Image is Israeli interceptors trying and failing to intercept missiles over their cities.
Israel just carried out a widespread bombing of Iran, which has killed a number of senior officials inside Iran (though it seems the leadership is more-or-less intact) as well as a number of civilians. Important facilities have been targeted, but the amount of damage is unknown so far (note that many important Iranian facilities are deep underground, making them both hard to damage but also hard to determine if they are damaged from just satellite imagery, so reports of damage will be he-said-she-said).
It appears the attack took Iran by surprise, given that a residential block was targeted that contained some senior officials - if one saw an attack coming, one would imagine they'd be in bunkers. Nonetheless, like the rest of the Resistance Axis, I suspect that Iran has adapted their military structures to be resistant to decapitation strikes by ensuring that replacement figures are ready to take the place of killed officials.
Iran has delivered a massive missile barrage in response to Israeli aggression, even though Israel is continuing to bomb Iran. Iran is now aware of the location of many important Israeli sites, including secret nuclear sites, due to their recent intelligence haul, giving them a distinct edge.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
100% I was fucking bewildered by the doomerism earlier today in this thread over like a few hours of attacks and 50 dead.
I'm glad people have cooled now that there's activity from Iran. People were incredibly doomer.
Imagine if Hexbear had been around back during Operation Barbarossa.
"Guys, just saw telegram footage of Stuka dive bombers leveling the airbases of the Red air force, they're COOKED!"
"Holy shit they're advancing down the Vyazma highway, nothing will stop them, Moscow is lost, its so Joever for the big man..."
To be fair, Barbarossa was devastating. There is a reason the advance started to be halted once there was a serious reconsideration of strategy. Iran got hit by an espionage attack, those were their failings. The USSR had to face rapidly all the mistakes, poor assumptions, and outdated strategies and solve them in mere weeks. They lost so much of their air force without them even taking off, and had to change their air warfare strategy as a result.
For instance the mechanized corps had been scrapped and their armor divided among infantry units in '39, only for that to be reversed in '40, but not in time for them to be prepared from Barbarossa. All existing reformed mechanized corps were destroyed during Barbarossa, and the rebuild was scrapped. Late '42 new corps that are much more balanced are formed with a new design philosophy. These prove effective.
My point being that Iran had a security failed, a bad one at that. But panic over that is less warranted than panic over Barbarossa. Barbarossa was a genuine defeat of huge proportions. The amount of lives lost in the ensuing fighting, the amount of unforced errors, mistakes, and necessary sacrifices to slow the Germans down are horrific.
Like if someone thought the USSR had lost after Barbarossa, that is a lot more reasonable than thinking Iran was joever because they had a huge security breach. Barbarossa was a series of disasters and the reason they overcame it was because Stalin was great at adapting and because the Soviet people had no choice but to endure. Iran had a security failure, fixed it and then went right along with their expected strategy. No need so far to adapt or even continue enduring a new type of conflict than what they expected.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is performing better is what I am saying
I don't blame people, we're so used to everything getting only worse
Being a socialist is all about the superposition of panic, dread, hope, celebration, and nothing ever happens.
You've gotta be all of them at once.
I stand by my comments that Iran's defenses being taken down like that is a huge problem and something that should never be able to happen. But the people saying Iran would COLLAPSE made me scratch my head. Iran is not Syria, Tehran could be in ashes and it still would not make the material reality of Iranian society anything like Syria after a decade of civil war.
Like I said the other day, they survived the Iraq-Iran war for a decade of grueling trench combat and atrocities, a serious failure of air defense is bad, but it is not going to break what endured THAT hell.
Honestly I should relisten to the Radio War Nerd ep on Iran-Iraq, good a time as any.
https://fountain.fm/episode/0XsubVEkxzxcRgSieBbo
this link was safe, warning don't click around on random sites for war nerd premium eps, always get pop ups, no way they are safe.
Have you read this analysis? They argue that it may have been intentional by the Iranians
https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1933717840311341408#m
Yeah I don't agree with them. I don't know armchair or at least don't remember their prior analysis with Russia, so I didn't have the baggage of knowing they are reactionary till after. I think their view is wishful thinking honestly. We know Mossad got a drone base into Iran (cough Azerbaijan cough) and took out many defenses. Iran could not have predicted what the missile attack was going to hit, not with much certainty in advance. If they did simply turn off defenses in places why let several nuclear facilities get hit as well, along with key scientists in their apartments?
A proper purge or even faking a pager attack just seems like a better way to do something like that. They got defenses online yesterday, they have done great at stopping missiles since then. it all seems consistent with a security failure, taking their time to assess, and then getting things up and running and retaliating once they were sure they had defenses up. Part of why I did not expect them to fire back in the hours following the initial attack.
Even once they seemed to have things running again there were some semi successful hits on missile launch sites. I take it Iran was playing it safe before escalating, making sure they could defend from another barrage. If they had tactically allowed their defenses to fail for certain targets, they wouldn't have needed that wait time.