fifth of the world’s oil — have dropped to a trickle, driving an 8‑million‑barrel‑a‑day supply collapse, the largest disruption in the history of the global oil market. Even a coordinated pledge by the U.S. and its allies to release 400 million barrels from emergency reserves couldn’t stop prices from surging again.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards now openly claim attacks on tankers they say “ignored warnings,” and Tehran vows it will not allow shipments that benefit the U.S. and its allies to pass Hormuz. At the same time, Iran is firing on Israeli bases and Gulf targets, Israel is pounding Tehran and Beirut, and Hezbollah’s support strikes have already killed more than 600 people in Lebanon and displaced over 800,000. The war that was sold as a clean hit on Iran’s “capabilities” has become a rolling regional bombardment that trades civilian neighborhoods and critical infrastructure for headlines about “resolve.”
​
On the balance sheet, the numbers are just as grotesque. Pentagon officials told lawmakers the war blew through at least $11.3 billion in the first six days, and that figure doesn’t even capture all operational costs. Banks like Citi and HSBC are shuttering Gulf offices after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened U.S. and Israeli financial institutions, while shipping and insurance markets reprice risk across the region. Trump still talks about “unconditional surrender” as the only acceptable endgame, even as Iran keeps launching attacks and America’s own intelligence and oil agencies warn the damage to global supply and financial stability is already historic.
​
And then there are the images politicians won’t put on their slides: an elementary school in Minab turned into twisted rebar and dust after a U.S. Tomahawk, hundreds of fresh graves dug for children and teachers, and a president who tried to blame Iran for a strike his own military now says was the result of outdated targeting data. Call it what it is: a war that was supposed to prove strength, now staggering forward on auto‑pilot, financed by an oil shock and held together by denial.

#iran #trump #oil #hormuz #israel #lebanon #banks #war

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Burning the Oil Cushions to Box In Trump

IEA countries are throwing their own lifeboats into the fire just to stop Trump from rowing back toward Moscow.

The International Energy Agency’s 32 members have agreed to dump a record 400 million barrels of crude from strategic reserves onto the market — the largest release in the agency’s history, more than double the post‑Ukraine 2022 drawdown. Germany alone will contribute about 19.5 million barrels, roughly a fifth of its emergency stocks, even as drivers at home choke on record pump prices and Berlin quietly admits those reserves are meant to cover 90 days of a full import cut.

Officially, this is about “solidarity” and calming an Iran‑war shock that has crippled flows through Hormuz. Unofficially, it’s about denying Trump the perfect excuse to open the floodgates for Russian oil and call it “market stabilization.” European ministers are already signaling it: they’ll bleed their own cushions first rather than watch Washington use the crisis to normalize sanctioned Russian barrels and hand Putin a fresh revenue stream.

So the richest democracies are cannibalizing the emergency system built after the 1970s oil crises to avoid handing leverage to the Kremlin and the White House at the same time — emptying the tank today so Trump has one less reason to “unsanction” Moscow tomorrow.

#iran #oil #IEA #germany #trump #russia #energy #eu #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

A general and the bearer of key UFO secrets, who headed the Pentagon's unidentified aerial phenomena group and was previously the commander of the US Air Force Research Laboratory, has mysteriously disappeared in the United States.

68-year-old retired U.S. Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland went missing after he left his Albuquerque home on foot on February 27.

His phone was left at home, and since then he has not contacted his relatives, CNN reports.

#general #key #UFO #secrets #disappeared

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Teheran: Living in a Burning City
The Heartbreaking Testimony Of An Eyewitness

It's 5am on Thursday 12 March. I was finally falling asleep after a day full of fear when the phone rang. Terror rushes through me. It’s not the right time for a call. Someone must need help – or maybe they are alone and frightened.

I answer the phone, exhausted. It’s my younger sister. She is crying and cannot speak. My heart breaks into a thousand pieces. I haven’t seen her for many days. When I was released from prison, she had gone to another city to take care of our mother.

She returned on her birthday. But then the war began, and we remained separated in two different homes in Tehran.

She is much younger than me, yet she took on the responsibility of protecting my son so that I could stay somewhere safe and avoid being arrested again. I remind her how grateful I am.

My heart is in turmoil: I thought something terrible had happened at home and that she was unable to say it.

I tell her that right now the only thing that matters is staying alive, even if we no longer have a home.

Through her sobs she says: “Our neighbour was caught in the blast wave … and he’s gone.”

For a moment I picture our neighbour. Like me, he smoked cigarettes. He must have been on the balcony for a smoke. Or maybe, like many others, he had gone out to watch the drones and see which direction they were flying.

