Tag: iran

Analysis: Iran likely transferred highly enriched uranium to Isfahan before the June strikes

orking with a team of visual investigators that included the Bulletin, the French newspaper Le Monde has analyzed a previously unreported satellite image of the Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, showing a large truck loaded with containers. In a Le Monde article published Saturday, experts said they could not be certain what the containers held. But the timing of the image, the type of load, and other indirect evidence suggest that Iran may have placed a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium—possibly all of its inventory—at the facility ahead of the June 2025 strikes by Israel and the United States against Iranian nuclear sites.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has mentioned the possible presence of highly enriched uranium at the Isfahan nuclear complex several times—a presence implicitly acknowledged by Iran’s own recent declarations. The IAEA has made multiple requests but was unable to access the underground tunnel complex at Isfahan, which was spared during Israeli and American military strikes in June. The satellite image could be the first publicly available evidence of the presence of highly enriched uranium at Isfahan.

According to Le Monde investigators, who have reviewed many satellite images of the entrance to Isfahan and other Iranian nuclear sites, it is the first time they have seen this type of convoy at the facility. Le Monde informed the Bulletin about the image on March 19. What follows is a detailed visual and technical analysis supporting my assessment that the cargo may have been highly enriched uranium.

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Russia’s secret drone playbook handed to Iran as Zelensky warns Trump’s war is a gift to Putin

Russians are advising Iranians on how to use their deadly mini drones to target US assets in the Middle East, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is warning. 

The Ukrainian President shared on Monday that Russian officials have advised Iranian counterparts on their operational experience from their invasion against Ukraine, including how to carry out short-range first-person-view (FPV) drone attacks. 

Videos of the drone strikes have been a hallmark of the brutal conflict, often showing soldiers or tanks on patrol being hunted by the small UAVs before the screens go black, indicating a detonation. 

Russia has recently released a new first-person drone called the KVS which reportedly has a range up to 30 miles that was designed after previous drones faced issues on shorter flights.  

Russia has closely worked with Iran since 2022 to deploy its Shahed-136 drone against Ukraine, which Russian officials rebranded into the Geran-1. 

In 2025 alone, Russia launched approximately 55,000 Shahed-style drones at Ukraine, according to the institute for Science and International Security. 

Having to rely on cheap, widely available drones to fend off repeated Russian assaults during the invasion, Ukraine has developed world-class FPV drone weapons. 

They’ve been so effective that the Ukrainian drone tech has even been procured by the US military. 

‘I think Russia is supporting Iran directly, 100 percent. The same format of sharing satellite images like they did in the case of Ukraine,’ he told Axios in an interview. 

He shared that Russia is keen on the US-Iran war dragging out so that President Vladimir Putin’s oil-reliant economy can sell crude at a markup to continue funding its hostilities in Ukraine.  

‘I am sure Russia wants long war. They have benefits: The U.S. is focusing on the Middle East and may decrease military help to Ukraine. Sanctions are partially lifted. I see only benefits for Russia from the war with Iran continuing,’ Zelensky said. 

Another concern for Ukraine as the US-Iran war continues: Ukraine’s weapons supply.

Zelensky said he is ‘absolutely’ sure that his country will have ‘challenges’ due to US resources being reallocated to the Middle East.

The Ukrainian President was recently in the Middle East to meet with leaders about possible security deals. He reportedly met with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan. 

Ukrainian military officials have also been advising Gulf nations on how to shoot down Iran’s Shahed drones. 

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NYT Covers Iran War With No Reporters in Iran

Since the US and Israel first attacked Iran in late February, it has been easy to spot the stark difference between the New York Times’ distant coverage of Iran and its up-close and personal coverage of Israel.

Multiple Times employees are reporting from and currently living in Israel. These include reporters Isabel Kershner, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman, Natan Odenheimer, Ronen Bergman, Adam Rasgon, Johnatan Reiss and Raja Abdulrahim, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief David M. Halbfinger.

They routinely report stories that center Israeli citizens, as in “How Israelis Feel About Another Potential War With Iran” (2/26/26). First-hand Times reports have Israelis taking “Shelter as Sirens Warn of Incoming Missiles” (2/28/26), feeling “Tense But Relieved That Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead” (3/1/26) and celebrating “Purim Amid Iranian Missile Attacks” (3/4/26). They also have penned stories on Iranian missile strikes in Israel mere hours after they took place (3/1/26, 3/18/26).

Many articles have been based primarily on statements from Israeli officials (3/1/26, 3/3/26, 3/11/26, 3/19/26) and US officials (3/2/26, 3/7/26). Other articles have centered on the perspective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and what would benefit him (2/28/26, 3/14/26, 3/18/26).

