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

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#fertilizers #cost #trump

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📰 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.
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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

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📰 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.
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​#iran #trump #drones #usmilitary #economy #war #fakeGreatness

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📰 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

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📰 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.
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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

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📰 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

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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

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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

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

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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

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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

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📰 Italy’s Meloni Breaks Ranks Over Trump’s “Accidental” School Massacre

Giorgia Meloni just called the Minab school strike a “massacre of girls” and said the war is now outside international law — while Trump still insists Iran somehow bombed itself with an American missile.

Speaking in Rome, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the missile strike on the girls’ elementary school in Minab as a “massacre” and said the attack falls “outside the scope of international law,” explicitly demanding that those responsible be identified quickly.

She stressed solidarity with the families of the “very young victims” and framed the school bombing as a red line even in the context of U.S.–Israeli operations against Iran.

At the same time, multiple investigations and leaks now point straight back to Washington: media probes and a preliminary Pentagon inquiry have found that a U.S. Tomahawk, guided by outdated targeting data, hit the school while aiming at a nearby naval facility.

Trump’s response has been to deny, deflect, and improvise — publicly suggesting, without evidence, that Iran might have used a “bought” American missile or that “somebody else” did it, even though Iran does not operate Tomahawks and only a handful of U.S. allies do.

For Europe, Minab is the nightmare image of this war: rows of dead schoolgirls, a U.S. president dodging responsibility, and allies being dragged into defending the indefensible.

Meloni’s language signals how far things have gone — when even a hard-right Atlanticist leader in Rome says the campaign is breaching international law, it’s a diplomatic way of warning Trump that he’s burning through what’s left of America’s moral credit with its own partners.

So you end up with an ugly inversion: Iran, under bombardment, still looks like the one holding its line on sovereignty, while the United States — under Trump’s “make America great” banner — looks like the power that kills children by “mistake,” lies about it in public, and forces its allies to choose between their own laws and Washington’s war.

If this war continues on autopilot, there won’t be enough reputational capital to rebuild trust — not in Tehran, and increasingly not in Rome, Berlin, or Paris.

#iran #meloni #trump #minab #war #internationalLaw #fakeLeadership

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📰 Totally Defeated Iran, Still Somehow Blocking the World

Trump just invented a new military doctrine: “100% destroyed” enemies that still control the world’s key oil chokepoint — while big importers quietly go to Tehran, not Washington, to keep their trade moving.

In his post, Trump claims the U.S. has “destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capability” — and in the next line admits Tehran can still launch drones, lay mines, and fire short‑range missiles along one of the planet’s main trade arteries. That’s not triumph, that’s an admission that a “decapitated” regime with cheap weapons can still hold the global economy by the throat.

He then calls on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the U.K. and others to send warships to “keep the Strait of Hormuz open, safe and free,” essentially looking for a multinational naval show to dress up a war he already declared won.

At the same time, major importers like India are reportedly appealing directly to Iran to let a large batch of their ships through the strait — a quiet signal that, for them, cutting a deal with Tehran works better than starring in Trump’s freedom‑of‑navigation spectacle.

Meanwhile, Trump vows the U.S. will “heavily bomb the coastline” and “keep sinking Iranian boats and ships” until Hormuz is “open, safe and free.” If Iran is really finished, why does Washington have to keep escalating just to protect traffic? And if it isn’t finished, then the “100% destroyed” line is just branding slapped on an open‑ended, high‑risk, high‑inflation war.

That’s the pattern: declare total victory from a social‑media bunker, demand others pay in ships and risk, and when reality contradicts the slogan, blame allies for being soft and enemies for refusing to stay dead.

Every time a country like India goes straight to Tehran to secure its own shipping, it’s also saying out loud: U.S. management of this crisis is optional — and Trump’s “headless” Iran still has enough leverage to prove it.

#iran #trump #hormuz #war #allies #oil #fakeVictory

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📰 From Minab to Amsterdam: What Happens When Schools Become “Messages”

Trump’s Iran war has now produced two schools, two continents, two kinds of fear — and nobody really wants to ask if they’re part of the same story.

