Tag: iran

Iran’s new supreme leader is named as Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba – Iranian TV network reports

Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been appointed Iran‘s new Supreme Leader.  

Mojtaba, 56, Ali Khamenei’s second oldest son, has strong links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and was chosen by Iran’s Assembly of Experts ‘under pressure from the Revolutionary Guards’, according to Iranian opposition outlet Iran International.

Mojtaba is not a high-ranking cleric, has never held office and does not have an official role in the regime. 

But he served in the Iranian armed forces during the Iran-Iraq war and is believed to wield considerable influence behind the scenes. He has been touted as a possible successor to his father for years.

However, he was not included in a list of three senior clerics Ali Khamenei reportedly identified last year. 

And his father is said to have indicated opposition to his candidacy because it would resemble the hereditary rule enacted by the US-backed Shah monarchy before it was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Father-to-son succession is also viewed negatively in the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment in Iran.   

But much of Iran’s top brass has been decimated in the latest conflict and Mojtaba has close ties with the powerful IRGC and the Basij volunteer paramilitary force.

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Israel Air Force strikes Iranian oil facilities, military source says

IDF sources confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night that the air force has attacked significant oil resources in the Tehran region of Iran.

According to the sources, the oil resources being attacked are directly connected to Iran’s military industrial complex.

It was unclear what distinctions the IDF would make in such attacks regarding differing oil sites, but there was a clear effort by the sources to emphasize the military nature of the sites, which might otherwise be framed as harming Iran’s economic power more broadly, even if a new regime might later take over.

In the past, senior Israeli sources have told the Post that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent years taken over certain portions of the economy, especially in the oil sector.

Iranian opposition reports indicated that as many as 30 sites might be under attack.

This vector of attack on the Islamic regime‘s power is the newest front after prior attacks on air defenses, ballistic missiles, top Iranian leaders, ballistic missile supply chain locations, and regime repression forces.

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U.S. Military-Industrial Complex Agrees To Quadruple Bomb Production As Operation Epic Fury Rages On

U.S. Central Command said late Friday on X that U.S. forces struck 3,000 IRGC targets with air-delivered munitions during the first week of Operation Epic Fury, signaling that the campaign is only intensifying as it moves into next week.

President Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday that he would not accept a negotiated end to the war with Iran, suggesting the conflict could drag on for some time. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he said.

We have reported that U.S. inventories of some critical munitions are running low, with U.S. forces scrambling for supplies of key air-defense interceptors as IRGC missiles and drones continue to target American and allied bases across Gulf states.

Dwindling supplies of critical munitions are being amplified by Ukraine’s continued need for interceptors amid relentless Russian missile and drone barrages, a major problem that likely prompted President Trump to host top U.S. defense manufacturers to discuss accelerating missile and bomb production.

“We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest U.S. Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules,” Trump said on Truth Social late Friday afternoon.

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Leaked spy report warns Trump’s Iran war faces disaster

A leaked classified report by the National Intelligence Council has shed an unfavorable light on Donald Trump‘s decision to strike Iran, warning that military involvement could be disastrous. 

In just one week, tensions have dramatically risen in the region, starting with a joint military operation conducted by the US and Israel against Iran. 

The strikes took out Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as Iran retaliated by targeting US military bases in the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Trump has stood firm on the military attack, but a report completed by the NIC just a week before raised doubts about the US’s ability to overthrow the regime. 

The NIC is a federal government agency that reports to the Director of National Intelligence. NIC members bridge 18 intelligence agencies with policymakers to provide analytical assessments. 

Three people familiar with the findings told the Washington Post that Iran would likely respond to Khamenei’s death by following protocols to preserve the regime. Sources said it was ‘unlikely’ that Iran’s opposition would seize control.

Khamenei’s successor has yet to be named. Iran’s Assembly of Experts and high-ranking members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have been tasked with naming his replacement. 

The ayatollah’s son, Mojitaba Khamenei, is rumored to be assuming the role, but Trump has previously called him ‘incompetent’ and a ‘lightweight.’ 