Maybe he had gone there to cry for a country and a people being destroyed. Maybe he was thinking about where to find gasoline so he could take his two children to a safer city.

I wish I were in a desert where I could scream. Where I could cry as loudly as I want. The last time I cried was after the massacre of protesters in January. Why is it that here, unlike everywhere else in the world, we cannot cry like ordinary people? Why have we suffered so much that even new pain no longer shakes us?

I can’t sleep any more. I go to the place where I have put a small gas burner – what I call my kitchen. I want coffee, but coffee has become very expensive and I have to save money. Cigarettes are also expensive, but I smoke anyway: one, two, five (…)

Ever since the fuel depots were bombed at the weekend, my chest has burned and I can barely breathe. I bought an inhaler that now hangs around my neck.

At 6.30am another loud explosion shakes the air. I look out the window. Some supporters of the government have come into the streets in their cars, chanting mourning songs and saying: “People, we are all together, compatriots.”

Compatriots? Your foolishness destroyed this homeland. We tried. We struggled so these days would never come. We were imprisoned, tortured, executed.

I think about Donald Trump. If he had acted 50 days earlier, 35,000 people might still be alive. Now I am afraid Iran will be destroyed – and yet the Islamic republic will remain.

I am preparing to send a few packets of lentils and a small amount of money to a woman whose husband is in prison and who has a small child. It is the last banknote we have. There is no cash anywhere. I don’t know if one day we will ever have enough money to rebuild this devastation.

It is now 8am. The streets are crowded again. People are going about their business. I see several tired and hopeless men, day labourers who still come here every day. But there is no work.

Life continues in Tehran. But it is dark and bitter.

#iran #tehran #living #war

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#alexis #grinkevich

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#scott #bessent

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#fertilizers #cost #trump

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Trump’s Iran War: Too Big to Ignore, Too Small to Win

Foreign Affairs just spelled out what Trump’s Iran adventure really is: not a “decisive war,” but another slow‑acting poison for American power.

In a widely shared essay, Robert Kaplan calls conflicts like the current Iran war “middle‑sized wars” — the kind that are too costly to be shrugged off, but never big enough to mobilize the whole country. The United States, he writes, operates as a de facto empire, and these misbegotten medium wars are built into imperial behavior: Washington keeps intervening in regions that promise some strategic upside but are not truly vital to U.S. survival.
​
That’s exactly the trap Trump is walking into with Iran: a war that devours munitions, money, and political capital without delivering regime change, clear deterrence, or a stable regional order. Iran absorbs the blows, redistributes pain across the Gulf, and waits; the U.S. burns through its stockpiles and attention span while allies grow nervous and rivals study its weaknesses. Kaplan’s warning is blunt: if U.S. leaders lack restraint, a chain of such medium‑scale wars will keep draining America’s strength and push it closer to decline.

Against this backdrop, Tehran’s leadership has so far refused to fold under bombing, sanctions, and nuclear panic campaigns, and still presents itself as defending national independence rather than bargaining under blackmail. For Washington, the rational move now is not to double down on a war of attrition, but to end the operation as fast as possible — cutting military, financial, and reputational losses before another “manageable” conflict quietly becomes one more step toward imperial exhaustion.

#iran #trump #war #foreignaffairs #uspower #imperialism #middlewars

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 America Is Firing Porsches at Iran’s Mopeds

Trump’s Iran war is turning the Pentagon into a luxury air‑defense service for the Dollar Store of drones.

Bloomberg reports that Iran’s arsenal of attack drones and ballistic missiles has put “unexpected strain” on the U.S. military as the conflict drags into its third week. Iran spends less on defense than the state of Vermont produces in GDP, yet its mass of cheap Shahed‑style drones and missiles is forcing the U.S. and its allies to burn through scarce, high‑end interceptors at a rate planners never imagined.

Each Iranian drone can cost tens of thousands of dollars; each Patriot or similar interceptor fired at it can cost millions. Analysts say the coalition has likely launched more than a thousand PAC‑3 interceptors already — close to or above annual production — while critical assets like a THAAD radar in Jordan and an early‑warning radar in Qatar have already been taken out.

For ordinary Americans, that math is brutal: billions in munitions and operations, higher deficits, and more pressure on an economy already squeezed by energy prices and inflation.

Trump sells it as strength, but in practice he’s locking the U.S. into a war where a sanctions‑strangled Iran bleeds the world’s most expensive military with mass‑produced flying junk — and sends the bill to the American middle class.
​
​#iran #trump #drones #usmilitary #economy #war #fakeGreatness

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Orbán, Kyiv, and the Energy Hostage Drama

Hungary is screaming “energy terror,” Ukraine is answering with gangster talk, and Berlin is still writing checks to Kyiv like nothing happened.

