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.
I'll be honest I don't understand the doomerism happening here.
This is the very start of a war and there's like... 50 dead? Some more injured? Why are people declaring that the war is unwinnable after a few strikes?
İran has been losing allies everywhere. Hezbollah neutralised, Assad is removed and replaced with a nazionist, houthis have taken some damage although it seems manageable. Iran is losing so many things they worked on for decades in short short time frame. China and Russia don't really seem too ready to supply Iran either. It is not my job to advise Chinese foreign policy, but if they just keep doing nothing as their allies are picked apart one by one, they might find theirself all alone in the world against great Satan and their banana dictatorships. Hope I am wrong
I also think Iran is very, very far from defeated (even if they lose, it'll take them months to be defeated, not a day) but I think there's a lot of extrapolation of current tragedy into the future going on, and I genuinely don't blame anybody for it this time around, because we saw a similar thing occur with Hezbollah. So people are probably going "Well, we all saw how THAT one went after Nasrallah got killed, so...".
Like, for my personal headspace/viewpoint: my analysis that Israel would not be able to defeat Hezbollah was based partially on the analysis of Amal Saad (who is probably the single most knowledgeable person about Hezbollah who isn't a soldier/commander on either side), who had an interview where she implied that the Israeli state might not survive a war with them, and, well... I mean, Hezbollah hasn't actually been defeated per se, because Hezbollah is so deeply embedded in southern Lebanon that it's basically synonymous with it, they aren't just a company of soldiers, they do like civilian construction projects and provide university education funds and shit; wiping that out would take many years. But there's definitely an element of winning the war (Israel failed to a hilarious degree in their ground invasion) but losing the peace (consenting at least partially with the disarmament program of the Lebanese state), and Israel definitely still exists. So, extrapolating that failure of hypothetical military might to create lasting political results to Iran, it's entirely possible that they fight for a while, sign a deal to not create nukes (but allow X% enrichment), and then Israel just keeps on with their genocidal programs in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon.
Yeah, iran being far from defeated does not make this any less of a tragedy and something that should have been prevented/mitigated. People I think are writing off losses very haphazardly under the presumption that Iran won't cease to exist. As if that fact means the losses are fine. Russia is not gonna collapse or even lose because of the drone attacks, but it doesn't mean that was not a huge breach of security.
That and Iran's offensive capabilities still matter, not for its own security but for their ability to defend Palestine....theoretically, not that they have actually done so recently.
We want to see Israel destroyed
It's not unwinnable but their air defense is non functional now while their missile capacity is fine.
We have a lot of armchair generals on the site- myself included- who have expectations of what war is supposed to look like, and get very rattled when it doesn't unfold how they expected it to