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White House blocks intelligence report warning of rising US homeland terror threat linked to Iran war

The FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center were preparing to put out a joint intelligence statement on Friday to state and local authorities alerting them of a heightened threat due to the ongoing war in Iran, a senior DHS official said.

The bulletin, which was reviewed by the Daily Mail, details ‘elevated threats by the government of Iran to US military and government personnel and facilities, Jewish and Israeli institutions and their perceived supporters, and Iranian dissidents and other anti-regime activists in the United States.’

‘Radicalized individuals with a variety of ideological backgrounds also may see this conflict or other geopolitical events as a justification for violence,’ the report continues.

The five-page bulletin blocked by the White House provides specific details on how Iranian proxies may carry out attacks across the country. One section explains how local law enforcement can respond to this type of violence.

The official title is ‘A Public Safety Awareness Report: Elevated threat in the United States during US-Iran conflict’. 

Homeland Security broke protocol and gave the White House a heads-up about the nationwide bulletin hours before it was set to be released. 

Top Trump officials ordered it placed on ‘hold’. The White House did not deny blocking the terror bulletin in a statement to the Daily Mail.

‘The White House is coordinating closely with all government agencies to ensure information being disseminated is accurate, up to date, and has been properly vetted — even if that means taking additional time to review to ensure nothing is done in a vacuum,’ said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

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How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away. 

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control. 

At that point, Trump was still campaigning to be a “President of Peace. On the campaign stump, he warned that his opponent, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III guaranteed.” Trump vowed to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day, and distanced himself from pro-war Republicans who sought regime change in Iran. 

Pro-war elements in Trump’s coterie exercised multiple points of leverage to reverse the president’s anti-interventionist instincts. Ultra-Zionist billionaires supplied vital and well-documented influence over Trump’s policies by keeping his campaign war chest flush. But Trump remained an erratic personality whose petty grievances kept his aides in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

It was only by exploiting Trump’s deepest psychological vulnerability – his fear of an assassin’s bullet – that Israel and its cutouts in his administration were able to secure their influence over the president, keeping him on the warpath against Iran. 

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Trump: Iran War Is an Open-Ended, Regime-Change War, Followed by Nation-Building

Every new war that the U.S. wages — at least over the past six decades — is accompanied by a series of official lies, shifting and inconsistent claims about the war’s goals, and constant exaggerations about the grand progress toward glorious victory. Now, a full week into the Iran War started by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partner, the American President Donald Trump, this war already equals, if not surpasses, the brazen war propaganda that instigated and fueled those prior ones.

For the first few days, Trump’s most loyal supporters insisted — over and over — that this was not even a war at all. Americans have been so accustomed to a state of constant, endless war that when some watch their government heavily bombing another country, deliberately killing its leaders, sinking its navy, all while the U.S. President warns that “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” this somehow does not count as a “war.” We are told by supporters of the Iran War that whatever Iran has been doing to the U.S. constitutes a vicious, 47-year terrorist war against the U.S., but when the U.S. sends a “massive armada” to Iran and then attacks it with aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and 2,000-pound bombs, that this is somehow not a war? O.K.

That insulting not-a-war propaganda was crushed, thankfully, by a rather large obstacle. Namely, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth began calling it a war and invoking war clichés virtually from the start. Israel has always described it as a war. And now President Trump is also calling it a war. That ought to end this rhetorical tactic among all but the most shamelessly dishonest.

Once that defensive wall fell, defenders of this new Netanyahu-Trump war resorted to a new rationale: Fine, it is a war. But it will be a very short one. It will not be like Iraq. Donald Trump is not George W. Bush.

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US warplanes ‘likely responsible’ for Minab school massacre in Iran, internal probe shows

US investigators probing the deadly attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab believe a US military strike is the most likely cause of the bombing that killed over 180 people, of whom at least 165 were children, according to US officials who spoke to Reuters.

Two US officials told the outlet that the investigation remains ongoing and that a final determination has not been reached.

However, preliminary findings suggest the strike was most likely carried out by US forces, though they added that additional evidence could still emerge that changes the conclusion.

Reports and investigations by multiple outlets have reached a similar conclusion.

An investigation by the New York Times (NYT), based on satellite imagery, verified videos, and social media material, found the school had been hit by a precision strike at the same time that nearby targets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came under attack.

