Image is of destruction and damage inside Israel, sourced from this article.
Iran and Israel have struck each other many times over the last few days. There has been a general focus on military facilities and headquarters by both sides, though Israel has also struck oil facilities, civilian structures and hospitals, and in return for this, Iran has struck major scientific centers and the Haifa oil facilities.
Israel appears to have three main aims. First, to collapse the Iranian state, either through shock and breakdown by killing enough senior officials, or via some sort of internal military coup. Second, to try and destroy Iranian nuclear sites and underground missile cities, or at least to paralyze them long enough to achieve the first and third goals. And third, to bring the US into a direct conflict with Iran. This is because the US better equipped to fight them than Israel is (though victory would still not be guaranteed depending on what Iran chooses to do).
Iranian nuclear facilities are hidden deep underground (800 meters), far beyond the depth range of even the most powerful bunker busters (~70 meters or so), and built such that the visible ground entrances are horizontally far away in an unknown direction from the actual underground chambers. Only an extremely competent full-scale American bombing force all simultaneously using multiple of the most powerful conventional (perhaps even nuclear) bunker busters could even hypothetically hope to breach them (and we have seen how, in practice, American bunker busters have largely failed to impair or deter Ansarallah). There are several analysts on both sides who have concluded that it is entirely impossible to physically prevent Iran from building nukes.
I fully expect the US to join the war. I believe the current ambiguity is a deliberate invention of the US while they work to move their military assets into position, and as soon as they are ready, the US will start bombing Iran. After that, Iran's leadership must - if they haven't already - harden their hearts, and strike back with no fear, or risk following the path of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, either into either surrender, occupation, or annihilation. Every day where they do not possess a nuke is a day where lives are being lost and cities are being bombed.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I don't think Israel have the air superiority they pretend they have. I think Israeli impacts on Iran are mostly missiles. Their attempts to fly drones and jets in Iranian airspace is resulting in things being downed whereas the Iranian AD can't deal with missiles. Some drones are sneaking through too but that's just always going to be the case.
One thing that irks me is that when we've seen air superiority achieved in the past it's produced videos of lingering presence of jets. Iranian civilians aren't taking any videos showing the presence of jets at all as far as I can tell. They're loud as shit, you know when one is in your area. So if they have air superiority? Where's the evidence of this?
The obvious conclusion is that they don't have it.
I think the lack of impacts in eastern Iran aren't because they can't fly the air force there due to lack of air superiority, I think the lack of impacts there are caused by lack of range on the munitions they're successfully hitting western Iran with.
They have air superiority over Tehran and western Iran. Over the whole country? Of course not, and they're lying if they pretend otherwise. Israel don't have the capability to do it quickly, they don't have the EA-18G Growler to actively suppress air defences. Manually suppressing air defences by destroying them with human in the loop TV guided glide bombs and cruise missiles (which is what Israel is currently doing) is going to take them a while if they want to reach further into Iran, it will be a slog. They'll certainly try though.
Internet is shutdown for over 48 hours now, so a trickle of videos are coming out. Jets will be flying very high in Iranian airspace to stay outside of the range of SHORAD and AA gunfire, most modern fighter jets have an altitude ceiling of 15-18km/50 000-60 000ft. Good luck trying to take a picture of that. Plenty of videos of UCAVs and MALE UAVs over western Iran and Tehran though at lower altitudes, quite different from one way attack drones. Iran has shot down 4 UCAVs/MALE UAVs.
Yeah they can't fly in eastern Iran, 100% correct there. As for munition ranges, Delilah air launched cruise missile/loitering munition has a 250-300km range (and human in the loop TV guidance), but only a 30kg warhead, so mainly used to manually suppress air defence systems and radars by destroying them (don't need a large warhead to destroy a soft target like that), launched from outside of the range of these air defence systems. It's warhead is too small to explain all the explosions in Tehran though. SPICE 250 and SPICE 1000 have a 100km range, human in the loop TV guidance (same system as the Popeye missile) and the number is the weight in lbs. SPICE 2000 is the same, but 60km range. And then there are the JDAMs, 24km range and M-code GPS guided. All of these have been used in western Iran and Tehran. For example those strikes aimed at underground facilities in the mountains and hillsides of Tehran, likely done by GBU-31 2000lb JDAMs with a BLU-109 penetrator warhead. The SPICE 250 and 1000 have allowed Israel to make extensive use of their 4th generation aircraft (F-15s and F-16s), who otherwise would be quite vulnerable. However, the maximum range is only 100km, so these aircraft are still flying hundreds of kilometres into Iran to strike Tehran for example.
Then there's the air launched ballistic missiles, ROCKS, Rampage, Air LORA, Golden Horizon. Ranges vary from 250km for Rampage, 300km for ROCKS, 430km for Air LORA, and over 1000km for Golden Horizon. But stocks and numbers are quite limited, the only one that exists in high numbers is Rampage (an air launched guided artillery rocket, like an air launched HIMARS). Haven't seen any evidence of their use outside of the first day of the war. Which is why we're not seeing many impacts in eastern Iran. So again correct as far as I know.
Curious question, if the Israeli jets fly higher than the altitude range of the Iranian air defence on the ground, what options does Iran have to defend against / destroy Israeli jets?
I'm assuming missiles fired from the ground might not work because of the speed the jet is moving...does this mean Iran would have to engage these jets with their own jets? My understanding is that they don't have many fighter planes like the US/Israel. I also wonder how they downed the F35s that have been claimed, hopefully they can do more of that.
They should buy those extremely long range air to air missiles Russia has. Or buy/make more long range air defence