The missiles were loaded, the aircraft carriers in position. I just needed to know when and how the attack on Iran would begin, telegraphed since USA will transfer to Persian Gulf the largest contingent of military forces since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and increased the trips of senior Israeli security officials to Washington. The answers came from the American intelligenceaccording to several North American media outlets, who had been tracking the movements of the supreme leader of iran and his lieutenants in the security apparatus. In those hours before the attack, the CIA moved to Israel with a “high level of reliability” that Ali Jameneí would meet on Saturday morning with his subordinates at his office headquarters in downtown Tehrana gesture of extreme naivety that ended up paying dearly.
Los long range missiles who killed the ayatollah left Israel at 6 a.m. on Saturday in several warplanes. Two hours and five minutes after takeoff, they hit the House of Leadership, the building that housed the offices of the supreme leader, the president of Iran and its National Security Council. In Tehran it was 9:40 in the morning. The new military aggression by Israel and the US about the Islamic Republic —an operation launched without the backing of the UN Security Council or any possible justification as an act of self-defense—was underway. Nine months after the last one and with the confessed objective this time of causing a regime change. “This morning’s attack was carried out simultaneously in several locations in Tehran, including one where several senior political and security officials had met,” an Israeli Defense Ministry official wrote shortly afterwards, according to ‘The New York Times’.
It matters little at this point that American espionage had concluded that Iran does not represent a “immediate threat” for Washington, as stated Donald Trump when justifying the offensive, or that the negotiations between both countries to ensure that Tehran did not develop nuclear weapons had made “substantial” progress days earlier, according to Omani mediators. Binyamin Netanyahu’s old dream of destroying the only state that has actively resisted the hegemonic plans of his country in the region has begun to take shape. Trump is just their enabler.
Senior officials killed in attack
In the attack against Khamenei’s labor offices, a thirty missilesaccording to ‘The Wall Street Journal’. The entire complex was devastated and, with it, the negligent recklessness of the Iranian leadership. How could so many of their leaders gather in the same place knowing that their enemies were waiting for the slightest opportunity to pull the trigger? Was it overconfidence, pure stupidity? The bombing not only buried the man who has led Iran with ideological zeal and an iron fist since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini almost 40 years ago, but also to other leaders of the regime.
The official IRNA news agency confirmed the death of the general at the head of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohammad Pakpur, and the Minister of Defense, Amir Nasirzadeh. Other sources also include Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Defense Council and in charge of supervising the negotiations with the US on the nuclear dispute, as well as the chief of the Army General Staff, Abdolrahim Mousavi. Israel maintains that the attack killed up to 40 senior security officials in less than a minute. “We have killed dictator Khamenei and dozens of senior officials of his repressive regime,” Netanyahu said this Sunday.
That initial rain of fire has once again revealed the penetration of Israeli and American espionage in the corridors of Iranian power, as was already seen in the 12 days that the war lasted last June. In his skill and brutality the Mossad has no rival. Since late 2023, when the war in Gaza began, the initial trigger for the dramatic events that have reshaped the region ever since, Israel has beheaded Iran’s leadership, Hezbollah y Hamas. Not once, but several times.
tactical surprise
“Everyone expected that the attack will come at midnight, when darkness provides cover for operations,” he told the ‘Journal’ Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence. The Israeli bombings focused mainly on regime figures and their missile arsenal, while the Americans prioritized military targets, from strategic to naval infrastructure, according to the same source. Only Israel would have struck on Saturday 500 targetsin the largest air campaign in its history, according to its military. At the same time, Israel launched several cyber attacks against mobile applications, media and even the app that helps Iranians fulfill the five daily prayers of Islam.
As a result of the cyber operations, many Iranians encountered message urging them to rebel against the regime, calling for the desertion of members of the security apparatus or warning the population that “help has arrived.” It remains to be seen now how events will evolve. If history has shown anything, it is that Regime change operations often end badly and that it is particularly difficult to achieve this solely through aerial bombardment, without the deployment of military forces on the ground.
Neither Israel nor the US have cared. They know that the Iranian regime is going through one of the weakest moments in its history and they have gone for its jugular, without caring too much about the consequences that the large-scale war unleashed by their attack may have for the region and the rest of the world.
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