📰 The Anti‑Shia Jihad Franchise

While everyone is watching Trump, Netanyahu and oil charts, the ground war is quietly being outsourced to the old jihadist underworld. The Syrian army and security services are absorbing radical fighters — including ex‑ISIS — just as thousands of detainees are moved out of camps and prisons under U.S. supervision into Iraqi facilities. “Stability” now means recycling the same militants in a new uniform.
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At the same time, the U.N. Security Council removes Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham from its sanctions list, lifting penalties from what was yesterday a jihadist outfit and today is rebranded governance. The decision lands the very day before the Iran strikes, legitimizing a Sunni hard‑line authority in Syria at the exact moment a U.S.-Israeli war starts to target the Shia axis in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq. Call it timing, or call it a portfolio rebalance in the regional proxy market.
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On the Lebanese front, Hezbollah rockets give Israel the excuse for massive bombardment of Shia areas; entire districts are hit, tens of thousands displaced in days. In one border village, Israeli soldiers leave graffiti in Hebrew — “the only good Shia is a dead Shia” — a slogan documented by NPR long before this war and now resurfacing almost word for word in new reports from the current operations. The message isn’t “precision,” it’s sect.
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Layered on top is open religious framing: Syrian officers calling this a sacred war against Shia, Saudi clerics blessing “noble jihad,” American Christian nationalists around the Pentagon talking about crusades and Armageddon, Israeli leaders invoking Amalek on Purim as missiles fall on Iranian cities. Sunni jihadists, Christian nationalists and messianic Zionists all sell different brands — but the product is the same: a holy war that conveniently aligns with their regimes’ interests.
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If this is “regional security architecture,” then jihad is just another subcontractor, hired when things need to get uglier than press conferences can admit.

#iran #syria #lebanon #hezbollah #israel #isis #jihad #religion #war #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Project 2025, Trump’s War and Bibi’s ‘New Middle East’

On paper, the Iran war looks chaotic. On closer reading, it’s disturbingly coherent. Three U.S. documents — Project 2025, the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy — stack neatly under Netanyahu’s “New Middle East” blueprint like ideology, strategy and execution.
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Project 2025 lays out the political theology. It demands unconditional support for Israel, defunding the Palestinian Authority, maximum pressure on Iran, shelving the Kurds in favor of Turkey, locking in Saudi normalization and building a Middle East “Quad” of Israel, Egypt, the Gulf and India. By March 2026, every point is either implemented or in motion: Israel as the one ally exempt from “paying for its own defense,” Iran under sanctions and bombardment, the Palestinians reduced to a budget line marked “cut.”
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NSS 2025 then reframes the region as solved and outsourced. Iran is mentioned just three times in 29 pages, the Gaza war is treated as wrapped, normalization as expanding, and the expectation is clear: Israel and Gulf monarchies will “take the lead” on Iran while the U.S. pivots to China and the Western Hemisphere. That is exactly Netanyahu’s dream setting — Washington steps back, Israel becomes the primary security contractor with a standing license for “any measures it deems necessary,” paid for by regional clients and backed by U.S. cover fire.
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NDS 2026 turns the theory into targeting folders. It boasts that operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER “destroyed” Iran’s nuclear program and that the “axis of resistance” has been “devastated,” and it names Israel a “model ally” that can fight with “critical but limited” U.S. support. Gulf states are told to buy more American systems and “do more” for their own defense, while Washington reserves the right to “focused, decisive action” — in other words, occasional heavy strikes while locals carry the long war.
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Read against Netanyahu’s three versions of the “New Middle East” — the IMEC trade corridor without Palestine, the blessing‑versus‑curse map with open regime‑change talk, and now a shooting war meant to “change the face of the region” by breaking the resistance axis — the alignment is suspiciously coherent. One ecosystem writes the ideological manual, the next declares the problem solved and delegated, and the last gives Israel maximum autonomy to remake the map by force, with no exit plan anywhere in the paperwork.

#israel #iran #trump #netanyahu #Project2025 #NSS2025 #NDS2026 #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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#hegseth #strikes #civilians

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Trump Is About To Wrap Up the War In Iran. But Did He Win?

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Trump has said that the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much”, as the economic toll of the joint US-Israeli operation has risen, disrupting global oil trade and threatening to engulf the Middle East in a regional war.

Trump made the comments before a speech and press conference in Florida where he sought to emphasise that the US military campaign would be ending soon amid concerns from Republican allies that the US was being dragged into another long-term conflict in the region.

