Iran Crisis & the 2026 War between Iran and the United States, Gulf States, and Israel - Please focus on news and coverage, not argumentation.

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IRGC base in Qorveh, west-central Iran (pop'n 78k), struck by three missiles.



Two military compounds, including one belonging to border security units, bombed near Mariwan in far western Iran.



Missile spotted flying over the Narmak neighborhood in Tehran.



IRGC troops spotted moving across Tehran, reportedly in preparation to impose a curfew & try to pre-empt any uprising in the capital; whatever we think of the probability of an internal Iranian regime change on this thread, the Islamists seem to consider that danger serious enough to further risk getting bombed in the open like this. Also for whatever reason, the uploader decided this clip needed a chipmunk jumpscare around the 0:30 mark.

 
Dammit Mandrake! said:
The Iranians swore loyalty to a cardboard cutout of the new Ayatollah. It wasn't even a good cardboard cutout. It was really bad.

So bad that I can't believe they did it.
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This does not project a winning spirit.
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This was so sad and hilarious. They could have used a nice portrait like the one in the background of Khamenei, but it looks like they made him out of some rubble from a missile strike.
:stress:
sanders-cardboard.jpg trump-cutoutprice.jpg
You can get professional cardboard cutouts of US politicians for $55. I don't understand how anyone in the IRGC copes anymore. Its Joever.

Edit: I spoke with my Iranian friend, if you join the IRGC, you get special stuff:
They have a good salary, in addition to many benefits, free car. Shopping from stores owned by the IRGC. Free housing.Free medical treatment. Status. Free university education for family members, Getting large bank loans without heavy paperwork. Every month they give free food supplies such as rice, oil,
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ThisIsGonnaBeGood said:
This is something that's being overlooked. If it appears that the regime won't collapse, I wouldn't put it past Israel to completely obliterate all remaining power stations, water supplies, and transportation infrastructure and just let the country devolve into civil war as everyone tries to avoid dying from thirst.
They may even deploy one of those nukes they promise they don't have.
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This is entirely plausible, with Trump standing there holding the bag wondering WTF just happened.
 
namvata said:
Not if you're shia, which is why sunnis hate them, because they view the shia reverence of prophets like Ali or religious figures like Khamenei as "shirk" (aka idol worshipping)
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Which is exactly why they're the threat that they are; their entire philosophy of governance is bringing forth "the 12th Imam"... Imagine some group of miscreants out of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer attempting to raise a demon - Angel in Season 2 with Acathla or the "Senior Partners" in Angel season 5 - whose belief system includes the idea that to raise said mythical being they have to eradicate a neighboring state/group of people, and they're pursuing nuclear weapons.

You simply can't "negotiate" with people who think getting weapons of mass destruction and using them against another group of people to bring an end-of-the-world ushering creature is a legitimate basis of government. That people haven't yet realized how cuckoo-fucking-bananapants these people are amazes me.

"Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords" is actually less loony if we're being honest.
 
BigJoey41X said:
you have to understand that religious fundamentalists are fucking crazy, they have zero fear of dying for the jihad or some shit, and are willing to hide in fuckall nowhere in squalid conditions for decades, which is why we could never properly beat the taliban.

the people being killed by the government are just normal people who can be suppressed into submission.
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namvata said:
Because those people are largely secular and the terrorists we were killing during the GWOT were islamist maniacs who aspired to die fighting holy war against the kuffar.

you can also apply this formula to Syria as well. The secular Assad regime was fighting against jihadists who were willing to keep fighting, keep dying, and bide their time until they saw a major weak spot in the regime's defenses and overthrew it in under 2 weeks. Also those people were, again, already armed and had an active rebellion against the government. No such thing exists in Iran as of now aside from separatist insurgents in Balochistan.
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Syria & Afghanistan's conditions do not map so neatly onto Iran. I've already posted as much before in this thread but the majority of Iranians live in the cities, whereas the majority of Afghanistan's population is rural-based (in fact the proportions are almost exactly the inverse of one another; Iran has a 77%-23% urban-rural breakdown, Afghanistan has a 74%-26% rural-urban divide). Similarly, in Syria the Assad regime was a minority dictatorship ruling over a Sunni majority, not a Sunni majoritarian dictatorship (that would be what the rebels replaced it with); in Iran it has long been suspected that the die-hard Islamists are similarly a minority ruling over the majority of less than fanatical Iranians, going all the way back to the 1979 Revolution (where, indeed, they were only one of many competing factions which had momentarily united to topple the Shah and had to purge their rivals, especially the commies who actually had a decent chance of coming out on top instead, in the years afterward).

AJ's rebels and the Taliban further greatly benefited from having safe zones where they could build up their strength and where their enemies couldn't follow, or at least had to abide by various restrictions, in Turkey-protected Idlibistan and in Pakistan respectively. It's not terribly clear where the IRGC could go to set up a similarly convenient base of operations if they're pushed out of Tehran; the Taliban in A-stan hate them for being heretics (they infamously even broke the Genghis-Khwarezm taboo and murdered Iranian diplomats back in the day), and while they could theoretically find refuge among the Shiites in Iraq, they could be bombed with impunity by the US/Israel there on top of having to contend with Kurds & Sunni Iraqis and they'd be cut off from the actually Shiite regions of Iran (most Iranian Sunnis live in the western provinces).

