By Lionel Bopage
This article is a critical examination of the 2026 US–Iran conflict, its humanitarian toll, and the enduring struggle for self-determination.
The opening of a new front
On 28 February 2026, United States and Israeli airstrikes hit key Iranian military and political targets. Those strikes killed senior Iranian leaders and triggered an immediate and sustained military response from Tehran. The conflict, swiftly labelled Operation Epic Fury by US command, did not emerge without warning. Its roots lay in years of escalating tension — sanctions, proxy confrontations, nuclear brinkmanship, and the unresolved legacy of the 2025 Twelve-Day War. Yet its outbreak shocked a global community that had dared to believe diplomacy might yet prevail.
Only days before the first bombs fell, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that a historic agreement to avert conflict was within reach, reaffirming Iran’s opposition to nuclear weapons. Reports subsequently emerged indicating that intense lobbying by Saudi Arabia and Israel had persuaded President Trump to abandon the negotiating table in favour of a military solution. US officials reportedly proposed that Israel strike first to provide political cover for broader American involvement. What followed was one of the most consequential military escalations in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The human cost
The human toll of the conflict has been staggering. Within its first six days alone, the war cost an estimated $ 12.7 billion. That figure speaks only to the financial ledger and nothing of the suffering inscribed on the bodies of ordinary Iranians. By mid-March 2026, conservative estimates placed Iranian military casualties between 3,000 and 4,800 dead, while civilian deaths had exceeded 3,000. A single US-Israeli airstrike near a school in the city of Minab killed 180 people, the overwhelming majority of them children.
More than 6,600 structures — residential buildings, commercial premises, and medical facilities — had been destroyed or severely damaged. Internet access was largely severed across Iran, with the government resorting to the distribution of SIM cards primarily for the purposes of state propaganda. UNESCO issued urgent calls for the protection of Iran’s cultural heritage sites, many of which stood in the path of the advancing bombardment. In Lebanon, parallel Israeli military operations had produced over 1,000 fatalities and displaced more than one million civilians. Iraq, too, bore the consequences of US-Israeli strikes against Iran-backed forces on its soil.
These are not abstractions. They are the texture of a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in real time. It is uncomfortably comparable to the ongoing destruction in Gaza. Gaza is a parallel drawn explicitly by educators, trade unionists, and civil society organisations in countries including Australia, whose government’s involvement in the conflict has attracted fierce domestic criticism.
Australia’s complicity
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong publicly affirmed Australia’s alignment with US military objectives from the outset of hostilities. Critics — including the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), which convened an emergency meeting to condemn the war — argued that this amounted to an endorsement of an illegal conflict. The Pine Gap joint intelligence facility in the Northern Territory, long a cornerstone of US surveillance and targeting operations in the region, drew particular scrutiny. Australia’s participation in AUKUS and its commitment to increased defence spending were cited as evidence of a deepening subservience to American imperial strategy.
The parallel with Gaza is not merely rhetorical. In both theatres, US military support has underwritten attacks on schools and hospitals, and in both cases the Australian government has chosen strategic loyalty over humanitarian principle. For many Australians — and particularly for those within migrant and diaspora communities with direct ties to the affected regions — this complicity is not a matter of foreign policy abstraction but one of profound personal and moral consequence.
The question of legality
The illegal nature of the joint US, Israeli-led campaign have been apparent from the moment the first strikes were authorised. No US congressional declaration of war was sought or obtained. The War Powers Resolution, invoked by members of Congress seeking to curtail the President’s military authority, failed in the face of Republican opposition. Legal scholars and international law practitioners questioned the basis for what the US characterised as preventive action. They noted that Iran’s retaliatory strikes — while devastating in their own right, including attacks on US installations across the Persian Gulf and the targeting of US-flagged tankers — could be construed as a legally defensible response to prior aggression.
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2817 on 11 March 2026, demanding that Iran cease its attacks on Gulf shipping lanes. Conspicuously, the resolution made no mention of the US and Israeli strikes that had precipitated those very attacks. The asymmetry was not lost on nations across the Global South. Condemnation of US and Israeli conduct was widespread and, in some cases, accompanied by significant domestic unrest — most notably in Pakistan, where pro-Iranian protests prompted military deployments.