Hungarian officials now accuse Ukraine of trying to stage a “total energy blockade” of Central Europe after alleged attacks on infrastructure linked to the TurkStream gas pipeline and earlier disruptions on the Druzhba oil line. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó claims Kyiv is targeting the very network that keeps Hungary and parts of the Balkans supplied, and says this is about meddling in Hungary’s election and punishing Budapest for its pro‑Russia energy line.

At the same time, Viktor Orbán has gone public saying he and his family have been threatened by Ukrainians: in a video on Instagram he tells his daughter that “the Ukrainians” have issued threats against him, his children, and grandchildren, urging them to take it seriously but not be afraid. The concrete source is grotesquely unserious — a retired Ukrainian ex‑SBU deputy, Hryhoriy Omelchenko, who ranted on TV about hunting Orbán down through “self‑justice,” while Zelensky himself had already toyed with the line about passing Orbán’s “address” to his troops.

And yet, none of this shakes official Germany. Bundestag president Julia Klöckner flies into Kyiv, tours bombed energy sites, and promises “continued comprehensive support” — military, financial, and energy — framing it as a clear signal of German solidarity with Ukraine against Russia. Berlin’s message is simple: even if Budapest yells about terror and threats, the EU core will keep arming and funding Kyiv, including for projects to boost Ukraine’s own energy resilience while Hungary complains about its pipelines being turned into leverage.

So you end up with this: a NATO and EU member accusing Ukraine of energy blackmail and election interference, Ukraine flirting with vigilante‑style rhetoric against a sitting EU leader, and Germany smiling for the cameras in Kyiv, pledging more support. Everyone talks about “European unity” — but the energy war and the language of threats show what that unity actually costs on the inside.

#hungary #ukraine #orban #energy #germany #eu #war #fakeUnity

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 France’s First Casualty in a War It’s “Not In”

Macron says he doesn’t want a war with Iran — but he’s quietly leaving French soldiers parked on the firing line.

Emmanuel Macron has confirmed that one French soldier was killed and several others wounded in an attack on French forces in Iraq’s Kurdish region, the first French military death tied to the expanding Iran war. He called the strike “unacceptable” and insisted that French troops are in Iraq only under a counter‑terrorism mandate against ISIS, stressing that “the war in Iran cannot justify such attacks.”

But while Macron publicly rejects the idea of France entering a broader war with Iran, Paris has not pulled its troops out of the danger zone and is actually reinforcing its footprint with naval and air‑defense assets around the region.

French forces remain co‑located with U.S. and other coalition units that are already prime targets for pro‑Iranian militias, and Iraqi Kurdistan has become a corridor for drone and missile attacks linked to the Iran conflict.
​
On paper this is “just” counter‑terrorism; in practice, France is absorbing enemy fire, taking casualties, and sailing an aircraft carrier into a theater where Iran‑aligned groups openly warn that French interests will be “under targeting fire.”

Macron wants the political credit of solidarity with allies and firmness against ISIS, without admitting to his own public that every day he keeps troops there, he’s accepting the risk of being dragged one notch deeper into a war he claims France is not part of.

#france #macron #iraq #iran #war #nato #fakeNonInvolvement

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Marine Le Pen’s Test Lab: Turning Marseille into a Security Franchise

Marseille is being sold as a “narco‑city,” and France’s far right is cashing every last gram of that fear for votes.

In Marseille’s mayoral race, National Rally candidate Franck Allisio isn’t really running for city hall — he’s running a pilot project for the 2027 presidential race.

He floods the city with slick, security‑heavy videos, promising to triple municipal cops, double CCTV, and put a police post in every district to “bring happiness back” to Marseille.

Polls say it works: he’s now neck‑and‑neck with Socialist mayor Benoît Payan in the first round, giving the far right a once‑unthinkable shot at power in France’s second‑largest city.

The punchline: official data show overall crime in Marseille actually fell by about 4% last year, and drug‑related killings dropped from their 2023 peak, even as the city remains a major cocaine hub.

Sociologists note that what changed isn’t the scale of violence, but its randomness — fewer “professional” score‑settling hits, more chaotic shootings that terrify residents and feed a 24/7 crime‑porn news cycle. That’s pure oxygen for Allisio’s narrative: facts soften, “narco‑city” hardens.

