TheAltWorld Iran survives terrorist war and emerges a major power broker
Tim Anderson tours Iran during the US-Israeli war, showing different scenes from the terrorist targeting of civilians. He contends Iran has emerged with greater regional leverage, especially through its control over the Strait of Hormuz.
The unprovoked war against Iran by the USA and “Israel” has failed in spectacular fashion, with the Israeli colony in tatters, Washington looking for a way out while Iran holds the upper hand in peace “negotiations” proposed by Pakistan. Further, Tehran’s newly asserted control over shipping traffic passing into and out of the Persian Gulf (which neither the USA nor anyone else can shake) has given it tremendous new economic leverage.
Furthermore, the Iranian population has held together strongly under an extensive series of strikes on mainly civilian targets, which began with the assassination of the former Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei and the murder of 168 people, mainly schoolgirls, at the primary school in Minab, in southern Iran. This coherence underwrites the stability and future of the Islamic Republic.
It is a strange war, as I was able to observe in its third and fourth weeks, with everyday life going on in most major cities, while terrorist atrocities take place in the background. As a bakery owner at Niloufar Square in Tehran told me, this is not a conventional war, like the US-backed Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, where militaries face each other across a frontline.
The bakery owner’s building had been demolished by an enemy missile which targeted the police station next door. The USraeli attack on the police station at Niloufar Square in Tehran also killed and wounded dozens at an adjacent café (see photo) and in surrounding residential apartments.
I was one of a group of four observers (a Turkish journalist, a Greek Lawyer and journalist and a North American videographer) hosted by the Iranian media, between 19 and 31 March. Our tour began in the northern city of Tabriz and wound its way down through Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Bushehr, Bandar Abbas and Minab, the site of the schoolgirl atrocity. Mostly, we were observing the aftermath of USraeli attacks and the patriotic mobilisation of people virtually every evening in the major cities.
In every Iranian city we visited, tens of thousands poured out each evening in support of their country. That included a huge gathering for Eid prayers after Ramadan, at the Imam Khomeini Mosalla Mosque of Tehran (see photos), the first such gathering in 35 years that had not been addressed by the murdered Iranian leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei
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From reports and observations we saw that many people, regardless of their political views, and including many who had returned home from other countries, were keen to defend their country from this foreign aggression. Not surprising, really.
It seems that Trump’s attack on Iran was encouraged by the Israeli propaganda against the Islamic Republic: the repeated claims that “the regime” was highly unpopular and isolated, often making use of heavily biased surveys. Israeli propaganda suggested that the Iranian people would rise up again this “regime” if it were decapitated. That, of course, did not happen, even after many leaders were assassinated.
This is the problem with “believing one’s own nonsense”, most of it generated by Israeli ‘Hasbara’ campaigns, which suggested that the Islamic Republic was hated and insubstantial.
That campaign made use of a wave of violence instigated by Mossad and the CIA in January 2026, as Israeli media and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo admitted, which infiltrated economic protests (after a currency collapse) and killed over 3,000 people (officially 3,117), including hundreds of police and volunteers (Basij).
In Iran, our group saw people of all sorts, but mainly women, coming out to defend their nation and their military. The aim of the Trump-Israeli war was never clearly spelt out, though it is plain that the Israelis wanted to destroy or dismember Iran. The lack of any clear pretext for war led to many of the US allies distancing themselves, while less discriminate ‘allies’ instinctively went along with whatever the US said or did.
As it happened, Iran’s formidable deterrent force of missile and drones punished the Israelis for more than a month, while partially or totally destroying all 13 US bases in the Arab Monarchies of the Persian Gulf. US ships could not approach the Persian Gulf for fear of Iranian missile strikes. For similar reasons, there was no US ground invasion.
Yet we saw traumatised family after traumatised family as we passed through the cities. One residential area in the Resalat neighborhood of Tehran had been largely destroyed by enemy missiles, killing at least 17 people. There was no strategic or military objective in sight. Homeless survivors were helped with housing by the municipality.
In Isfahan we attended a massive funeral for the obviously popular IRGC Colonel Mehdi Nasr Azadani who, after 20 days of active service, returned home only to be murdered by a USraeli missile strike, which also killed his mother, wife and two of his three children. We visited his one surviving child Zeinab in hospital (see photo), where she was on life support after suffering burnt lungs, unaware that her whole family had been wiped out. One uncle was waiting at the hospital to look after her, if and when she emerges from her unconscious condition.
We saw the grieving family of a murdered post office worker in Tabriz, emergency workers and rural people maimed and killed by missiles, drones and even air-dropped magnetic mines strewn over villages on the outskirts of Shiraz (see photos), media workers killed across the country, and an eight-story apartment block collapsed in Bandar Abbas.
In our hospital visit in Shiraz we met 12-year-old Salar (see photo), a champion youth soccer player and survivor of the missile strike on a sports fields in Lamerd, which left 20 dead and injured. This reminded us that the Minab massacre was not the only attack on school children. Unlike little Zeinab in Isfahan, Salar had his parents with him at the hospital.
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