War News.
And war news only.
1. The Washington Post:
Early on a cool autumn morning in 2023, from a tunnel beneath the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar gave an order that sent thousands of Hamas fighters through the fence separating the territory from Israel. That green light has reordered the Middle East on a scale comparable to the Arab Spring or the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century — but not remotely in the ways Sinwar had in mind.
Twenty-nine months later, the Middle East is almost unrecognizable. Israel stands indisputably as the military hegemon, its enemies demolished or decapitated. Saudi Arabia is emerging as a pivotal economic and political anchor, its Persian Gulf neighbors reeling under Iranian missile fire. Palestinians, mourning 75,000 dead in a shattered Gaza and losing territory in the West Bank, seem marginalized — by everyone, again.
Sinwar is dead — assassinated by Israel in October 2024 — and after nearly two and a half years of bloodshed and upheaval, the network he hoped would ride to his rescue is in ruins. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was blown up in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Saturday. The regime that bankrolled and armed the “axis of resistance” for four decades is on the edge of collapse — perhaps taking with it Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis….
(W)hat Sinwar set off was not a liberation but an unraveling of everything he and his sponsors yearned for — a defeated Israel, Palestinian hopes for statehood, a Middle East rid of Western influence. The so-called Great Satan looks more like the Great Decider. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
2. Robin Wright:
For the entire Middle East, the changes wrought by this new war and the convulsions precipitated by the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, underscore the failures of Iran’s strategy to transform itself and the region. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has sought to build an alliance that would protect its interests and influence other Shiite communities. “We shall export our revolution to the whole world, until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world,” Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, vowed. Graffiti on the former U.S. Embassy, which was stormed by students ten months after the Revolution, said, “God willing, this century will be the period of victory for the oppressed over the oppressors.”
Iran has certainly failed the oppressed within its own borders. Today, daily life in the country is rife with challenges. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, one dollar bought seventy rials. On the eve of this current war, a dollar bought 1.3 million rials. Basic food supplies are exorbitantly expensive. Water and electricity are in short supply. And, regionally, Iran’s “axis of resistance”—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—has been seriously weakened, though far from eliminated. A striking feature of the first days of the war is that Tehran’s allies—founded, funded, and armed by the Islamic Republic—have not intervened on behalf of their sponsor. (Source: newyorker.com)
3. Institute for the Study of War briefing, 4 March 2026:
> The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted multiple strikes at several military compounds in southeastern Tehran on March 4 that house the headquarters of several services and branches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as well as other internal security forces. The IDF strikes could be part of an effort to disrupt Iranian command and control, but these strikes could also seek to achieve other effects, such as suppressing and degrading Iranian retaliatory capabilities.
> There are reports that Kurdish groups moving from Iraqi Kurdistan have begun a cross-border ground operation in Iran. ISW-CTP has observed no corroborating evidence of such an operation, and a senior Iraqi Kurdistan official denied on March 4 that any groups from Iraqi Kurdistan had begun a ground offensive in Iran.
> The combined force destroyed more provincial sites of internal and external forces key to the armed forces’ domestic control over the population in Tehran and Kurdish-populated cities in northwestern Iran.
> Iran has continued to launch a greater number of drones in its attacks as the number of ballistic missile launches continues to fall, which likely reflects the combined forces’ success in degrading Iran’s ability to launch ballistic missiles.
> Iran will continue to attempt to disrupt international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as part of a broader effort to impose a cost on the Gulf states using missiles and drones until the combined force degrades the ability of Iran to do so. The combined force has severely degraded the Iranian navy. (Source: understandingwar.org)