Also since you mention Syria, jihadists aren't superhuman and can absolutely be broken with force, it's just that such a level of force was off the table for George 'Islam is Peace' W. Bush and the Islamophilic liberal crowd. Time will tell if the Iranian opposition has it in them to treat Shiism the way the Jacobins did Catholicism or, at least, the way Ataturk treated Sunnism; it's too early to make any predictions since they first have to take over before they can even begin countenancing this sort of thing, however it is worth noting that the protesters in January did absolutely burn down mosques (as also recorded in the early pages of this thread) and that even the Islamist government's ministers have previously admitted that as many as 50k out of the country's 75k mosques have had to close down due to lack of attendance just a few short years ago, hardly the sign of a pious (much less suicidally Islamist) population.
 
lurker7274519 said:
Don't expect public defections, at best soldiers will abandon their guns in places where protesters can pick them and flee back home. Anyone expecting loyalty from the grunts of a totalitarian regime is nuts. The mental profile of the people who join the military in these kind of regimes, is the lowest of the low, cowards who don't even have the balls to kill, because if they had them, they would be promoted to the dissent killing squads. I am 100% sure that Iran must have its special protester killing squads designated to reduce the amount of grunts having to be used to massacre civilians.

Guns are not even the problem, the important thing is to be able to push the ball hard enough to put the country beyond protests, and directly into civil war, total death mode. Once that happens, cops will have to start wearing neck guards to not get their throat slit open by some drunk teen.
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The biggest mistake everyone here is making is trying to view the mentality of an IRGC extremist through Western eyes instead of through the eyes of someone who has waited their entire lives to die in a war against the USA. Westerners believed Iran would immediately surrender because they would have immediately surrendered. These people want to die killing us, we don't want to die killing them.
 
SaidNoOneEver said:
The biggest mistake everyone here is making is trying to view the mentality of an IRGC extremist through Western eyes instead of through the eyes of someone who has waited their entire lives to die in a war against the USA.
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I simply wish to give them what they've been waiting for.
StudMccool said:
Thai flagged ship got hit in the strait earlier today, name is Mayuree Naree
View attachment 8685948

three have been hit so far in last few hours
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Source
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oh good stud's here to repeat the news posts from ten pages ago
 
Chuckwagon said:
Syria & Afghanistan's conditions do not map so neatly onto Iran. I've already posted as much before in this thread but the majority of Iranians live in the cities, whereas the majority of Afghanistan's population is rural-based (in fact the proportions are almost exactly the inverse of one another; Iran has a 77%-23% urban-rural breakdown, Afghanistan has a 74%-26% rural-urban divide). Similarly, in Syria the Assad regime was a minority dictatorship ruling over a Sunni majority, not a Sunni majoritarian dictatorship (that would be what replaced it); in Iran it has long been suspected that the die-hard Islamists are similarly a minority ruling over the majority of less than fanatical Iranians, going all the way back to the 1979 Revolution (where, indeed, they were only one of many competing factions which had momentarily united to topple the Shah and had to purge their rivals, especially the commies who actually had a decent chance of coming out on top instead, in the years afterward).

AJ's rebels and the Taliban further greatly benefited from having safe zones where they could build up their strength and where their enemies couldn't follow, or at least had to abide by various restrictions, in Turkey-protected Idlibistan and in Pakistan respectively. It's not terribly clear where the IRGC could go to set up a similarly convenient base of operations if they're pushed out of Tehran; the Taliban in A-stan hate them for being heretics, and while they could theoretically find refuge among the Shiites in Iraq, they could be bombed with impunity by the US/Israel there on top of having to contend with Kurds & Sunni Iraqis and they'd be cut off from the actually Shiite regions of Iran (most Iranian Sunnis live in the western provinces).

Also since you mention Syria, jihadists aren't superhuman and can absolutely be broken with force, it's just that such a level of force was off the table for George 'Islam is Peace' W. Bush and the Islamophilic liberal crowd. Time will tell if the Iranian opposition has it in them to treat Shiism the way the Jacobins did Catholicism or, at least, the way Ataturk treated Sunnism; it's too early to make any predictions since they first have to take over before they can even begin countenancing this sort of thing, however it is worth noting that the protesters in January did absolutely burn down mosques (as also recorded in the early pages of this thread) and that even the Islamist government's ministers have previously admitted that as many as 50k out of the country's 75k mosques have had to close down due to lack of attendance, hardly the sign of a pious (much less suicidally Islamist) population.
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I wasn't referring to the Iranian population when talking about religious fundamentalists, it was unrelated to Iran itself and more about the GWOT and how jihadists remained resistant to western forces for so long.

now I don't know if the IRGC can be like the Taliban and do asymmetric guerilla warfare in the event a US ground force actually happens as a final attempt to topple the regime and no one aside from those Israelis trying to goad us into doing it because ANOTHER prolonged war will surely end the current Republican resurgence in domestic politics.
 
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