The geopolitical landscape
This conflict has redrawn strategic alignments with considerable speed. Analysts suggest that sustained US military engagement in Iran may diminish Chinese influence across the Gulf region, even as it complicates American capacity to maintain pressure on Russia over Ukraine.
The Houthis in Yemen, though exercising military restraint, have expressed firm political solidarity with Tehran and signalled readiness for escalation should circumstances demand it. Global oil prices have surged dramatically, with the Strait of Hormuz — through which a significant proportion of the world’s petroleum exports pass — largely closed to shipping, raising the spectre of recession-inducing inflation across world economies.
President Trump’s announcement of the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on 1 March marked a further and deeply destabilising escalation. In its aftermath, Iranian military operations intensified, while the Iranian Foreign Ministry itself acknowledged diminished governmental control over parts of the country. Israel’s subsequent targeted killings of Ali Larijani and several other leaders raised new alarms about the scope and character of the US and Israeli operation. Rather than the swift decapitation followed by democratic transformation promised by some of its architects, this military campaign has produced a fragmented, volatile, and increasingly ungovernable situation on the ground.
The people of Iran
How Iranians themselves have responded to these events is complex. The death of Khamenei prompted celebrations among sections of the diaspora and, reportedly, among some within Iran, where opposition to the Islamic Republic has deep and legitimate roots. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, endorsed the US strikes while calling for the protection of civilians. Kurdish Iranian leaders in northern Iraq expressed conditional support for a US ground operation, though they denied any planned military coordination.
Yet alongside these reactions ran a countervailing current: the refusal of many Iranians to welcome foreign bombs as the vehicle of their liberation. The Islamic Republic, for all its authoritarianism, like the banning of independent trade unions, the denial of free elections, the holding of political prisoners, the violent repression of the Woman Life Freedom Woman, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) protest movement and the protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini — has not met with widespread revolt.
The history of the 1979 Revolution demonstrated what Iranians could achieve through collective mobilisation. The history of the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh demonstrated, with equal clarity, what foreign intervention produces: not democracy, but deeper authoritarianism and durable nationalist grievance.
It would be a grave error to suppose that the removal of the Islamic Republic’s leadership by external military force could serve as a reliable pathway to democratic transition. The institutional infrastructure for such a transition — independent unions, civil society organisations, opposition networks capable of governing — has been systematically dismantled over decades of repression. In the absence of these structures, the most likely outcomes are either a consolidation of emergency powers under a new strongman, or a prolonged and bloody fragmentation of state authority.
Resistance, culture, and the long view
Even in the darkest of circumstances, resistance persists. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi is subject to a two-decade ban on making films. However, he has continued to create. And in doing so, he has embodied the insistence of Iranian civil society on its own survival. Poetry, underground cinema, independent journalism, clandestine labour organising – these are not merely gestures of defiance; they are the architecture of a future Iran that can only be built by Iranians themselves.
The fourteenth-century poet Hafez (Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī)— beloved across the Persian-speaking world and venerated as a “poet’s poet” and a universal voice of love — knew something about the moral hypocrisies of power, and about the gap between proclaimed righteousness and actual conduct. His verses resonate with renewed urgency in the present moment, when those directing the bombs speak the language of liberation while producing the conditions of catastrophe. In this sense, the cultural resistance of Iran’s artists and intellectuals is not peripheral to the political struggle. It is central to it, keeping alive the possibility of a society that foreign military planners cannot bomb into existence and do not understand.
Escalation and the double standard of terror
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz indicated a significant rise in U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran, with U.S. Admiral Brad Cooper stating that over 8,000 Iranian military targets had been struck, including 130 vessels. On 21 March, U.S. strikes were conducted on the Natanz Nuclear Facility using bunker buster bombs. Russia condemned it as a “blatant violation of international law,” calling for restraint from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In retaliation, Iran targeted the Israeli town of Dimona, injuring 78, followed by another strike on Arad, which resulted in over 116 injuries. Reports by CNN and The Wall Street Journal mentioned an unsuccessful Iranian missile attack on the U.S.–UK military base at Diego Garcia, which was intercepted. Iran denied involvement, attributing the incident to an Israeli provocation.