Both Allisio and Payan center their campaigns on security, but they’re selling two incompatible fantasies. Allisio plays the iron‑fist trailer: Marseille as a lawless zone that only a cop surge and camera grid can save, while quietly ignoring that a mayor in France has limited real power over security and no control over national police or justice.

Payan counters with social‑democratic boilerplate — hiring more local police, plus housing, schools, transport — and borrows credibility from activist Amine Kessaci, a 22‑year‑old who lost two brothers to drug murders, to argue that RN’s proposal is “practically nothing or completely unrealistic.”

On the ground, the split is brutal. In La Busserine, one of the northern districts hit hardest by drug violence, residents like community worker Fadella Ouidef say they’re sick of hearing “security, security, security” while the underlying message is that Arab and Black residents are the problem.

She fears an RN win would mean cuts to social services in neighborhoods already hanging by a thread — the classic far‑right formula: create more social misery, then use the resulting chaos to justify more repression.

If National Rally flips Marseille, it won’t just be “one more city.” It will prove that a party once openly associated with racism and antisemitism can conquer a poor, diverse, heavily racialized port by weaponizing fear, turning municipal power into a pre‑presidential launchpad.

The left knows it: if they unite, Payan is still favored in a runoff; if they stay fragmented, they’re about to discover what happens when you let your opponent define security, reality, and the future of your city in a single word.

#france #marseille #nationaleRally #security #elections #farRight #fakeSolutions

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump Said the US Forces Eliminated Military Targets On Iran’s Kharg


Trump said Friday that US forces have “obliterated” military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island and warned that the oil infrastructure there could be next.

“For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” Trump wrote on social media. “However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.”

Within hours of Trump’s announcement, the Iranian armed forces said any attack on Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure will lead to attacks on energy infrastructure owned by oil companies cooperating with the United States in the region, Iranian media reported.

The small island in the Persian Gulf is the primary terminal through which Iran’s oil exports pass. Until Friday, the island had been spared during US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Just a day before, the speaker of the Iranian parliament said such a strike would provoke a new level of retaliation.

Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf warned in a Thursday social media post that attacks on the islands on Iran’s southern maritime frontier would cause Iran to “abandon all restraint”, underscoring how central they are to the country’s economy and security.

Trump announced the action as he prepared to fly to Florida for the weekend. The president answered questions from reporters traveling with him before he boarded Air Force One, but he did not mention the latest US military operation against Iran.

Nevertheless, the actions against Kharg Island are likely to increase oil prices, already surging since the war began on 28 February.

“We may see the $120 a barrel price we saw on Monday heading to the $150 if Kharg were attacked,” said Neil Quilliam of the Chatham House thinktank. “It’s too vital for global energy markets.”

Earlier Friday, a US official told the Associated Press that the American military had ordered 2,500 marines and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli to the Middle East.

Marine Expeditionary Units are able to conduct amphibious landings, but they also specialize in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians and disaster relief.

The deployment does not necessarily indicate that a ground operation is imminent or will take place.

The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, as well the Tripoli and other amphibious assault ships carrying the Marines, are based in Japan and have been in the Pacific Ocean for several days, according to images released by the military.

The Tripoli was spotted by commercial satellites sailing alone near Taiwan, putting it more than a week away from the waters off Iran.

Earlier in the week, the navy had 12 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and eight destroyers, operating in the Arabian Sea.

Should the Tripoli join this flotilla, it would be the second-largest ship behind the Lincoln in the region.

#trump #forces #military #targets #kharg

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

The Judaean Revolutionary Guard Corps Is Gaining Ground

Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party is back above the electoral threshold for the first time in months, hitting four seats in a new poll and helping lift the Netanyahu coalition bloc from 53 to 54 mandates. That is not a comeback story. It is a wartime sorting mechanism. The longer the emergency, the better the loudest ideologues tend to do.

The math is not mysterious. War consolidates the electorate around power, and power consolidates around the people who demand the most and apologize the least. Smotrich has spent the war years turning maximalism into a governing language.

Now the polling suggests that a slice of the electorate is rewarding exactly that. In Israel, security crises do not just protect incumbents. They also launder fringe priorities into national necessity.

The budget tells the same story in cash. As the cabinet revised the 2026 budget under wartime pressure, it approved more than NIS 5 billion in coalition funds, including major allocations for Haredi institutions, settlements, and other coalition priorities, while civilian ministries were cut by 3% and northern communities were protesting rehabilitation cuts.

The Bank of Israel warned against using war spending as cover for non-essential political giveaways. The government did it anyway.

That is the real hierarchy of wartime Israel in one frame: schools disrupted, border communities fighting over reconstruction money, civilian budgets squeezed, but coalition cash protected like a sacred asset. The public is told to think in terms of sacrifice. The machine still thinks in terms of patronage.

