193
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

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.


you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] [email protected] 87 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

New Simplicius report - Iranian Abyss: Will US Take the Plunge?

It's premium so I can't read it all but here's the key parts of what I can access:

  • Simplicius is now only more sure than ever that Israel expected the decapitation strikes to cause an immediate collapse, and when that did not happen, Israel was forced to go to Trump and get the US involved because Israel cannot handle a war of attrition with Iran (running out of interceptors to protect critical infrastructure)
  • Simplicius believes the current Iranian strategy is to deliberately slow down the conflict and fight to their strengths (a long war of attrition) rather than their weaknesses (a shock and awe campaign). This is a campaign inspired by Russia's actions in Ukraine. To conserve stockpiles, they send small volleys every day rather than dramatic overwhelming attacks that they can only do a few times before running out of missiles.
  • These small volleys are overall more effective as the social and economic pressure of constant sirens and forcing Israelis into the bunkers will deal more damage in the long run. Israel apparently went into this conflict expecting only 5000 settler deaths before Iran is defeated because they expected a giant wave from Iran that killed many people at once and provided a clear American casus belli.
  • There is no evidence to support Israeli claims of air domination over Iran. Israel is not flying planes over Iran for the most part; they are using drone strikes and cruise and ballistic missiles instead. This is supported by the fact that the footage we predominantly get out Israel shows drone video footage, and the numerous Israeli booster stages of missiles found in Iraq and Syria.
  • The only piece of footage that Simplicius has seen of Israel hitting Iran with aircraft is a video of JDAMs striking Kermanshah, just 100km into the border of Iran, which would have meant Israel penetrated a couple dozen kilometers into Iran to drop them.
  • Iranian long-range air defense has not been degraded at all. Israeli strikes are only evidenced on very old Mim-23 Hawks, short-range Karmin-2s, and the short/medium-range Khordad systems. The Bavar-373, an S-300 equivalent, shows no physical/video evidence of being degraded beyond mere Israeli claims, which are always very suspect.
  • To be fair, this is because Iran has very probably withdrawn their long-range systems east towards Isfahan to protect against potential US bombing, and Iranian heavy missile launchers are following them east for the protection.
  • Israel can't safely fly directly over Iranian territory; they couldn't even safely fly directly over Syrian territory until Jolani let them destroy Syria's air defense, which was substantially weaker than Iran's, and had to bomb Syria from behind Mount Lebanon before then. The US also could not safely fly over Yemeni territory, with F-35s launching stand-off strikes before they reached the border.
  • That all this began shortly after Iran finished its major rail link with China is not a coincidence; deepening connections with the East represents an existential threat to the Western program to isolate and weaken Iran that they've been enacting over the decades.
  • The West not only hopes to destroy Iranian nuclear sites, and not only wishes to enact regime change, but seeks to permanently divide Iran into a series of statelets from which it would be kept under pressure by dividing ethnic groups, preventing a future reconsolidation of the country.

There's then a section on what the US can and cannot do but my free access ends there.

Simplicius also seems pretty sure about Iran's abilities and about Israel's weakness where he's posted on Substack and Twitter.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago

Thank you for the hoperism doggirl-kiss

load more comments (12 replies)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
193 points (100.0% liked)

news

24118 readers
816 users here now

Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.

Rules:

-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --

-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --

-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --

-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --

-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--

-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--

-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --

-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS