By Jeremy Salt
Escalating military movements unfold alongside ongoing diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tehran. (Photo: Illustration, Palestine Chronicle)
It may turn out to be a nuclear war, or it may turn out to be the ultimately unavoidable final war for Palestine. It will certainly determine the future of the region for a long time to come.
So Iran’s Supreme Leader is dead, obliterated in his home along with his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and a grandchild. His badly wounded wife died two days later.
In the south of Iran, 165 elementary school girls, as well as their teachers, were annihilated by a US-Israeli missile. Teams of young women playing volleyball in a gym were killed by another missile.
In the first few days of the war launched by the US and Israel, ‘double tap’ missile attacks on public places familiar from the Gaza genocide killed rescuers as well as the initial victims. Hospitals, ambulances, and the offices of the Red Crescent were also bombed. More than 700 civilians were killed in the first three days.
Ayatollah Khamenei spoke four languages, was well-read in Persian and Arabic literature, with broad intellectual interests that ranged from mathematics and poetry to the history of secular liberation struggles similar to Iran’s against the imperial West.
As a marja’i (jurist worthy of emulation), he was regarded as second only to Ayatullah Sistani of Najaf. All of this was meaningless to the uncouth, semi-literate US president and the Zionist cult leader indicted by the ICC (International Criminal Court) in 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These two low, corrupt individuals decided to murder him, as if somehow, in their gangster minds, this would turn the Iranian people in their favour. Of course, it did the exact opposite, as anyone with any grasp of the centrality of martyrdom in Shi’a culture could have told them.
Iran is acting within the law by defending itself against a war of aggression, described by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 as the “supreme international crime.” Yet it is the states violating international law, the US and Israel, that the UK, European governments, Australia, and Canada are supporting. They are thus complicit in the war crimes these two states have already committed.
Ayatullah Khamenei’s struggle against Pahlevist-Savak police state oppression in Iran led to six arrests before the shah’s regime collapsed amidst mass nationwide demonstrations that the army could no longer control in 1979.
His predecessor as the Supreme Guide, Ayatullah Khumayni, returned in triumph from exile in France, and the Islamic Republic was born. One of its first decisions was to close the Israeli embassy and hand the building over to the PLO.
Iran’s support for Palestinian resistance has not wavered since, despite sanctions, blockades, sabotage, assassinations, war waged through a third party (Iraq), and since 2025, two open direct wars.
Ayatullah Khamenei’s background was not just scholarly but included his voluntary service after the 1980 attack on Iran by Iraq, even though he had no military background. He had survived several assassination attempts as Supreme Leader, including one that paralyzed one of his arms.
He could have left his compound in Tehran, but refused. The people had nowhere to go, he said, so he would not leave the city either, even though he knew Israel had threatened to kill him as a first target.
It was Ayatullah Khamenei who issued the fatwa (religious opinion) prohibiting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Yet, in the name of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, it was this man whom the US president and Netanyahu decided to murder, with the support of the vassal states the US calls ‘allies.’
For the second time since June 2025, the US and Israel launched a war during negotiations with Iran that were reported to be going well. On both occasions, the US was simply using the negotiations to play for time. The date for the second attack was actually fixed in late December 2025 and moved forward a week to February 28 after Russia was understood to have learned of the original date.
It was also in December 2025 that the US and Israel launched the ‘regime change’ operation they hoped would cause the chaos leading to the collapse of the Iranian government. As this did not work, another open military attack was inevitable.
Differences of opinion amongst Iranians are the same as in any other country. They may like or dislike the government. Their views might fall somewhere in between, but with Iran attacked twice by the US and Israel in less than a year (not counting the failed ‘regime change’ operation launched last December), they closed ranks behind the government and the military.
The first of these wars killed 1000 civilians. In the first three days of the second war, more than 700 had already been killed, including the schoolgirl victims of the bombing in the southern provincial city of Minab.
Propagandist claims during the failed ‘regime change’ operation that the population only needed a small push to rise up against the government were ludicrous.
The demonstrations in support of the government during this attempted overthrow were nationwide and massive. They were repeated on an even greater scale following the assassination of Ayatullah Khamenei.
His murder is an event loaded with historical significance for the Shi’a. From Iran through Iraq to Lebanon, they are joining Iran in this existential struggle against the forces of evil, the greater and the lesser Satan, the US and Israel, whose atrocities in the past three years include the mass slaughter of children in Palestine. Like an evil miasma spreading across the Middle East, they are now murdering children in Iran.
The Shi’a history of martyrdom reaches back to the killing of the grandson of the Prophet, Husayn bin Ali, in the 7th century Battle of Karbala. His martyrdom at the hands of the caliph Yazid has been commemorated across the Shi’a world on the 10th of Muharram every year since 680 AD.