Meanwhile, the Times has no reporters based in Iran, as its editors admitted in two Q&A-style articles (3/9/26, 3/16/26). Instead, the paper has largely relied on its Visual Investigations team (3/12/26) and reporters based elsewhere to cover Iran, including correspondents in Israel, the US, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, Sri Lanka, South Korea, England, France and Germany. The Times reporters who most often quote Iranian voices—like Farnaz Fassihi, Parin Behrooz (both based in the US) and Yeganeh Torbati (reporting from Turkey)—largely rely on telephone interviews (3/2/26, 3/27/26), along with “text messages and social media posts” (3/18/26).

This lack of on-the-ground coverage in Iran has directly resulted in slower coverage and confirmation of US/Israel culpability for deadly strikes. For example, it took five days for the Times (3/5/26) to report that the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike” on the school in Minab that killed at least 175 Iranian civilians, mostly schoolchildren.

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Iran’s Alleged 47-Year War on America: Debunking the 1,050 American Deaths Canard

On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not even remotely establish that the regime in Tehran had been wantonly prosecuting a murderous war against Americans.

Thus, from the ballyhooed list of 1,050 Americans allegedly killed by the Iranian regime during the last 47 years about 29o of these deaths had occurred before 9/11. Yet more than 90% of these unfortunate fatalities occurred in Lebanon in the midst of the war between the indigenous Shiite/Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli occupiers, including 241 deaths of US servicemen at the Marine barracks.

So let us say it again. For crying out loud, US soldiers should never, ever have been in Lebanon. Moreover, by his subsequent action which amounted to “cutting and running” under the euphemism of repositioning these forces to a far away aircraft carrier, President Reagan himself admitted his mistake.

In a word, Israel’s long running battle with the PLO and other Palestinians, which had spilled over into Lebanon’s already fraught confessional fissures in the early 1980s, had no bearing on America’s homeland security. None whatsoever. Had Washington maintained the good sense to stay out of this fight, even the car bomb incidents at the US embassy during these years would surely not have occurred, either.

Again, this period also proves the hoary myth that Iranians or their proxies killed Americans because they hated our freedoms is just damn nonsense—casuistry confected by Israeli/neocon propagandists to fuel that Big Lie that Iran has been “attacking” America for nearly five decades. To the contrary, these deaths happened because Washington was meddling where it had no business intervening at all, thereby putting American servicemen and State department employees in harms’ way for no good reason.

During this 22-year period there were also a handful of incidents where Americans were killed in Israel or Gaza by Hamas operatives. Yet no one can argue with a straight face that without what was actually Iran’s limited, episodic and secondary support for Hamas (versus the much, much larger support from Sunni Gulf states) that Israel and Hamas would have laid down together in blissful harmony.

In fact, the perpetual war between Hamas and the Israeli govenrment would have been every bit as brutal and intense, and what were 7 American deaths attributed to Hamas during the 1990s would likely have happened anyway. Surely, the Iranian regime did not provide modest aid to Hamas in order to instruct it to go out and find visiting Americans to kill.

Indeed, even the 1996 killing of 19 American servicemen at Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia by Shiite militants actually proves a wholly different point. As it happened, the Saudi’s were supremely embarrassed by the breakdown of security with respect to the American troops still domiciled there at a time about five years after the First Gulf War ended. So in short order they rounded up six Shiite militants who they claimed had been responsible for the attack.

The interesting point, however, is that the Saudi’s refused to extradite these admitted members of Saudi based Hezbollah al-Hajaz, but instead extracted “confessions” from them with respect to their alleged Iranian-backing while in Saudi prisons. The only time America officials were ever allowed to see them or question them was on a single occasion from behind a one-way mirror in response to be pre-submitted questions. None of them ever faced US officials, prosecutors or courts without Saudi chaperones.

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Iran puts US students in crosshairs with campus threat as new US missile strike on school sparks fury

Iran has threatened to target American campuses in the Middle East in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes on its schools. 

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard set a deadline for noon on Monday for the Trump administration to ‘condemn the bombing of the universities’ or else it would retaliate against US students studying abroad in the Middle East.  

Regime officials warned that employees, professors, and students affiliated with US schools in the region should stay at least one kilometer from their campuses.

Iran claims strikes hit the Tehran University of Science and Technology over the weekend, damaging nearby buildings but not resulting in any casualties.

‘If the US government wants its universities in the region to be free from retaliation… it must condemn the bombing of the universities in an official statement by 12 noon on Monday, March 30, Tehran time,’ the regime told Iranian media. 

Multiple American universities operate campuses abroad, where thousands of students often study with financial support from host governments.

New York University has a campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, while Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern and Texas A&M each have satellite campuses in Qatar’s Education City, a research hub based in Doha.