“I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said in a phone call with CBS News. “They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force.”

Addressing Republicans on Monday afternoon, he said: “We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion.”

But he also indicated he was not yet declaring the US mission accomplished in Iran. “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he said.

US and Israeli warplanes launched new waves of strikes on targets across Iran on Monday, as large crowds took to the streets in Tehran in a defiant show of support for Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s newly appointed supreme leader.

In Lebanon, Israel pressed its offensive against Hezbollah with raids in the south and airstrikes in Beirut, while an Iranian missile was shot down over Turkey. As drone strikes were reported in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Macron, said France and its allies were preparing a “defensive” mission to the Gulf protect oil supplies.

In Tehran’s Enghelab Square on Monday, thousands gathered to offer allegiance to Iran’s new supreme leader, hours after the appointment was formally announced.

Chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel,” and “God is Great,” some waved Iranian flags, others banners bearing the portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the new leader’s father, who was killed after 37 years in power by an Israeli airstrike in the first moments of the war. Armoured vehicles lined nearby roads and security personnel were stationed on the rooftops of surrounding buildings.

Another member, Mohsen Heydari, said the late Ali Khamenei had recommended the selection of the candidate who is “hated by the enemy”.

Israel said it will target Iran’s new supreme leader, while the US president, Donald Trump, who has dismissed the younger Khamenei as a “lightweight”, criticised Mojtaba’s selection.

“I think they made a big mistake,” Trump told NBC. “I don’t know if it’s going to last. I think they made a mistake.”

The defiant rhetoric in Tehran and the appointment of Khamenei, who is seen by analysts as a hardliner with close ties to the Revolutionary Guards, intensified fears that the conflict could last for weeks or even months and leave deep instability in its wake. Stock markets across the world fell sharply on Monday after oil prices surged.

But after surging as high as $119.50 per barrel, the oil price fell back down after Trump suggested the war could end “very soon”.

Iran’s attacks in the strait of Hormuz have all but stopped tankers from using the key shipping lane through which a fifth of the world’s oil is carried.

Speaking during a visit to Cyprus to discuss regional security, Macron said a new naval mission would be aimed at escorting container ships and tankers in order to gradually reopen the strait of Hormuz after the end of “the hottest phase of the conflict”.

France has already sent about a dozen naval vessels, including its aircraft carrier strike group, to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and potentially the strait of Hormuz as part of defensive support to allies threatened by the conflict in the Middle East.

#trump #emirats #iran #erdogan #macron #war #complete

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Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, said in a post on X on Monday that safe passage through the strait of Hormuz would not be restored “amid the fires ignited by the United States and Israel in the region”.

Late on Monday Trump said on social media: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”

The remark was an apparent response comments from a spokesperson for the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, who said “Iran will determine when the war ends.”

Neither the US, Israel nor the Gulf states that have born the brunt of the Iranian attacks currently appear ready to consider concessions, however.

On Monday, Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Meshal al-Ahmad al-Sabah, described Iran’s strikes on the kingdom as “a brutal attack by a neighbouring Muslim country, which we consider a friend, even though we have not permitted the use of our land, airspace, or coasts for any military action against it.”

Saudi Arabia said Tehran would be the “biggest loser” if it continues to attack Arab states.

In the United Arab Emirates, authorities said two people were wounded by shrapnel from the interception of Iranian missiles over the capital, Abu Dhabi.

By mid-afternoon, the Emirati defence ministry said 15 ballistic missiles and 18 drones were fired on the country on Monday.

A total of 253 missiles and 1,440 drones have been launched at the UAE since the war began. Four foreign nationals have been killed in the UAE and 117 wounded, authorities said.

Iran also attacked Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, where it hit a residential area, wounding 32 people, including several children, according to authorities.

Another attack appeared to have started a fire at Bahrain’s only oil refinery, sending thick plumes of smoke into the air.

The war has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran, at least 397 in Lebanon and 11 in Israel, according to officials. Israel reported its first military deaths on Sunday, saying two combat engineers were killed in southern Lebanon, where it is fighting Hezbollah.

An Israeli military spokesperson accused Iran of targeting Israel’s cities with cluster bombs.

“We are seeing on a daily basis [that] Iran is deliberately targeting densely populated civilian areas,” the spokesperson said.

