On the night of February 28 2026, the world changed. An American-Israeli airstrike in Tehran resulted in the death of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s top leadership. Within hours, retaliatory missiles launched by Iran began flying across the night sky, with targets being the US military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan. Tensions that diplomats had abhorred for decades and that various rounds of nuclear negotiations had desperately tried to prevent had come to pass. The Middle East is presently embroiled in warfare, which will have far-reaching ramifications beyond its borders.

The war was due to years of tension and failed diplomatic efforts that created an environment of hostility. After the collapse of the the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran began expanding its nuclear enrichment programme gradually and consistently. By the end of 2024, the IAEA reported stocks of uranium enriched to near-purity for a bomb, with no credible civilian justification. As Israel hit Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, it set the programme back by two years but did not end it. During the same period, high-pressure sanctions were reimposed by the United States, which, according to their own admission, resulted in the short supply of dollars that caused the free fall of the Iranian rial and helped trigger the riots of December 2025 and January 2026. These were the largest massive anti-government protests since the revolution of 1979.

Iranian security forces took brutal measures against those protests, killing thousands of civilians. The Iranian government’s massacre of its own people, along with its renewed nuclear ambitions, gave the Trump administration the political justification it needed. On February 26, the third round of indirect nuclear talks in Geneva came to a failed conclusion. The failed conclusion of the talks also meant that the ten-day deadline that was imposed by President Trump expired. The bombs dropped two days later.

The War Today and What Lies Ahead

In less than two weeks, the US and Israel have initiated around two thousand........

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