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.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
Trump saying that Iran's nuclear sites have been "obliterated"
Also, that's a pretty tall order, to simply say something that can very easily be debunked such as that. Unless the preliminary info from Iran is totally bogus, this seems like a weird way to put it.
The imperium has reached the state that they don't even need to lie, they can just spout whatever they wish in open contempt for truth.
"Might makes right irrelevant"
Honestly I would not trust claims coming from either side until at least half a day later, if not longer than that.
Proper damage assessment takes way longer than that, with all the inspection that needs to be performed, and with all the sensitive equipments and infrastructure involved. At best they can tell you about the structural damage.
Same with the battle damage assessment following the strike from the US side. Maybe they have some advanced recon capability that I don’t know about, but still you’d expect this to take longer than what Trump was immediately tweeting after the strike.
You also have to take into considerations the Iranian response, which is still being decided. If they don’t want to escalate any further, or only want to commit to limited retaliation, they will probably save face by saying that damage is minimal and not seriously affecting their operations. Another reason is to prevent mass panic. Again, with minimum intel, all we can do is guess here
The attack was visible from space on satellite video, so I don't know, it could very well have succeeded. Think of how massive an explosion has to be, to be visible on satellite video...
depends how far away the satellite is and how good the optics are. Remember they were able to track will smith by satellite in the late 90s, imagine modern technology.
It was visible on meteorology satellites, the second generation Meteosat satellites, 9 and 10 in particular. So not even some high resolution satellite in the visual spectrum.
Source here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteosat
Must have been terrifying to be anywhere nearby
has a nuclear detonation been recorded on one of these satellites? just to be sure by comparison
~~Yeah they're done.~~ The US is very, very good at this type of stuff and acting like they're clowns just makes people look unserious. They're they more experienced military in the world.
~~There is no way Fordow didn't sustain, at least heavy damage that will take months to fix unless there was some factor not known to the imperialists about its construction. I bet they ran extensive simulations, maybe even modeled it in miniature somewhere using real explosives and matching construction on a smaller scale.~~
~~They probably determined they needed 5 but used 6 anyways.~~
Doomed a little bit. Still I think if this didn't work it's because they knew it wouldn't work and Trump did it as a show of loyalty and as a threat, negotiating tactic, etc and to prevent the zionists from being able to operate totally freely as he's now proclaimed something to be true and if the zionists counter that any time soon they might run into trouble. So we'll see. We'll see.
They’re the most experienced military in the world!
at shooting civilians in the back maybe
The resistance has just as much experience at building underground facilities to avoid bombing (passed down from the DPRK who mastered it) as the US does at... failing to win wars against insurgents using this strategy. I really don't think that we should take it as a given that the attack was successful just on the basis of the US being "good" at this (really, if that was the case, how could Hamas still be operating after all this time?)
depends how deep it is and how hard the rock is. before this it wasn't clear whether moabs would go deep enough and we won't know until Iran decides to say something, and they have multiple incentives to lie in either direction about the damage.
Claiming 6 BB too