“US Israel Iran War”

Pete Hegseth said US strikes on Iran are “only just the beginning”, as he promised to deliver Donald Trump’s demand for the regime’s unconditional surrender.

The US defence secretary said the US was “willing to go as far as we need to in order to be successful”, and refused to rule out putting boots on the ground inside the Islamic Republic.

Speaking to CBS News, he said: “This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees.”

🚨 JUST IN: Footage released of a UAE Air Force F-16E targeting an Iranian attack drone

Iran is CONTINUING to attack its neighbors — horrible move on their part!pic.twitter.com/nOss2FLGkY

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 9, 2026

Israel 🇮🇱 and U.S. 🇺🇸 precision strikes have practically wiped out Iran's naval fleet. A beautiful destructive poetry. 💥 pic.twitter.com/5XXPNXgdCE

— HJB News (@HJB_News__) March 9, 2026

B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers reportedly landed at RAF Fairford in the UK on Monday.

Iran’s Islamic regime really needs to surrender immediately.

This won’t go well for them otherwise.pic.twitter.com/cvf7qyTGJP

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) March 9, 2026

h/t patthedog

Who could forget the Washington Post‘s foolish unforced error in 2019 when its obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS, called him an “austere religious scholar“?

Apparently, the editors at the Washington Post forgot, because they printed an obituary for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that makes its praise for al-Baghdadi look restrained.

The U.S. has intercepted encrypted communications believed to have originated in Iran that may serve as “an operational trigger” for “sleeper assets” outside the country, according to a federal government alert sent to law enforcement agencies.

The alert, reviewed by ABC News, cites “preliminary signals analysis” of a transmission “likely of Iranian origin” that was relayed across multiple countries shortly after the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was killed in a U.S.-Israeli attack on Feb. 28.

Even before US and Israeli missiles began raining down, those sensing the winds of change were forecasting a Berlin Wall moment for Iran.

Mass nationwide demonstrations in January – although savagely repressed, causing the deaths of an estimated tens of thousands – were seen as portents of a reckoning for the country’s ruling theocrats, just as the popular breaching of Berlin’s fearful symbol of Europe’s cold war division spelled the downfall of East Germany’s communist regime in 1989.

Now the sudden death of Iran’s most powerful figure, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – killed, with his wife, in an Israeli missile strike on his supposedly secure compound in Tehran last Saturday – has further fuelled the belief that profound transformation is at hand.

President Trump is considering sending troops to secure Iran’s enriched uranium after reports of US-Israeli strikes on one of the main sites that he said was obliterated last year.

Missile attacks caused “severe damage” to an irradiation sterilisation facility in Isfahan on Saturday, Iran’s ISNA news agency reported. The Iranian regime has not allowed any inspection at Isfahan, where most of the uranium was believed to be stored, nor at Fordow and Natanz, the main places for enrichment.

A synagogue in the Belgian city of Liège was damaged in an explosion in the early hours of Monday, police have said.

The blast happened at around 04:00 local time (03:00 GMT) in front of the synagogue and damaged windows across the street but caused no injuries, according to officers.

Willy Demeyer, the city’s mayor, called the incident “an antisemitic act”, while Prime Minister Bart De Wever said later on social media: “We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community.”

Related – Police release images of Oslo US embassy explosion suspect

h/t Patti Jo

As hundreds of thousands of tourists in the Middle East wait anxiously for news of scant repatriation flights, a smaller group of ultra-wealthy people have sought a more exclusive way out: private jets.

In four days last week SHY Aviation fielded some 200 requests for 700 people in the Middle East to charter its planes, which carry up to 12 passengers. Overall, the company estimates, some 30,000 people have tried to evacuate the area by private jets hired through SHY or its rivals.

An Iranian Kurdish militia leader said Donald Trump would not be able to topple Tehran’s regime without their help.

Rebaz Sharifi, a military commander with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), an Iranian separatist group based in northern Iraq, said he was confident the US would back them for an eventual ground invasion of Iran.

He also claimed there were 10,000 fighters ready to invade once given the order.

This is the third Gulf war and umpteenth outbreak of conflict since the United States took over as the dominant power and influence in the Middle East at the end of the cold war. And it is arguably the most dangerous, consequential and confused of them all.

The destruction and chaos spreading across the region confirms the Middle East’s status as the world’s pre-eminent crisis factory, but it also raises questions as to how US presidents so often declare they are ending US interference in the region, only to be lured back in.

Since the second world war the US has set out to oust a government in the Middle East on average once a decade, and on almost every occasion it has left the country, and the US, worse off as unexpected consequences eventually emerge. As Donald Trump embarks on yet another regime change – this time in Iran, a country of 90 million people – the sense of foreboding is profound. Already the timelines are extending, and the sense is growing by the day that Trump is gambling with the fate of a country about which he knows next to nothing.

Everyone is counting Iran’s missiles. They are counting the wrong thing.

The number that determines the outcome of this war is not 2,000 or 2,500 or 3,000. Those are pre-war missile inventory estimates and they are now largely irrelevant. The number that determines the outcome… https://t.co/cgJ7yHJLwf pic.twitter.com/45jw3JbTsc

— Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ (@shanaka86) March 6, 2026

It’s the Guardian but worth a look assuming you’ve had your rabies shot.

Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed in US-Israeli strikes, has been chosen as his successor.

Unlike his father, the 56-year-old has largely kept a low profile. He has never held government office, nor given public speeches or interviews, and only a limited number of photos and videos of him have ever been published.

But for years there have been rumours that he held considerable influence behind the scenes in Iran.

I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped into Venezuela and took President Maduro to New York to face trial, Keir Starmer was keen to get straight out in front of the cameras. There he said that he wanted to stress that ‘the UK was not involved in any way in this operation’. As though the whole world had been expecting to hear that the British armed forces were indeed central in snatching the narco-terrorist from Caracas.

This week it was again Starmer’s turn to stand behind a podium, British flags behind him, and deliver another statement that absolutely no one thought necessary. Speaking about the US-led strikes on Iran, he announced solemnly: ‘I want to set out our response.’ What could it be? The world wondered. ‘The United Kingdom played no role in these strikes,’ he declared.