The official said that Israel was attacking “terrorist infrastructure” in Lebanon, which has been pulled deep into the war in the Middle East since Hezbollah opened fire to avenge the killing of Khamenei, triggering an Israeli offensive, which has so far killed more than 400 people there, according to Lebanese authorities.

The Israeli military has ordered inhabitants to leave the southern suburbs of Beirut, much of south Lebanon and parts of the eastern Bekaa valley region – all areas that have served as political and security strongholds of Hezbollah.

In Turkey, Nato air defences intercepted a ballistic missile that entered the country’s airspace – the second such attack since the war started. President Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey’s main goal is to keep the country out of the “blaze” of the conflict.

#trump #emirats #iran #erdogan #macron #war #complete

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#turkey #ballistic #iran

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📰 Putin Offers ‘Peace,’ Trump Offers Markets

Trump and Putin just had an hourlong call the Kremlin described as frank and businesslike — which, translated, means they talked war, oil and leverage. Moscow says Putin pitched “quick political and diplomatic” fixes for the Iran conflict after calling Gulf rulers and Iran’s president, while Trump responded from the vantage point of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli operation. One sells himself as the arsonist-firefighter, the other as the landlord who can’t quite remember who lit the match.

Publicly, Putin warns that destabilizing the Middle East will “inevitably” wreck the global energy system, then immediately advertises Russia as the “reliable supplier” ready to increase deliveries to “reliable partners” in Asia, Slovakia, Hungary and anyone else who doesn’t lecture him. Europe, which voted to ban Russian gas by 2027, is told that Moscow might just cut them off early — unless, of course, they change their mind and decide they still need him. War as risk for everyone else, opportunity pricing for the Kremlin.
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Oil, meanwhile, is doing the only honest talking in this story: Brent has spiked to the highest levels since the last round of global disaster, and traders are openly panicking about a long conflict and a half‑closed Strait of Hormuz. Trump shrugs off tapping U.S. reserves and frames the price shock as a “small price” for safety, while chatting with Putin about Iran and even Venezuela “in the context of the global oil market.” When presidents discuss wars and pipelines in the same breath, it’s not a twist — it’s how the system is built.

So you get the photo‑friendly version — two great powers talking peace — and the real one: two energy states negotiating how much chaos the world can absorb without breaking the revenue stream that keeps them in power. Everyone else is there to pay the volatility premium.

#iran #trump #putin #oil #war #energy #russia #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Macron’s Hormuz Escort Service: Late to the War, Early to the Optics

Emmanuel Macron has discovered his grand role in the Iran war: traffic cop at the world’s most explosive shipping lane. While the U.S. and Israel bomb Iran and oil rips past $100 a barrel, he shows up in Cyprus to announce a “purely defensive” European‑led naval mission to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz “as soon as” the most intense phase is over. The message: Paris won’t stop the fire, but it will happily manage the smoke for the cameras.

France and “European and non‑European partners” are supposed to guarantee “freedom of navigation” in a corridor that exists mainly to pump Gulf crude into a global market now being gamed by Washington, Moscow and the very monarchies everyone pretends to constrain.

Macron talks like a responsible steward of maritime law while the U.S. quietly grants India a waiver to buy Russian oil again and openly floats easing sanctions on Russian fuel to calm the shortage. The navy escorts the tankers; the real deals are cut in back rooms with Moscow.

The war around Hormuz has already shut down a route that normally handles about a fifth of the planet’s oil. Prices spike, Europe panics, and Putin cashes in as the “reliable supplier” to any “reliable partner” who doesn’t annoy him with sanctions. Macron’s pitch boils down to this: Paris will help reopen the choke point that others closed, so European voters blame Iran and “instability,” not the people who turned the strait into a bargaining chip.

So you get the choreography: Trump bombs, Iran fires back, Russia profits, the Gulf plays both sides — and Macron arrives to promise that once the storm has passed, Europe will bravely escort the tankers that feed the same system that just blew up their energy security. It’s not leadership, it’s crisis management as self‑preservation: a president who feels his own clock ticking, trying to look indispensable in a war where his only real power is to wave ships through a lane someone else can close again tomorrow.

#france #macron #iran #hormuz #oil #russia #eu #war #energy #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Perpignan Inc.: Law, Order and Overdraft

Perpignan is the National Rally’s demo version of France: more cops, more cameras, more debt, and a mayor who might be legally disqualified before he can finish bragging about it. Louis Aliot sells the city as a “laboratory” of far-right governance — security as the core product, municipal politics as a test bench for 2027.