Texas A&M said it closed its Qatar campus, moving to remote learning and with most international staff returning home amid the war.

Around 5,000 Americans studied in the Middle East and North Africa in the last academic year, with around half in Israel and roughly 1,000 in the UAE, according to the State Department.

Since the start of the war, deadly missile strikes have hit Iranian education facilities, including an elementary school attack on February 28 in the city of Minab that killed 175 people, most of them children.

The attack sparked a US military investigation whose preliminary findings concluded that American forces were likely responsible due to outdated intelligence. The building was once part of a regime naval base.

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Trump Says He Wants to “Take the Oil” in Iran

President Donald Trump has suggested the United States may try to take over Iran’s oil the way it did with Venezuela’s, per a Financial Times interview.

“To be honest with you, my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” Trump told the FT.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” the U.S. president also told the publication, adding. “It would also mean we had to be there [in Kharg Island] for a while.”

Kharg Island is Iran’s oil hub, handling 90% of the country’s oil exports. The island lies beyond the Strait of Hormuz, however, which would make taking it a challenge, as noted by various military experts. According to official Pentagon statements, the U.S. has bombed as many as 90 targets on Kharg Island but these have not included oil facilities or infrastructure, per President Trump himself.

“We can do that on five minutes’ notice. It’ll be over,” Trump said earlier this month, referring to the pipelines connecting mainland Iran to Kharg Island. “Just one simple word, and the pipes will be gone too. But it’ll take a long time to rebuild that.”

That one simple word has yet to be pronounced, it seems, even as Trump told the FT on Sunday that “I don’t think they have any defence. We could take it [Kharg Island] very easily.”

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A month of war has shown the strategic failure of attacking Iran

After one month of war against Iran, one conclusion stands out more clearly than anything declared in all the press briefings: Neither the US nor Israel entered this confrontation with a plan for a long war.

The campaign was conceived as a short and brutal episode, a shock operation designed to break Iran’s will, force Tehran back to the table on humiliating terms, or in the most ambitious fantasies circulating around Donald Trump’s political circle, trigger internal collapse and perhaps even regime change. Israel’s aim was somewhat different, though complementary. It wanted to inflict the maximum possible damage on Iran’s military and strategic infrastructure, weaken it for years, and reshape the regional balance through force. Yet in the first month of fighting, the central assumption behind both approaches began to collapse. Instead of folding and getting coerced into submission, Iran resisted like a state fighting for survival.

What doesn’t kill Iran makes it stronger

American planners appear to have imagined a limited punitive maneuver lasting perhaps a week or two. The logic was familiar and, from their point of view, elegant. Strike hard, generate fear, disrupt command structures, raise the economic cost, and create a moment in which Iran’s leadership would face a stark choice between capitulation and disaster. Some in the Trump camp seem to have believed that Iran’s political system was brittle enough to crack under pressure. That assumption now looks less like strategy and more like projection. Washington entered the war expecting quick leverage rather than a drawn out contest of endurance.

Israel, for its part, appears to have approached the opening phase with fewer illusions about diplomacy and more determination to degrade Iran by force. The strategic instinct in West Jerusalem was not primarily to negotiate with Tehran from a position of strength, but to use the cover of an American-backed offensive to hit as much as possible and to push Iran backward in military, technological, and geopolitical terms. In that sense, Israel’s goals were harsher and more concrete. But even here the first month exposed a contradiction. A state can damage Iran. It can kill, disrupt, sabotage, and bomb. Yet weakening Iran is not the same thing as breaking Iran. A campaign that hurts but does not decisively cripple can still end by strengthening Tehran politically, morally, and strategically if the attacked state manages to survive, retaliate, and turn endurance into legitimacy.

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Who’s behind the mysterious ‘Iran-backed terror cell’ haunting Europe?

Claims that an Iran-backed group is carrying out attacks in European cities raise questions about why they’re not targeting countries directly involved in the US-Israeli war, and why they appear to communicate like Israelis.

Strangely, suspects arrested in the attacks have been released on bail.

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Ashab al-Yamin. Officially known as “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI),” or the “Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right,” the group mysteriously appeared in early March, and, according to mainstream media, it’s taking the continent by storm.

But a closer look at the supposedly Iran-backed terror organization suggests that it does not exist in any concrete form, and may be a confection of Israeli intelligence.

Though the nebulous HAYI claimed credit for torching ambulances belonging to a Jewish community organization in London on March 23, two suspects in the attack have been released on bail, and are not charged with any terror-related crimes. What’s more, London Metropolitan Police have so far refused to release the men’s names, raising questions about their identities. Were they even Muslim? 

