Foreign. It's James. And I am just here to update you on the fact that the United States and Israel have started a war with Iran. Most of you will probably be aware of this, but I wanted to, I guess call to attention a few things that I've been looking at as we enter nearly a month of almost non stop bombing of Iran, right? And I suppose the most notable incident of killing of civilians was the killing of 160 school children at a girls school in Minab. This was hit on the very first day that the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February. And it was probably hit because of bad intelligence, right? It's not uncommon for schools and other such facilities in Iran to be built relatively near Revolutionary Guard or Basij or military infrastructure, Right. It is also, from what I understand from friends in the region right now, very common for Iranian state security forces, right? Be they police, military, paramilitary, militia, whatever, to have relocated themselves inside things like schools, inside things like sports stadiums. That absolutely does not excuse killing 160 children, right? When somebody takes a decision to unleash that amount of death and violence, then they need to be accountable for that decision. So I'm not, I'm not saying this to excuse that in any way, right? Doesn't matter what the excuse was, it matters what the outcome was, which was that 160 children were killed, which is a tragedy. I also want to talk about the way that a lot of this war has been covered, right? Because I think a lot of it's kind of not entirely rooted in reality to begin with. We saw this piece in Axios, right? If you're not familiar with Axios, it's an outlet that thinks you're not intelligent enough to read paragraphs and so does everything in bullet points. They reported that Trump had had calls with the leaders of the PUK and the kdp, the two major political parties in southern Kurdistan. The initial draft of article actually misidentified them as leaders of political parties in eastern Kurdistan known as Rojalat in Kurdish. They are not Kurdish people who live in the state of Iran. They are very much Kurdish people who live in the state of Iraq. They're probably the two most famous Kurdish people who live in the state of Iraq in the world currently. It's a remarkable error to make. And this kind of began a cavalcade of irresponsible reporting suggesting that eastern Kurdish militias, right? So the people from the Iranian Kurdish community, many of whom now live in southern Kurdistan, which is currently part of the Iraqi state, were preparing to enter the state of Iran, eastern Kurdistan to do war with the Iranian state. The result of this has been a massive bombing campaign on southern Kurdistan. Right. Including on some of the facilities that are related to those militias but are not military targets. I'm talking about the refugee camps where the families of the fighters of some of these Kurdish groups live and people have been hurt in those strikes. Right. Many of the different five different Kurdish groups who have declared something of a united front have suffered casualties. Right. People have died. And I think we can point at this irresponsible reporting for that. Right? Of course they want to do away with the state of Iran. Right. They want to, to live a free life. They want women to have the rights that they deserve and the equality that they deserve. Right. But that doesn't mean that they are currently planning to coordinate with the United States and Israel and they have said as much. Right. I've interviewed a couple of these parties. You can listen to the other podcast. I make it get up in here to hear the quotations they gave me. But they were very clear that the US and Israel have their plans and the Kurdish groups must make their own plans because we are just weeks away from the last time the United States abandoned a set of its Kurdish allies, this time in Rojava, which is western Kurdistan, which is currently in the Syrian state. I wanted to highlight that because I think there's been a lot of really poor reporting on it. What Iran has done in response is to launch strikes at the US and its allies across the Middle east, including striking things like hotels where it's claiming that U.S. or military personnel or contractors are. Many of these hotels are the sort of places where you would see contractors, to be clear, having spent a good amount of time in those hotels. It has also attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz using a combination of naval mines and then uncrewed surface vessels. Uncrewed surface vessels are basically water drones, remote control ships. They are ships that are only going. I don't like the word suicide with response to drones because it's not the drone that's dying, it's people that are dying. Drone is just an object. They are one way drones, right? They are themselves a weapon. And they detonate when they hit the target generally. And that is what they have done, destroying several ships, Right. Not, not just in the straightforward moves, but also in Basra, for example, in Iraq. Right. They have done this because the straightforward moves is a vital part of the global supply chain. And in doing so, they have reduced a large amount of specifically like liquid natural Gas goes through. Straightforward moves. But generally access to petrochemicals. Right. Which many of you will have noticed, has resulted in fuel getting more expensive. If