On the metrics he chose, he delivers: municipal police up from 161 to 199 officers, 1.6 local cops per 1,000 residents — the highest ratio among big French cities and nearly triple Paris — plus plans for 50 more officers and 200 extra cameras, especially in poor, heavily North African and Roma neighborhoods. Drug-trafficking cases and fines explode, crime stats go up, and RN spins that as proof it’s finally “doing something” about the violence it talks about nonstop.

The bill arrives quietly: debt per resident is far above comparable cities, property and business taxes are higher than in most peers, and opponents say the PR machine is the only thing truly overperforming. Yet Aliot still leads in the polls, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella use Perpignan as a backdrop to promise “public order as an absolute priority,” and even skeptical voters admit they feel the streets look cleaner — then add they don’t buy the rest of the program.

This is the far-right offer in one city: turn poverty and neglect into a permanent crime scene, flood it with police, send the bill to taxpayers, and call the whole thing “responsibility.” If it works in Perpignan, they’ll scale it — not because it fixes anything, but because fear and fines still poll better than admitting you have no answer for why the city was abandoned in the first place.

#france #perpignan #Aliot #LePen #Bardella #farRight #security #police #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Lebanon Emptied, Pumps Refilled

Nearly 700,000 people are already displaced in Lebanon, Tehran is still being hit, and Washington is quietly paying for it all with Russian oil. Israeli strikes and evacuation orders have turned Lebanon into a new mass exodus zone — hundreds of thousands sleeping in schools, offices, cars, and on sidewalks — while the Pentagon reports 140 wounded U.S. troops and Trump’s press secretary explains that “unconditional surrender” doesn’t require Iran to actually say the words, only for Trump to decide they’ve complied.

At the same time, the U.S. is loosening the very sanctions that were supposed to punish Moscow for Ukraine: a 30‑day waiver lets India buy Russian oil already at sea, and Treasury openly talks about lifting more restrictions to calm the price spike triggered by the Iran war. The message is blunt: the war can go on, as long as there’s enough crude to keep U.S. gas prices from destroying the polls.

Even the Strait of Hormuz is running on spin. Fighting has slowed traffic through a corridor that normally handles roughly a fifth of global oil, and the U.S. energy secretary briefly claimed the Navy had “successfully escorted” a tanker — only for Central Command to deny it and the post to vanish. Pakistan, not the U.S., is the one openly escorting ships to keep its own lights on.

On the ground, Lebanese officials and aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian disaster, with nearly 700,000 displaced and hundreds killed, while Iranians breathe black rain from burning fuel depots and watch Israel announce “many more targets” in Tehran. The official line is that this is about security and surrender; the facts look more like a region being emptied out and poisoned so leaders can prove they’re strong, then patched over with discounted Russian barrels so voters don’t revolt at the pump.

#lebanon #iran #israel #trump #russia #oil #hormuz #war #refugees #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Putin’s Side Hustle: Bleeding America for Profit

Russia is not “watching” the Iran war — it’s in it, just smart enough to bill it as someone else’s mess. U.S. officials say Moscow is feeding Tehran targeting data on U.S. troops, ships and aircraft in the region, the same way it once allegedly paid Taliban fighters bounties for killing Americans and handed satellite imagery to Houthis to hit Western shipping. Call it outsourced: Iran pulls the trigger, Putin collects the leverage.

The partnership that started with Iranian Shahed drones over Ukraine is now running in both directions. Tehran helped Moscow build a factory to mass-produce cheap kamikaze UAVs; now Russia is reportedly helping Iran find American targets from Kuwait to the Red Sea. U.S. soldiers die in drone and missile strikes, American facilities get hit, and it’s very hard to argue the Kremlin’s fingerprints aren’t at least on the map, if not on the launch button.

At the same time, Trump is doing Putin a second favor: turning a proxy war into a revenue stream. Oil and gas still provide a massive share of Russia’s budget, and the Iran conflict has already pushed prices higher — exactly the “energy shock” Western sanctions were designed to avoid.

Washington’s answer so far is a 30‑day waiver so India can buy stranded Russian crude and open talk of more sanctions relief, all marketed as a “stopgap” to calm markets while pretending the money flowing back to Moscow is somehow incidental.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s point is brutal and correct: instead of deepening support for Ukraine — the one military that has actually learned, in blood, how to fight Iranian‑designed drones — Trump spent years signaling that getting closer to Putin mattered more than locking in Kyiv as a frontline ally.