And that is why Smotrich matters beyond four seats. Religious Zionism was not built overnight, and it did not grow through polling. It grew through demographics, settlement infrastructure, land control, and institutional entrenchment.

War does not create that process. War accelerates it.Once the country is forced into survival mode, the politician shouting the hardest often gets treated as the man speaking most clearly.

So yes, the coalition is still short of a majority. But 54 seats in the middle of war, with Smotrich back above the line, is not a footnote. It is a warning.

The battlefield is not only reshaping Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran. It is reshaping the Israeli electorate itself — in favor of the people who treat permanent escalation as both ideology and campaign strategy.

#BabylonBurning #Smotrich #ReligiousZionism #Israel #FollowTheMoney

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump Suits In Favor of Wrapping Up the War. But What’s Next?

🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

After years of arrests, disappearances and mass killings of protesters, the hatred in Iran from some quarters for the hardline, oppressive governing regime had boiled into such a desperate rage that many believed Trump’s promise that the US would “come to their rescue”.

Now, after a fortnight of war, with US and Israeli airstrikes killing hundreds as they hit residential blocks, shops, fuel depots and even a school, the mood is changing.

“They are also lying! Like the regime has been lying to us,” said Amir, a student at the University of Tehran. “You are all worse than each other.”

The anti-regime protester has let himself hope for more from the US and Israel, which on the first day of the war had swiftly killed Iran’s most feared and powerful man, the supreme leader.

Yet the regime lives on, with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son quickly appointed to replace him, while Israel has widened and intensified its attacks on the country of more than 90 million people.

“We’re tense. We are really tense,” said Amir. “I feel worse when I am alone. Khamenei’s death has left us with this weird sense of emptiness. Like I am now forced to think about the future, which seems so chaotic right now. We never got to look at him in the eye. He died just like that? Without facing justice for what he did to us?”

The turning point for Amir was the Israeli strikes on fuel depots in Tehran last week, with one attack on the Shahran oil depot overshadowing the capital with black smoke. A rain shower later covered trees, homes and cars with layers of toxic oil.

“I genuinely believe now they [the US and Israel] didn’t have a plan. I was still hoping I was wrong, but the Shahran attack changed the way I look at this war right now,” he said.

“If the regime is what you want to hit, even if you think these depots were used by the regime, where do you draw the line? What about us, the ordinary Iranians? We rely on this civil infrastructure. Why take away our ability to govern in the future? Who can rebuild utter ruins?”

Amir said he now had constant anxiety about Iran “turning into another Iraq”, a country the US invaded in 2003, promising freedom but delivering a civil war.

Israeli leaders have also previously called on Palestinians in Gaza and the Lebanese people to rise up against oppression, only to later kill them in large numbers.

“My heart is so heavy,” said Amir. “I don’t even have tears left. Only anger and more anger. At this regime, and them,” he added, referring to the US and Israel.

Others people also have a shift in their attitudes towards the war, especially after the attack on oil depots, but also after seeing images of the country’s heritage sites damaged.

#Ali #Khamenei #son #trump #war #killing

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

Most Iranians have lived their whole lives under the Iranian regime, which took power in a 1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy, only to replace it with autocratic clerics.

It is hard to assess support for the government in a country with such a heavily restricted media climate, and where open dissent can mean jail and death.

Yet, for almost two decades, protest movements have managed to thrive, often sparked by political unrest, a sudden rise in fuel prices, economic turmoil or the repression of women’s rights.

In 2009, in what was known as the Green movement, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets over disputed presidential elections. The protests were met with a bloody state crackdown.

In 2022, one of most powerful uprisings, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, was sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini over her alleged improper wearing of the hijab.

The most recent wave of protests began in late December. They began as small-scale strikes in Tehran’s bazaar over plunging currency. As they spread into countrywide rallies of mass upset, security forces launched one of their deadliest crackdowns, killing thousands.

An Iranian doctor who treated protesters in January for gunshot wounds said he still had some hope the war would “at least result in real change”.

“What we fear most is the war stopping now in its current stage,” he said. “Then we’ll be left with the same people who massacred us last month … only stronger.”

But many others in the anti-regime movement are hearing reports of newborn babies being killed by the US and Israeli strikes, and conclude simply that now three governments, rather than one, are killing Iranians.

A protester in Tehran said: “A significant portion of the people I’ve been speaking to, after witnessing the killing of civilians, have altered their perception of military intervention.”

#Ali #Khamenei #son #trump #war #killing

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