October 624
My 326th post on The War
Briefly
Yesterday, I spent most of my time describing the situation here in Israel - inbound missiles, casualties, how everyone deals with the alarms, etc. There is more to report from last night’s attack from Iran, but it will have to wait. Today I am going to dwell on what is happening in Iran. Then, in my next post I intend to provide some background and context as to why Israel struck Iran now. Then, I will go on to update everyone on the situation on our other fronts in this multi-front war.
Today’s Images
The top image is of Israeli equipped, US built, F-15 fighter jets flying over Israel (not Iran). The Iran-Israel War is an aerial war (at least so far). There has been nothing like this since the Battle of Britain at the onset of WW2. Iran launches ballistic missiles and drones that are hitting primarily civilian residential facilities (and last night key industrial sites in Haifa). And the we go into our bomb shelters and wait out each wave of the missile attacks. And just like the Nazis bombed London indiscriminately, killing civilians, the Islamic Republic of Iran (the new age Nazis) are indiscriminately bombing civilian sites. And the Israeli Air Force IAF, through its fleet of fighter jets, is taking out military facilities, air bases, missile launchers, armories, missile manufacturing sites, IRGC facilities and more. I will write much more about this below.
The second image is the “Rogues Gallery” of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp leadership that has been eliminated by the IAF. Two more senior members of Iranian military were killed today so this chart needs to be updated - Commander of Al-Quds Intelligence and Head of IRGC Intelligence. I will discuss this in more detail below as well.
Good Cop, Bad Cop
As we all know, this is a very common negotiating strategy in all kinds of situations. Prior to Israel’s launch of the attack on Iran very early morning (Israel Time) on Thursday many of us, including this author, read all the reports regarding phone calls between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu concluding that “President Trump just threw us under the bus”. By that I mean that after throwing out the terrible JCPOA agreement negotiated by the Obama Administration together with those weak countries in the EU during his first term in the White House it all looked to us like President Trump was about to authorize special envoy Steve Witikoff to structure a deal that was not too different from the Iranian deal that President Trump threw out years ago. But, it turns out that we were wrong…. very wrong.
It is now clear that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were in lock step regarding how to deal with Iran. The Trump Administration started discussions genuinely believing that structuring a strong nuclear deal through negotiations was the preferred approach. But somewhere along the way they began to see that Iran was just stringing them along demanding that they must maintain their Uranium enrichment program despite the fact that the only countries in the world capable of enriching Uranium have a nuclear arsenal of some type. What really happened was that somewhere along this negotiation path, perhaps before negotiations started, the Trump Administration realized that Iran was not serious and decided to play along like they were castigating Prime Minister Netanyahu in public. From what we know here, on or around May 28th Israel had concluded that the urgency for taking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities was immediate. Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed the situation with President Trump and made the compelling argument on why NOW was the time. I will elaborate on this in my next post.
President Trump must have concurred with the Prime Minister informing him that he would not stand in the way of Israel’s campaign. They must have also agreed that the USA would help defend Israel from the onslaught of Iranian missile attacks like it did back in October, 2024.
The main result of this deception was that it enabled the IAF to catch the regime and its leadership totally off guard. Israel’s intelligence on the ground in Iran recognized that the IRGC leadership was meeting at the same place and same time. It was a major opportunity to eliminate the leadership and Israel took it.
Iranian Military Leadership Assassinations
With the element of surprise the IDF eliminated much of the Iranian military leadership early on the morning of Thursday, June 12. Since then the Israeli intelligence on the ground in Iran and its network of informers is pinpointing the surviving leadership which the IAF through its network of drones operating inside Iran. Just today an Israeli fighter jet destroyed the temporary facility where the interim Iranian Army General Staff was meeting causing all the military leadership to scatter. In that attack Iranian Maj. Gen. Ali Shadmani was killed. He just replaced Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid who was killed on Friday in a different IAF attack. At this point Shadmani was the most senior military official in the Iranian Army.
In a previous post I had written about why assassinations are an effective policy, in some but not all cases. One of my readers reached out to me a couple days ago wanting to discuss the situation and this subject came up again so let me explain again. Many will say that there is no point killing a leader since they will just be replaced. This is true in structured democracies where terms of office are often limited and individual are usually (not always) promoted through a proven merit system. But when you are dealing with dictatorships, in this case a fanatical jihadi nihilistic fascist dictatorship taking out leaders is a very effective policy. Back in January 2020, near the end of President Trump’s first term the US Army Centcom assassinated Qasem Soleimani based on Israeli intelligence. It is not clear to this day why Israel chose not to kill the man. Soleimani was the architect and leader of the proxy jihadi groups throughout the Middle East - Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, Syria and the pro-Iranian groups in Iraq. He organized their training, funding, arming and organizational structure. His assassination was a huge blow to Iran.
Soeimani’s successor was Esmail Qaani, an Iranian brigadier general heading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp IRGC. Qaani along with about 12 other senior Iranian military officials were killed in Israel’s first strike early last Thursday morning. I do not know who succeeded Qaani but the IAF will most likely find out soon and kill him as well. As a military commander in an army such as that in the USA or Israel one involves one’s subordinates in policy making, planning, tactics, strategy and execution, when security permits. This is not as common in fascist fanatical dictatorships such as Iran. Contacts, relationships, leadership are all personal. Taking out leadership like this disrupts significantly the chain of command, leadership, trust, communications, relationships with the civil authorities, etc. It is a very effective strategy for dealing with such enemies. Most everyone is convinced that had Hitler been assassinated it would have dramatically changed the nature of WW2. And they are right. Killing Hanan Nasrallah has a huge impact on the morale, motivation and internal respect within Hezbollah. So in dealing with entities like fanatical islamic jihadis like Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. assassinations are a very effective policy.