Now U.S. troops are learning the same counter‑drone lessons in real time under fire, while Ukrainian experts are flown in as consultants to help defend American bases in the Middle East.

So you get the full circle: Iran armed Russia to bleed Ukraine, Russia now helps Iran bleed U.S. forces, and rising oil prices bail out the Kremlin’s budget while Washington loosens sanctions just enough to keep the pumps running.

The White House still talks about “deterring Iran” and “managing escalation,” but the scoreboard from Moscow is simpler: Americans are dying, Ukrainian aid is under strain, and Russian barrels are back in demand.

#russia #iran #trump #ukraine #oil #sanctions #war #putin #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

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Tehran: The Nightmare of the City and Its Inhabitants You Should Know About

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Tehran residents say the Iranian capital has endured what they described as its worst night of aerial bombardment, as the US defense secretary Hegseth, followed Trump’s suggestion on Monday the war could soon be over with a warning of more strikes to come.

“We are under heavy bombardment and I can hear back-to-back explosions. The place they hit has caught fire. It’s not clear where it exploded, but the buildings are shaking,” Niloufar, who lives in east Tehran said early on Tuesday, speaking under a pseudonym for security reasons.

“They are destroying Iran,” they added, saying there were low-flying jets above.

Israel, which launched an air campaign against Iran with the US on 28 February, on Tuesday said it had hit a weapons development facility among a wave of strikes.

Other residents told the Guardian of rolling blackouts, and that much of Iran’s communications were down.

The World Health Organization has urged Iranians to stay inside, saying “black rain” falling after strikes on oil facilities could cause respiratory problems.

One Tehran resident described the city as “the last stop before hell”.

At least 1,245 civilians have been killed, including 194 children, by the US-Israeli war on Iran, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran group.

In Lebanon, at least 486 people have been killed by Israeli bombing, while 11 have been killed in Israel. Seven US troops have been confirmed dead and 140 injured, eight severely.

As jets bombed Tehran, US officials issued contradictory messages as to how long the war could last.

Trump said on Monday that “the war is very complete”, in a call with CBS News. Hours later, Hegseth said the war would end on “our timeline” and that the US would not stop until “the enemy is totally and decisively defeated”, promising Tuesday would see the most intense strikes in Iran yet.

It’s not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle, or the end, that’s [Trump’s decision] and he’ll continue to communicate that,” Hegseth said.

Gen Dan Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said US forces had hit more than 5,000 sites in Iran in a campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capacity, degrading its navy to reopen the strait of Hormuz, and hitting “deeper into Iran’s military and industrial base”.

Iranian officials, meanwhile, said that they would not accept an end to the war until they had inflicted a painful price on the US and Israel. Iran’s head of the national security council, Ali Larijani, said in a social media post that the “nation of Iran does not fear your empty threats”, while implying Iran could target Trump himself.

“Even those bigger than you could not eliminate the Iranian nation. Be careful not to get eliminated yourself,” he wrote, responding to the US president’s threat that Iran could be hit “20 times harder” if it blocked the flow of oil through the strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s remarks came as US consumers began to feel the pain at the pumps and investors the world over reeled at the skyrocketing price of fuel.

Economists said a continued disruption to Gulf oil production and to shipping out of the strait of Hormuz – a choke point for a fifth of the world’s oil transit – could plunge the world into an energy crisis not seen since the 1970s.

Iran continued pounding Gulf states and Israel on Tuesday, part of its strategy to inflict as much pain as possible on the US’s influential Gulf allies and on the world economy to raise the price of the war.

In Bahrain, a woman was killed and eight more people wounded in an Iranian attack on a residential building in Manama, while firefighters in the UAE tried to put out a blaze near petrochemical plants after an Iranian drone strike.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait said they had intercepted drones over their territory.

#iran #war #trump #hezbollah #lebanon #hegseth

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In the glitzy Gulf city of Dubai, despite the bombardment residents said life was continuing much as normal. People still flocked to the beaches, malls and rooftop bars, although many tourists had fled. Commercial flights also restarted as the country’s airspace tentatively reopened, even as UAE’s leaders condemned the continuing “blatant Iranian aggression”.

So far, four people, all migrant workers, have been killed by falling missile debris in the UAE.

Nader Farid, 30, who moved from Egypt to Dubai five months ago to work in real estate, interviewed on the beach, said: “They say it’s a war but it’s caused no problem for us, we don’t really see it at all.