HAYI’s first public mention in the West came on March 9, when the previously non-existent organization released a video showing an explosive device detonating outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium, alongside a statement taking credit for the attack. Within hours, the group had somehow been identified by the “SITE Intelligence Group,” an Israeli-led private intelligence firm founded in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to cash in on the newly-minted Global War on Terror.

The materials HAYI published were promptly circulated on social media by Joe Truzman, a self-described “Senior Research analyst examining Palestinian armed groups and Iranian proxy organizations” at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative DC-based think tank founded in 2001 with the stated goal of working to “enhance Israel’s image.” As The Grayzone reported, the Trump White House plagiarized its public justification for attacking Iran word-for-word from an FDD paper. 

Though Truzman declined to state where he’d found the materials, he wrote that “Telegram channels linked to the Axis of Resistance… widely disseminated the publications,” using a reference to a variety of resistance factions sympathetic to Iran and Palestine throughout the greater Middle East. The group he linked to, a popular Telegram channel called Sabereen News, made it clear they were reposting the video, which they said was the work of a group calling themselves “the companions.” 

Almost immediately, Truzman began asserting that these “companions” were all but guaranteed to be a Tehran-linked cutout. For starters, he told British media, “their logo with the wording is a sign of a classic Iranian front organization.” And Iran had already threatened to carry out just such a wave of attacks, Truzman claimed. After all, he wrote, “On March 8, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s deputy-foreign minister, warned that if a European country joined the US and Israel in the current war against the Islamic Republic, it would be a ‘legitimate’ target ‘for Iranian retaliation.’”

Over the next two weeks, the shadowy group would go on to take credit for burning a vehicle in a Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp, arson at a synagogue in Rotterdam, explosions near a Jewish school and financial office building in Amsterdam, firebombing Jewish-dedicated ambulances in London, and an unspecified attack in Greece. 

So far, the only media outlet to have interviewed a member of HAYI is CBS News, which was recently purchased by David Ellison, the ultra-Zionist billionaire son of the largest individual donor to Israel’s military, Larry Ellison, who happens to be a close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief installed by Ellison at CBS, is a self-described “Zionist fanatic.”

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Why Washington needs talks with Tehran more than it admits

In recent days, there has been a noticeable shift in US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding Iran. Less than a week ago, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran, threatening strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refused to unblock the Strait of Hormuz. Now, Trump has expressed openness to negotiations and even claims that some contact with the Iranian side has taken place. This rhetorical shift may not reflect a genuine diplomatic process but could be part of an information strategy. After it became clear that Tehran was unwilling to make concessions and was unresponsive to Trump’s coercive pressure, the US attempted to make it look like the Iranian side was the one suggesting talks.

Israeli news outlet Ynet claims that Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has agreed to negotiate with the US. However, no credible evidence has surfaced to back this, raising questions about the sources of the information and its purpose. Given the current dynamics, these reports can be seen as propaganda aimed at crafting an image of Iran as vulnerable and eager for urgent dialogue with Washington. These interpretations might serve to reinforce the narrative of Tehran’s weakening position.

In Tehran, this is perceived as an attempt to influence global energy markets. Public signals from the US, particularly from Trump, affect oil and gas price dynamics, especially amid tensions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz – a critical artery for global hydrocarbon supplies. In this context, talk of negotiations can be viewed as a tool for stabilizing expectations and reducing market volatility.

Iranian society and elites remain skeptical about negotiations with the US. Based on past experiences, Iran believes that diplomatic agreements with Washington do not lead to long-term de-escalation and are often followed by increased pressure or an escalation of the conflict. In the current situation, Iran maintains that its position does not necessitate immediate negotiations. Furthermore, within the regional landscape, Iran possesses the capability for asymmetric influence, utilizing allied actors and indirect means of leverage.

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AWACS’ Destruction is a Major Loss for US Military – Ex-DoW Analyst

The destruction of a US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian missile strike is a serious blow to the US military, former US Department of War analyst Karen Kwiatkowski tells Sputnik.

The US has a limited number of E-3 aircraft, which are based on aging Boeing 707 airframes, and the next-generation replacement for E-3 is not yet available

The loss of even one of E-3s puts a strain on the remaining aircraft as they are forced to operate longer. It demoralizes the crew, stresses systems, and “increases the consumption rate of surveillance capability and information management”

Other E-3s now have to prioritize their own defense, which may reduce the radar, surveillance, and command effectiveness they supply

With many of the important US long-range radars in the region being knocked out by Iranian strikes, the strain put on E-3 aircraft will only get worse, with further losses among them threatening to “narrow and pressure the information space for theater commanders and US and Israeli forces”

Due to E-3’s distinctive and well-recognized function and appearance, Kwiatkowski adds, its destruction creates concern in the US because it doesn’t look like “winning,” and that claims of Iran losing its fighting capability were premature.

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