A similar recent investigation by Middle East Eye (MEE) indicated the site was struck twice, describing the incident as a so-called “double-tap” strike.

A double-tap strike is a tactic meant to maximize civilian casualties in which a second missile hits the same location shortly after the first, deliberately killing survivors and rescuers who rush to the scene to help the wounded.

The BBC later reported that satellite imagery and open-source evidence suggested the area was struck by multiple simultaneous or near-simultaneous attacks.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt deflected accusations of deliberate targeting, telling Reuters that “the Iranian regime targets civilians and children, not the United States of America.”

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US offensive on Iran burned through an estimated $779M on first day

US forces spent an estimated $779 million, or about 0.1% of the entire 2026 US defense budget, during the opening 24 hours of its offensive against Iran, according to estimates and data compiled by Anadolu.

The US’ CENTCOM confirmed that the massive deployment included B-2 stealth bombers, F-22, F-35, and F-16 fighter jets, A-10 attack aircraft, and EA-18G electronic warfare planes. The operation also utilized MQ-9 Reaper drones, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems.

Four B-2 stealth bombers, flying non-stop from Whiteman Air Force Base in the US state of Missouri, struck targets using 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), according to CENTCOM. Known for high maintenance requirements and a 40,000-lb (18,143-kg) payload capacity, the B-2 operations alone accounted for an estimated $30.2 million, based on flight hours, maintenance costs, and munition requisitions data from the US Defense Department’s 2025 and 2026 budget requests.

CENTCOM’s buildup of various fighter jets of F-18s, F-16s, F-22s, and F35s contributed to the initial strikes, according to a post by CENTCOM on US social media company X. Based on flight hours, maintenance costs, and munition requisitions data from the 2025 and 2026 US department budget requests, these sorties cost an estimated $271.34 million.

Specialized aircraft, including the EA-18G Growler, A-10C Thunderbolt, and the MQ-9 Reaper, played a critical role alongside the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS). When factoring in P-8 Maritime Patrol aircraft, RC-135 reconnaissance planes, and aerial refueling tankers, as well as land-based HIMARS batteries, the cost for the combined air and ground assets, including the fighter jets, reached approximately $423.57 million.

The two US carrier groups in the region, the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford, also took part in the attack. The cost of operating the aircraft carriers along with their contingent of destroyers and littoral combat ships is estimated to come to $15 million a day.

Additionally, CENTCOM also released videos of its navy deploying scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles. While exact numbers remain classified, estimates suggest that roughly 200 Tomahawks were fired, totaling $340.4 million in munitions costs.

Combining these expenses, the total estimated cost for the U.S. strikes conducted last Saturday alone stands at $779.174 million, or some 0.1% of the 2026 US defense budget.

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Trump’s Plan To Escort Ships Through Strait Of Hormuz Would Put U.S. Navy Warships In The Crosshairs

U.S. Navy could soon be escorting commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where maritime traffic has effectively stopped due to the current conflict with Iran, according to President Donald Trump. Doing so would demand that American naval vessels transit through the Strait, shifting them away from other duties. More importantly, it would also mean putting them right in a super weapons engagement zone full of Iranian threats that could include cruise and ballistic missiles, one-way-attack drones, explosive-laden kamikaze boats, and naval mines.

“If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible,” President Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social social media network.

“Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” he also wrote. “This will be available to all Shipping Lines.”

“No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD. The United States’ ECONOMIC and MILITARY MIGHT is the GREATEST ON EARTH,” he added. “More actions to come.”

U.S. Central Command declined to comment when reached for more details. TWZ has also reached out to the White House.

The Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, is just 20 nautical miles across at its narrowest point. A significant portion of the waterway falls within Iran’s national waters, which also overlap with those of Oman to the south. Under normal conditions, maritime traffic flows in and out through a pair of established two-mile-wide shipping lanes. Each year, roughly one-fifth of all global oil shipments, and an even higher percentage of seaborne shipments, pass through this one waterway. It is also a major conduit for liquid natural gas exports. Some 3,000 ships, including tankers and container ships, pass through each month.

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