In the Shi’a culture of martyrdom, the US and Israel are the new Yazid, and the Ayatollah Khamenei the latest martyr to fall in the historical Shi’a struggle against oppression and injustice. Still painful in Shia’a minds are the murders of Hasan Nasrallah and, further back, Qasim Soleimani, ordered by Trump just after he landed in Baghdad in 2020 to work on a treaty of reconciliation between Iraq and Iran.
Planning on a short war, the US and Israel are now discovering they have opened a Pandora’s Box that could end in a regional war and even a global nuclear war. Furthermore,
Israel has started a war that could end in its own extinction. If this point is reached, it is not likely to refrain from resorting to the ‘Samson option,’ the nuclear weapon that would at least take its enemies down with it.
Nothing is more likely than this threat to finally push Iran into developing its own nuclear deterrent. As it already has the material and technical capacity, it would not take long. A fatwa to this effect issued by the incoming marja’- i would supersede Ayatullah Khamenei’s edict against the development of nuclear weapons. There are numerous indications now of public support for such a change of policy.
‘Regime change’ may be on the way as a result of this war, but not necessarily the regime the West wants to fall, i.e., the Iranian government. What about Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim overlords, currently facing an uprising by the Shi’a majority? Or Jordan’s Hashemite vassal-king, dependent on the ‘west’ for survival and loathed by the 70 percent Palestinian majority of the people?
Distant ‘allies’ – Starmer in the UK (22 percent public approval), Macron in France (20 percent), and Merz in Germany (23 percent) – are already sitting on a knife-edge of unpopularity. The longer they support a deeply unpopular war on Iran, the worse these figures will become.
Then there is the Trump regime itself. Support even among MAGA supporters has slumped. Recent polls show Trump is losing ground even on immigration. Public opinion polling shows a general 56 percent disapproval rating, rising to 70 percent in the 18-44 age group. Only 27 percent approve of the war on Iran, with a 43 percent disapproval rating.
Trump has to turn these figures around before the midterm elections in November, but already, the war is not going to plan. It has been launched in violation of the Constitution, which gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the president.
Trump’s claims that the “military actions” against Iran do not constitute an actual war would not pass any definition of war. The abrogation of constitutional authority, plus an unpopular war in which the US is already becoming bogged down, lay the groundwork not just for electoral failure but impeachment.
This war meets the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal’s definition of a war of aggression as the “supreme international crime.” Having taken part in or supported all the illegal wars waged by the US since 2001, its vassals from Europe to Australia are now supporting this one. The lies they and their media are telling are different from the lies told before the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, but they are still lies.
It is worth recording here that on every occasion of crisis in Iran since the constitutional movement of 1905-6, in fact going back to resistance in the 19th century, the ulama (the religious scholars), the merchant class, and the people have taken a united stand against oppressive shahs and their foreign overlords.
The Western media is so full of propaganda as to be unreadable. It was indifferent to the killing of half a million Iraqi children through sanctions, so we should not be surprised at its indifference to the slaughter of at least 20,000 children in Gaza, the continuing killing of children and other civilians on the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon, and the slaughter of schoolgirls in Iran.
The US or Israeli missile attack that killed the Iranian girls and the scenes of horror in and around their obliterated school were not the headline hitting the front pages in the Western media. They were a down-page news item. Jubilation at the murder of an elderly cleric was the headline.
The future of West Asia and, to an extent, the planet, given the possibility of the war turning nuclear, is now in the hands of a semi-literate US president and an indicted war criminal. US soldiers are being told by their commanders that the war is a good thing because it’s going to lead to Armageddon.
The Trump team consists of real estate developers, a crackpot ambassador to Israel also guided by God’s divine plan, and a secretary of state and a self-declared minister for war who vie with each other for the award of the most stupid person within the Beltway. The tempting comparison with trained monkeys is avoided only because it would be unfair to the monkeys
Living in a completely amoral, unprincipled, lawless world, of course, Trump and his advisors cannot understand why some people cannot be bribed or bullied and why they will take a principled stand against even overwhelming odds, as Iran and its people are now doing.
“Why haven’t they capitulated?” asks the puzzled Steve Witkoff. Like Trump, he just doesn’t get it.
Trump tells us that he is guided by his own morality. Like the Sun King, Louis XIV, Trump regards himself as the law. Having descended into the sewer with Jeffrey Epstein, the source of his morality and his law has been revealed.
He heads a team of the most ignorant, incompetent, and plainly unprofessional people ever to dis/grace the Beltway. They have no idea of what they have unleashed in West Asia, which is not the short, successful war they expected but a war already rebounding on the US and Israel.
It may turn out to be a nuclear war, or it may turn out to be the ultimately unavoidable final war for Palestine. It will certainly determine the future of the region for a long time to come. It is already changing the face of the Middle East, not in the direction its purveyors expected but against it.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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