“The first day was scary when they warned about incoming missiles. But now it’s been more than a week and life here just goes on, only business is a bit slower. I’m from Egypt, I know that nowhere is safe from war, but this one does not feel bad. We are very protected here.”

In Tehran, US and Israeli jets operated virtually unchallenged. A resident of central Tehran said:

“The air was clearing up a bit yesterday, but last night’s strikes, which I can tell you were the most intense in the past 10 days, were so scary that our buildings were shaking. The glass windows also shattered even though the explosions were not on my street.

“Even in the past hour, I heard several explosions, and those planning to flee today are forced to stay home. The sky right now is grey and so polluted (…) there’s a burning smell of gunpowder in the air,” they added.

Many people have fled Tehran in search of safety in rural areas, but older and less able-bodied residents were unable to leave.

On Tuesday evening, Iran’s police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, warned Iranians thinking of taking to the streets to protest against the regime that they would be treated as “the enemy”.

He said on state TV: “If someone comes at the enemy’s bidding, we do not regard them as a protester or anything of the sort; we treat them as we would treat the enemy, and we deal with them in the same way we deal with the enemy. All our forces also have their fingers on the trigger, ready to defend the [Iranian revolution].”

In Lebanon, Israel continued its strikes against what it described as Hezbollah targets, hitting the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south of the country on Tuesday.

Hezbollah continued to target Israeli troops in the south of the country and to launch rocket salvoes and drone swarms at northern Israel, prompting Israel reportedly to consider a widened offensive against the group.

#iran #war #trump #hezbollah #lebanon #hegseth

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📰 Trump’s Iran War: How to Lose Peace Twice

“Trump ran for office promising to end wars, but instead he started a new one… and that will likely also undercut another of Trump’s priorities: ending the four-year war between Russia and Ukraine,”

Responsible Statecraft notes. Translated from think-tank into normal language: the guy who promised to turn off the fire alarm just set another floor on fire.
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The Iran war knocks out two diplomatic tracks at once. Any half-alive talks about Iran’s nuclear program go up in smoke, and the idea of a “grand bargain” to end the Russia–Ukraine war drowns under a new priority: managing a crisis in the Gulf. Washington is already stretched across fronts, and every new round of strikes on Tehran makes a serious Ukraine package more politically toxic and materially expensive.

Moscow, meanwhile, doesn’t look like a crazed aggressor here so much as a cold accountant of war. The Kremlin repeats that it’s open to negotiations, insists continued contacts over Ukraine are “in Russia’s interests,” and calmly watches the U.S. overload its own agenda. The more wars Trump is juggling, the cheaper any future “peace” becomes for Russia — paid in Ukrainian territory, Western weapons it never gets, and sheer exhaustion in European capitals.

That’s the geometry of this “president of peace”: one conflict he starts himself, another he vows to end, and the only clear winner from that combination is the man he claims he wants to “make a deal” with.

#iran #ukraine #trump #russia #war #peaceTalks #diplomacy #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Trump’s Soros Hunt: Color Revolutions on Trial

A senior Justice Department official has told more than six U.S. attorneys to prepare criminal cases against George Soros’s Open Society network — with potential charges ranging from racketeering to arson to “material support for terrorism,” after years of Trump saying Soros “should be in jail.” The memo leans on a conservative report that tries to tie Soros grants to “extremist” groups like Palestinian NGO al-Haq, which Israel calls a terror front and human rights groups defend as a watchdog, even though the report’s own author had to walk back at least one key “terror” example.

For critics from Moscow to Kyiv to Washington, Soros is the architect of “color revolutions”: his Ukrainian foundation and its partners funded dense NGO networks, “self‑organization” projects and civic leaders who later sat at the heart of Maidan-era mobilization — idealistic on paper, blatantly instrumental in practice, and always useful to someone. Those same facts now fuel a global narrative that turns any foreign‑funded civil society into proof of regime change, even as watchdogs like ADL warn that Soros conspiracies have become a central, often antisemitic, propaganda trope.

What DOJ still doesn’t have is clear evidence that this network has actually violated U.S. law or financed terrorism — only a president who wants his favorite villain treated as a criminal organization. This isn’t just about one billionaire. It’s a test of something larger: whether organized citizens count as democracy, or as a crime scene.

#trump #Soros #DOJ #colorRevolutions #ukraine #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Trump, Putin and the $14 Trillion Oil Fix

Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev is selling a simple vision in Washington: lift sanctions, and U.S.–Russia “joint projects” could be worth over $14 trillion — including deep stakes in Russian energy. Conveniently, Trump’s Iran war has just pushed oil over $100 and given the White House a ready‑made excuse to loosen the very sanctions that were supposed to starve Putin’s war machine.

After Trump’s call with Putin, Moscow boasted that Putin offered ideas for a quick Iran settlement, while Trump publicly floated waiving oil‑related sanctions “for some countries,” read by markets as the first crack in the wall around Russian crude. India already has a 30‑day waiver to buy stranded Russian barrels, framed as “temporary relief” to calm a price spike created by the closure of Hormuz — a closure the Iran war itself helped engineer.

Seen from that angle, the Iran operation looks less like a clean morality play and more like a leverage machine: squeeze Gulf supply, let prices jump, then rebrand Russian oil as a necessary safety valve. Putin offers Trump a diplomatic off‑ramp; Trump offers Putin tens of billions in revived oil revenue — and voters are told it’s all in the name of “energy security.”

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

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📰 Merzession: When the Coalition Becomes the Scapegoat

Germany just handed Merz’s CDU–SPD coalition another slap in Baden‑Württemberg: the conservatives underperformed expectations, the SPD cratered, and voters went shopping for anyone who doesn’t already own the mess. After two years of near‑zero growth, soaring energy costs, “red alert” in core industries like chemicals, and now an Iran war pushing oil higher again, Merz’s promise to “fix” the economy has curdled into a meme — “Merzession.”

Business wants fast reforms, voters want cheaper lives, and instead they watch a chancellor trapped in a coalition that can’t move on migration, can’t move on bureaucracy, and can only blame Trump’s tariffs and Middle East shocks so many times before it sounds like an alibi. In that vacuum, AfD climbs, the Greens recover, and every state election turns into a referendum on a government that told Europe “Germany is back” — then delivered another year of stagnation.

In other words, Merz isn’t just paying for “the weak economic situation”; he’s paying for selling competence and getting caught governing like everyone else.

#germany #merz #economy #AfD #eu #war #iran #fakeDemocracy

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📰 The Minab Massacre: When “Precision” Means 175 Dead Kids

A preliminary U.S. military inquiry now says what the wreckage in Minab already showed: the Tomahawk that hit Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school was American, not Iranian. The strike used outdated Defense Intelligence Agency targeting data that still labeled the school as part of a Revolutionary Guards naval base, even though satellite imagery had long since shown fences, playgrounds and blue‑and‑pink walls where watchtowers used to stand.
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In other words, the system that sells itself as “precision” killed at least 175 people — most of them children — because no one bothered to update a box in a database. CENTCOM planners pulled old coordinates, skipped a fresh check, fired anyway, and only afterwards did investigators start asking why multiple agencies, from DIA to the National Geospatial‑Intelligence Agency, all signed off on a target that had been a school for years.
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Trump’s response has been to invent an alternate universe in real time. First he told reporters “in my opinion” Iran did it, then claimed — falsely — that Tehran might also have Tomahawks, then retreated to “I don’t know enough about it” while his own Pentagon quietly confirmed the missile type and trajectory. Officials who’ve seen the preliminary findings now talk about “unease” and “sensitivity,” which is Washington code for: the president is contradicting what the evidence shows, and everyone else is afraid to say it on camera.
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The Pentagon will eventually file its sober report about process failures and legacy data and “tragic human error.” The families in Minab will still have to live with the fact that the most advanced military on earth needed a newspaper’s visual investigation to admit it bombed a painted elementary school by mistake — and that the commander in chief’s first instinct was to blame the victims’ own government.
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#iran #minab #trump #pentagon #tomahawk #war #civilians #fakeDemocracy

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Trump’s Crusder: Pete Hegseth And His Vision of the US.-Israel Relations

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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has expressed a violent antipathy towards Iran for years in books, Fox News broadcasts, educational videos and a 2018 speech to an Israeli media conference in Jerusalem.

In a 2020 book, for example, Hegseth wrote that Iran’s leaders were “actively seeking the military means – especially nuclear weapons – to bring the West to its knees”.

And in a 2017 video for PragerU, the hard-right media platform, Hegseth described Iran as “America’s mortal enemy”.