This policy is continuing even after Thursday. On Sunday the IAF assassinated Mohammad Kazemi, head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Directorate. In addition to Kazemi, the IDF killed Gen. Hassan Mohaqiq: deputy head of the intelligence organization for IRGC, Maj. Gen. Mohsen Bagheri: head of Quds Force intelligence directorate and al-Fadl Nikouei: deputy head of Quds Force intelligence directorate. See more here. The Al-Quds force, named after the Arabic name for Jerusalem, is the expeditionary wing of the IRGC known to fight alongside Hezbollah and the former forces of Bashir Al-Assad’s former Syrian regime. Moreover, since this past Friday the IRGC aerospace chief Amir Ali Hajzadeh (in charge of the Drone Program so critical to Iran and Russia in its war with Ukraine) was killed. And last night Ali Shadami, Iran’s War Time Chief of Staff and top military commander, was killed in a missile attack from an Israeli fighter jet operating in Iran… right in the heart of Tehran. Shadami held that position for a total of four days before meeting his maker. His predecessor was killed on the first day of this war. You may find this article interesting reading as it describes how Supreme Leader Khamenei is become a very lonely leader as all his military advisors have been eliminated. And this one describes how, without his main advisors that he trusts, Khamenei has no where to turn for advice on what to do. He doesn’t know the replacements and can’t determine whose opinion should be trusted and whose not. This campaign will continue. When the IAF destroyed the remaining Iranian fighter jets dating from the 1970s, the pilots saw them coming and ran. Soon most of the military leadership left in Iran will start running too… or be killed.
Destroying the Nuclear Bomb Knowledge
But it is not just the military echelon that has been the target of the IAF assassination campaign. On the first day of this war, last Thursday morning, the IAF assassinated nine Iranian nuclear scientists: Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering; Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering; Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics; Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics; Mansour Asgari, expert in physics; Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering; and Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics. Back in 2020 Israel’s Mossad assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, “the father of the Iranian nuclear project”. All were killed using very precise and low charges missiles capable of destroying a single apartment within an apartment tower. The IAF knew precisely the address and apartment numbers for each of these scientists killed in their homes. Since last Thursday another five have been assassinated. By assassinating the scientists behind the active nuclear bomb project Israel is removing the ability for Iran to continue the program for some time to come. As you may recall in January 2018 the Israeli Mossad launching a daring operation in which they infiltrated a secret warehouse in the Kahrizek District of southern Tehran and stole, in all, more than 100,000 documents which laid out the entire plan for building and launching a nuclear weapons against Israel. All these documents were taken and transported to Israel. An incredible operation. No one in the world really cared, but the Mossad kept track of the other set of these documents. And the IAF destroyed them using a drone operating inside Iran. So to the best of the IDF’s knowledge, or at least what they are willing to say publicly, both the scientists and documentation needed to build a bomb from within Iran has been destroyed. Yes, North Korea could help them again and restart the program, but it should set them back by years. Destroying the knowhow and the infrastructure for building a bomb is a major accomplishment.
Eliminating the Iranian Political Leadership
So far Israel and the IDF have not targeted the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, nor members of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. There are various rumors that President Trump has stated that this would be off limits. I am not sure I believe this. Together they rule all of Iran and the projection of their maniacal and apocalyptic mission to bring around the arrival of the Mahdi, the messianic figure that brings about the Day of Judgement and rids the world of wrongdoing, injustice and tyranny. Khamenei’s predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, developed this vision and the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to bring about the coming of the Mahdi. All of this is important because it drives the motivations and rationale for the fanaticism of the fascist government of The Islamic Republic of Iran and its military arm to export its violent approach to the bringing the coming of the Mahdi through violence.
Ali Khamenei is 86 years old and reportedly not in very good health. There are already lots of rumors about his likely successor. Some argue that his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is the most logical successor. But from what can gather by reading, the Supreme Council is not in some overwhelming favor of creating a royal family of ascendency. You can read more here. You will find this analysis by Afshon Ostovar entitled “The looming battle for succession in Iran” a most interesting read. Ostovar wrote that article just a month ago and he is an authority on Iran and the Islamic Republic. Khamenei owes the longevity of his rule to his open and earnest support for the IRGC, outside the framework of the Iranian Army. And they owe their predominance to his across the board support for them. With all the IRGC leadership gone Khamenei is going to have to reach out to new leaders he neither knows nor trusts.
Should Khamenei be assassinated, like I think he should, along with his son there will be a genuine mess on determining a successor to the role of the Supreme Leader. And with a weakening of the leadership of the IRGC it will only compound and confuse the process for selecting a successor. After the death of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, Khamenei was the only natural successor. With Khamenei’s death there would be massive confusion and chaos.
And Finally the IRGC and the Basij
The Basij is the internal police force inside Iran responsible for the enforcement of the Islamic rulings laid down by the Supreme Leader and Supreme Council. They are the ones who have arrested, imprisoned and tortured all the dissidents, including the women who refused to wear a Hijab and were ultimately raped and killed by the Basij. During the protests when Khamenei felt threatened he order the Basij to loosen up on their enforcement of the strict Islamic codes. But once the dissidents were found, arrested and killed, the Basij resumed its old practices. Already the IAF has hit many barracks, bases and operational centers for the IRGC inside Iran. Perhaps if they hit the Basij it will also impact the repression of the general population which hate the ruling Islamic nutcases. It is hard to predict.