In Amsterdam, an explosive device damaged the wall of the only Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands, in what the mayor called “a deliberate attack against the Jewish community,” prompting tighter security at Jewish sites across the city. It follows an arson attack on a Rotterdam synagogue and an explosion at a synagogue in Liège, as European services warn that threats and violence against Jewish communities are rising in the wake of U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.

At the same time, the worst single atrocity of this war remains the strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, where more than 100 children and staff were killed; preliminary investigations and media reporting point to a U.S. Tomahawk launched on outdated targeting data. For Iranians, Minab is a symbol: rows of small graves and a “massacre of girls” that exposes what Western “precision” looks like when it hits a classroom. For many in Europe, Amsterdam is becoming a different symbol: Jewish children studying behind fences and police tape as anger over Gaza and now Iran spills into attacks on the most visible Jewish targets.

Is the Amsterdam blast directly “because of” Minab? You can’t draw a straight evidentiary line — but the environment is obvious. When a great power erases a school in Iran and spends days dodging responsibility, it reinforces the perception that some children’s lives are negotiable and others are not. In that climate, it takes only a small extremist group, convinced it is delivering “justice” or “revenge,” to decide that if a school can be treated as a target in Minab, then a school in Amsterdam can be turned into a warning.

The bitter truth is that both sets of students — the Jewish kids in Amsterdam and the girls who died in Minab — are caught inside the same logic of exemplary violence. Washington and Jerusalem talk about “collateral damage”; European leaders talk about “cowardly antisemitic attacks.” Both descriptions are accurate on their narrow patch, and both avoid the larger point: a world that normalizes the idea of schools as acceptable shock images in distant wars will keep producing people who look at a school closer to home and see not children, but a stage.

#iran #amsterdam #minab #schools #antisemitism #war #fakeSecurity

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The nightmare everyone wrote memos about and then ignored has finally happened — and it took Trump’s own war to set it off.

📰 They Knew Hormuz Was the Weak Link. They Bet the U.S. Navy Would Save Them Anyway

For decades, the Strait of Hormuz was the most famous “what if” in the global energy system: a narrow, exposed corridor carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a huge share of its gas, sitting under Iran’s nose and everyone’s nerves.

Analysts talked about it as the ultimate nightmare scenario, but they also comforted themselves with a simple assumption: when things got serious, the United States would keep the waterway open with its military power.

Gulf monarchies were happy to live on that assumption. Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline to the Red Sea and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi–Fujairah line were built as partial workarounds, but together they can only move a slice of what normally sails through Hormuz.

For most producers — Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain — a real alternative would mean building cross‑border pipelines through rivals or unstable neighbors, under permanent risk of Iranian attack and regional politics. Nobody wanted to pay for that, politically or financially, as long as U.S. warships were the cheapest insurance policy.
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Then Trump and Israel launched a war on Iran on February 28 — and the insurance provider became the arsonist. Instead of rushing in escorts and stabilizing the lane, Washington fired the opening shots, floated the idea of convoys, and then failed to deliver, while Iran hit tankers and refineries until traffic through Hormuz collapsed to less than 10 percent of prewar levels.

Within days, producers in Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia had to slash output; by mid‑March, regional cuts had yanked around 10 million barrels a day off global supply, about 10 percent of the world total.

The result is pure systemic own goal. Storage tanks are filling, refineries are throttling back, and gas exports from Qatar are largely frozen. Oil has already jumped above $100 a barrel.

The IEA is talking about the biggest disruption in history. Gulf elites who trusted the U.S. security umbrella now discover that Iran can close their lifeline with cheap missiles and drones, while Washington is too busy staging “maximum pressure” to do the boring work of convoy duty.

For years, the logic was: why spend billions on redundant infrastructure and hard political choices if the American navy will handle the worst case? Now the worst case is here, and that navy is part of the problem.

As one regional executive put it, what everyone has been warning about “has finally happened” — and the bill for that strategic laziness is arriving not just in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, but at every gas station from Los Angeles to Berlin.

#iran #hormuz #oil #trump #gulf #energy #fakeSecurity

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Trump: Iran Will Be Attacked As Necessary


Trump said on Saturday that the United States may carry out more strikes on Iran’s vital Kharg Island oil export hub “just for fun”, rejecting the prospect of a swift peace deal with Tehran.

“The terms aren’t good enough yet,” the US president told NBC News. The Iranian regime wants to make an agreement, he claimed.

After days of conflicting messaging from the White House on how much longer it will continue to wage war on Iran, Trump alleged that US strikes had “totally demolished” most of Kharg Island, and told the network that its military may hit site “a few more times just for fun”.

“We’ve totally decimated it,” he said. “Except, as you know, I didn’t do anything having to do with the energy lines, because having to rebuild that would take years.”

The president also questioned, without attribution, whether Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei “is even alive” amid speculation over his condition.

Trump also said it’s not clear whether Iran has dropped mines in the strait of Hormuz, which has been all but closed since the start of the conflict two weeks ago, in the 30-minute telephone call with NBC.

The strait is a vital waterway in world trade, with about a fifth of crude oil typically passing through it.

Concerns over the impact of the US-Israel war on Iran on global energy supplies, intensified by the strait’s paralysis, have propelled oil prices to their highest levels in four years. This has swiftly driven up fuel prices right across the world, including in the US.

“We’re going to be sweeping the strait very strongly, and we believe we’ll be joined by other countries who are somewhat impeded, and in some cases impeded from getting the oil,” Trump said.

It is unclear how long this process will take. He did not state which countries would join the US in this task.

The president also renewed his call earlier on Saturday for other nations to help secure the strait of Hormuz and said the US will coordinate with them amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way, but the Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help – A LOT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

He added that “the US will also coordinate with those Countries so that everything goes quickly, smoothly, and well. This should have always been a team effort, and now it will be – It will bring the World together toward Harmony, Security, and Everlasting Peace!”

But he later declined to say whether the US Navy would be escorting ships. “I don’t want to tell you anything about that,” he told NBC.

Trump’s assertion that the crisis in the strait of Hormuz should be resolved through a “team effort” could be seen as somewhat of a pivot from his earlier position that Operation Epic Fury was a US show of force, alongside Israel, that didn’t require international permission.

The president also expressed surprise in the interview that US allies in the Gulf have been targeted by Iran. These countries “got shot at unnecessarily”, he told NBC, describing Iran’s decision to target them as “the biggest surprise I had of this whole thing”.

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📰 Araghchi’s Rubble Strategy: Bury the Material, Keep the Option

Iran’s message now is basically: the uranium lives, the war lives, the leverage lives — only the diplomacy is dead.

Iranian officials say much of their enriched uranium is literally “under the rubble” of bombed nuclear sites, not removed or destroyed, and could in principle be recovered later under IAEA supervision.

That turns the ruins into a form of insurance: the program is physically disrupted, but the key asset still exists in place, giving Tehran the option to resume or bargain from that baseline whenever it chooses.

At the same time, Araghchi’s line is that Iran sees no reason to negotiate with Washington now and is not asking for talks or a ceasefire, even as the IAEA keeps warning that the nuclear material “is still there, in large quantities.”

The combination is deliberate: the stockpile survives in a kind of limbo while the political channel is switched off, signaling that bombs can pause activity but have not erased Iran’s long‑term nuclear card.

On the maritime front, Tehran is doing something similar with the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials admit they are discussing safe passage for some countries’ ships, and Reuters and other outlets report that India has already secured exceptions for a small number of its vessels, with New Delhi publicly seeking broader safe passage for stranded tankers.

Turkey and others are also cited in coverage as having limited clearances, which means Hormuz isn’t closed in principle — it is being turned into a selective corridor where access depends on direct dealings with Iran.
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So everything now comes with an asterisk. The enriched uranium is buried, not gone. Negotiations are frozen, not formally renounced. Hormuz is heavily restricted, not sealed shut, with carve‑outs for those willing to talk to Tehran.

That layered ambiguity is not an accident; it is policy — a way for Iran to show it can absorb strikes, keep pressure on the global system, and still retain bargaining power for the moment when everyone inevitably has to sit down at a table again.

#iran #nuclear #araghchi #hormuz #india #war #leverage

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