The Houthi movement in Yemen threatened repercussions against any escalation concerning Iran, cautioning Bahrain and the UAE about their involvement in the Strait of Hormuz operations. Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, threatening retaliatory strikes against Iranian power plants. Iran responded by threatening to close the Strait and attack vital regional infrastructure.
Amid escalating tensions, including claims of shooting down an F-15, Trump postponed military strikes for five days, asserting negotiations with Iran were in progress. Iran rejected and ridiculed this claim, branding it deceitful and suggesting plans against U.S. and Israeli interests were underway.
Trump labels Iran the “Number One State Sponsor of Terror” and threatens to obliterate its power plants if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t opened. Yet by his own logic, one must ask: Does decades-long economic warfare through sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, deliberately designed to cripple civilian populations, not meet the same threshold? If choking a nation’s economy to force political submission is not state-sponsored terror, the definition seems to depend entirely on who holds the megaphone.
The Pentagon is expected to deploy soon a brigade combat team of about 3,000 soldiers from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division, known as the “Immediate Response Force,” specialized in parachute assaults, to the Middle East to support operations against Iran, according to reports. While widely reported, the deployment has not been officially confirmed by the Pentagon, which cites operational security.
Water as a weapon of war
Water has historically been utilised as a tool of control in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, as of early 2026, has emerged as a critical “weapon of war” within the escalating U.S.-Israeli confrontation with Iran. With the Persian Gulf region heavily reliant on desalination for potable water, infrastructure in this area is increasingly targeted, turning essential water resources into strategic targets, according to the latest reports. Oxfam and UN experts have accused Israel of using “thirst as a weapon” by deliberately restricting water access and destroying water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza. This has resulted in a 94% reduction in available water. Since October 2023, Israeli military operations have damaged or destroyed 89% of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities, including wells, desalination units, and pipelines.
During the conflict that began in late February 2026, both sides have targeted critical water infrastructure. Iranian officials claimed the U.S. attacked a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, shutting off water to 30 villages, while Bahrain reported a drone attack on its desalination infrastructure. The Gulf states (Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman) are heavily reliant on over 400 desalination plants. Qatar and Bahrain obtain over 90% of their drinking water from these systems. Iran has threatened to target desalination plants in the Gulf—specifically in the UAE and Bahrain—if Iranian infrastructure is attacked by the U.S. or Israel. Disabling these plants would cause severe suffering for millions, and experts warn that such attacks constitute a “war crime”.
Conclusion: Against the logic of an imperial war
The war on Iran was made possible by decades of bipartisan American hawkishness, by Israeli strategic calculation, by the complicity of allied governments including Australia’s, and by the grotesque spectacle of a US president reportedly contemplating the bombardment of Kharg Island — in his own words — ‘just for fun.’ It has produced mass civilian casualties, environmental destruction, economic disruption, and a humanitarian crisis of the first order. It has not produced democracy, and it will not.
Those who advocate for peace — in Iran, in the United States, in Australia, and across the world — are not naive about the character of the Islamic Republic. They understand, and are prepared to say clearly, that the regime is authoritarian, that it represses its people, that it denies them fundamental freedoms. However, they insist, with equal clarity, that Iranians must determine the fate of Iran. Not by cruise missiles. Not by the machinations of foreign powers with strategic interests to protect. Not by the same imperial logic that has left Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Gaza in ruins.
History teaches that lasting democratic change requires the patient, courageous work of people organising within their own societies — in workplaces, communities, and cultural institutions — against the structures that oppress them. The Iranian people have shown, across decades of struggle, that they are more than equal to that task. What they require is not bombs dropped in their name. What they require is solidarity, and the space needed to determine their own future.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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