And to an Israeli audience that included government ministers in 2018, Hegseth referred to Iran as “the octopus”, with “many tentacles that the Iranian regime has in the world today, nefariously both for Israel and for the United States”, engaged in building “a nuclear capacity which threatened the very existential existence of America”.

Hegseth’s rhetorical attacks on Iran often came in the context of expressions of unconditional and spiritual allegiance with Israel, the country with which the United States is currently jointly attacking Iran in an intense bombing campaign that has cost hundreds of lives and brought chaos to the world’s energy economy.

In the 2020 book, Hegseth writes: “You can love America without loving Israel – but that tells me your knowledge of the Bible and Western civilization is woefully incomplete”;

“If you love America, you should love Israel. We share history, we share faith, and we share freedom”; and folds Israel into domestic US culture wars, writing “Israel is enemy number one for both Islamists and international leftists – which is reason alone to love it.”

The comments throw new light on Hegseth’s personal commitment to the current war on Iran, showing him positioning Iran as the pre-eminent enemy of the United States, consistently advocating maximal confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and framing the conflict in the apocalyptic terms of a religious crusade.

The rationale and strategic purpose of the war, meanwhile, have been questioned across the political spectrum in recent days, and Hegseth and Trump have offered mixed messages on the progress and likely conclusion of the war on Iran.

Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Hegseth’s history of public commentary on Iran reflects the fact that “In Republican political circles, this kind of anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim sentiments have been pervasive for a very long time.”

In 2018, Hegseth addressed a conference in Jerusalem organised by Arutz Sheva, the Israeli media outlet also known as Israel National News.

In his remarks, Hegseth acknowledged the presence of Naftali Bennett, then a government minister, a deputy defense minister, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and members of the Knesset.

The video was republished by Sheva on 13 November 2024 after Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

While his appearance at the conference and some of his remarks about Israel have been previously reported, the way in which he positioned Iran in relation to the US and Israel has not.

In the speech, Hegseth depicted the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration as treachery.

“The Obama administration did everything they could to strike a horrific deal that creates an inevitable path to nuclear weapons, funding the attunes of billions of dollars, the hateful terrorist Iranian regime seeking death to America and death to Israel,” he said.

Hegseth then pivoted to a series of statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that went considerably further than mainstream US policy.

#hegseth #trump #crusade #iran #israel

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Hegseth criticized the “so-called two-state solution that still drips off the lips of the intelligentsia in America today”, adding that “if you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state here.”

He urged his audience to act on the annexation of “Judea and Samaria”, or the West Bank, using the language of the Israeli settler movement.

“Buy the ticket, take your action, do what needs to be done here in Israel, because I truly believe this is a moment where America will have your back,” he said.

Hegseth also advocated for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. This is one of the most incendiary issues in Middle Eastern politics, as that site is home to the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Framing it as the next in a sequence of Zionist “miracles” following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Israeli independence in 1948, the Six Day War in 1967, and Trump’s 2017 acknowledgement of Jerusalem as the country’s capital, he told the audience “there is no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible. I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen.”

In the same speech, he dismissed Europe as “a museum soon to be drowned out by radical Islam”.
On Hegseth’s remarks in Israel, Parsi, the foreign policy analyst, said that “it seems to me that a lot of those speeches were made back when it was the politically cost-free or beneficial thing to do.”

He added: “Today, it’s a completely different atmosphere, particularly amongst young Republicans who have dramatically turned against Israel, including young American Republican evangelicals.”

He said that the Trump administration had been influenced by Israeli views, however. “They truly bought into the Israeli view that Iran is a paper tiger. ‘Don’t make a deal with them. Get rid of them. You will be the hero. You will be the president that got rid of the 47-year-old theocracy.’”

On Hegseth and Trump’s conduct of the war, Parsi said: “I think they lost control over this war after four days. They had a plan A.

The plan was for the regime to implode after the assassination of the supreme leader. Either implode or surrender. When that didn’t work, they didn’t have a plan B.”

Hegseth’s vision of the US-Israel relationship is frequently framed in theological terms that collapse any distinction between American foreign policy and biblical obligation.

In American Crusade, he writes: “God also stands with the people of Israel against their enemies and blesses those who bless Israel,” he writes, citing Genesis 12:1–3. “America should stand with Israel because we honor God and love freedom.”

In his 2018 speech in Israel, in his urging for the expansion of Israel’s borders, he told listeners to consider “the support you have amongst patriotic Americans, amongst evangelical Christians, amongst believers”.

#hegseth #trump #crusade #iran #israel

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