fossil fuels are something you buy, the results of this were only just beginning to see. The United States has continued to bluster about this. I made a whole podcast about how it's very unlikely that the US Is going to be able to stop Iran from harassing ships in the Strait of Hormuz without deploying US Troops in Iran, which the US has said it's not going to do. They don't even have to destroy all the ships to go through. They just have to make it uninsurable for ships to go through. And that will mean that ships stop going through. And that will cause a serious crunch on global supply chains, not just for fossil fuels, but also for things like fertilizer. Right. For the many other things that take that route around the world. It does not seem that this conflict will be over quickly. It does not seem that the United States has very clear goals. What we can see is that the United States and Israel do, although they're both acting in unison here, they very clearly have different goals. Right. When we look at what Israel is doing, they took out Larajani the other day, one of the few leaders left who would have been able to negotiate a peace with the United States after the United States or Israel. I'm not sure which of them sent the bomb that killed the Supreme Leader on the first night of strikes, but one of them did. They have continue to kill people in leadership positions in Iran. Israel has also struck targets like steel factories, targets like oil and gas infrastructure, which the United States has said it wasn't striking. Now, the United States isn't avoiding those strikes because it wants to be kind to the people of Iran. It's presumably doing it because it would like to see the global oil market continue as undisrupted as possible. It seems that the Israeli goal is to cripple the Iranian state and indeed to leave itself one of the only states, if not the only state in the region, that is able to project significant military force anywhere. Right. We see this now as Israel is also invading Lebanon, creating a crisis of the scale that perhaps we have not seen since the Nakba. I will update you more on that next time. Majority of my reporting has been on Iran so far, but I've been speaking to people in Lebanon, too. This is a really difficult time. It's something that will have economic consequences here, but I don't think we should lose sight of the human Consequences. And not just in Iran either. I was talking to friends in Iraq yesterday. Iraq has the distinction of currently being bombed by both sides of this conflict. The United States is bombing popular mobilization forces who are people. They're a Shia militia that fought against the so called Islamic State that was at that time on the same side of the United States. The United States considered some of them terrorist organizations and has been bombing them inside Iraq. Iran has also been striking inside Iraq, specifically in the Kurdistan area, which I spoke about earlier on. I just want to finish up by reflecting on a couple of kind of, I guess, interesting conflict things. I don't know if that's the right word. It was interesting to see an FPV drone fly over the United States Embassy. Right. And to see strikes on you at the Victoria base in Baghdad or outside of Baghdad near the airport. It is remarkable that after four years of war in Ukraine, five years of the larger scale war in Myanmar, and obviously the war in Ukraine began in 2014, but the larger scale war began in 2022, that the states of the world have largely failed to learn from the adoption of commercial off the shelf drones. And we're seeing the consequences of that now in Iraq with for instance, this FPV drone flying over the US Embassy compound for minutes without anything happening to it. I don't think any of this, any of the conflict wonk stuff, any of the economic impact, any of the international relations stuff should take our solidarity away from the people who are affected. The people of Iran have been suffering state violence for decades and they are suffering state violence now. The United States does not seem to have a plan for regime change and has said it doesn't want it. The people of Iran rose up just in January of this year against their oppressive regime. And the United States and Israel and everybody, every other state in the world left them to die. Did it when they rose up for Gina Amini. It has done it for decades. Right? I do not believe that they've suddenly had a change of heart in the last two months. I do not believe that it is possible to liberate a people by bombing their country. The destruction of the Iranian state, which is a state which has incredibly profuse state violence resources, requires people fighting in the streets. It requires, quote, unquote, boots on the ground. And I don't think the United States is willing to commit those in the scale that is necess. And so that will fall to the people of Iran. And the choices they face are between dying or dying. Right. They're dying now. Those children died in that school. If they if they choose to fight their regime, which is not significantly weakened enough to make that an easy concept by any means, then then they will also confront death there, right? And I think our solidarity should be with them, not not with any of the states in the region. I'll keep you updated on this next month. If you want more regular updates, you can listen to my other podcasts. It could happen here. Thanks. It.