A collection of opinionated commentaries on culture, politics and religion compiled predominantly from an American viewpoint but tempered by a global vision. My Armwood Opinion Youtube Channel @ YouTube I have a Jazz Blog @ Jazz
and a Technology Blog @ Technology. I have a Human Rights Blog @ Law
Malachy Browne is an expert in verifying online imagery, and John Ismay is a former Navy bomb disposal officer.
The video, uploaded on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency and verified by The New York Times, shows a Tomahawk cruise missile striking a naval base beside the school in the town of Minab on Feb. 28. The U.S. military is the only force involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles.
A body of evidenceassembled by The Times— including satellite imagery, social media posts and other verified videos — indicates that the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on the naval base. The base is operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Asked by a reporter from The Times on Saturday if the United States had bombed the school, President Trump said: “No. In my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He said, “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing beside Mr. Trump, said the Pentagon was investigating, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
President Trump said he believed that Iran was responsible for a strike on an elementary school that reportedly killed 175 people.
The video of the strike, which was first reported by the research collectiveBellingcat, was independently verified by The Times. We compared features visible in the footage to new satellite imagery captured days after the strikes in Minab.
The video was filmed from a construction site opposite the base and shows a worn, dirt path across a grassy area and piles of debris also evident in recent satellite imagery, bolstering its credibility. The video also comports with otherverified videostaken in the immediate aftermath of the strikes.
A Times analysis of the video shows the missile striking a buildingdescribedas amedical clinicin the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base. Plumes of smoke and debris shoot out of the building after it is hit as the distant screams of onlookers are heard.
As the camera pans to the right, large plumes of dust and smoke are already billowing from the area around the elementary school, suggesting that it had been struck shortly before the strike on the naval base. This is supported by atimeline of the strikesassembled by The Times that shows the school was hit around the time as the base.
Several other buildings inside the naval base were also hit by precision strikes in the attack, an analysis of satellite imagery showed. Determining precisely what happened has been impeded by the lack of visible weapons fragments and the inability of outside reporters to reach the scene.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.
U.S. Central Command said a video it released of several Tomahawks being launched from Navy ships was filmed on Feb. 28, the day the Iranian base and school were hit.
The Defense Departmentdescribes Tomahawksas “long-range, highly accurate” guided missiles that can fly about 1,000 miles. They are programmed with a specific flight plan before launch, and the missiles steer themselves to their targets.
EachTomahawkis about 20 feet long and has a wingspan of eight and a half feet, according to the Navy. The most commonly used Tomahawks have warheads that contain the explosive power of about 300 pounds of TNT.
Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who works with Bellingcat, alsoidentified the missilein the video as a Tomahawk, as did another weapons expert, Chris Cobb-Smith, director of Chiron Resources, a security and logistics agency.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference on Wednesday that U.S. forces were carrying out strikes in southern Iran at the time the naval base and school were hit. A map he presented showed that an area including Minab, which is near the Strait of Hormuz, had been targeted by strikes in the first 100 hours of the operation, although it did not explicitly identify the town.
“Along the southern axis, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln strike group has continued to provide pressure from the sea along the southeastern side of the coast and has been attriting naval capability all along the strait,” the general said.
It is not the only time that General Caine has acknowledged the role Tomahawk missiles played in the early hours of the war.
“The first shooters at sea were Tomahawks unleashed by the United States Navy,” hesaidin a briefing to reporters at the Pentagon on March 2, as the Navy “began to conduct strikes across the southern flank in Iran.”
In June, a Navy submarinelaunchedmore than two dozen Tomahawks at a nuclear facility in Isfahan, Iran, as part of the 12-Day war.
Shawn McCreeshcontributed reporting.Shawn PaikandMcKinnon de Kuypercontributed video production.
John Ismayis a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy."
How Trump’s War in Iran Has Echoes of Putin and Ukraine
"The many similarities between the White House’s justification for war in Iran and Russia’s messaging on Ukraine underscore the risks of a vaguely defined, open-ended war.
Some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric on Iran has been in step with Russia’s rhetoric about its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Anton Troianovski was the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times from 2021 to 2025. He now covers global affairs from Washington.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethsaidlast Monday that the United States “didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.”
After he invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russiaput itthis way: “We didn’t start the so-called war in Ukraine. Rather, we are trying to finish it.”
Mr. Putin’s war was a disastrous ground invasion of a fledgling democracy. Mr. Trump’s war on Iran is a sophisticated bombing campaign against an aggressive theocracy that was killing its own people in the streets. But some similarities are uncanny, starting with the White House and the Kremlin both trying to avoid calling their actions acts of war.
Asked last week if “this is war,” Speaker Mike Johnsonresponded, “I think it’s an operation.”
“This is a special military operation,” Mr. Johnson’s Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Volodin, the State Duma speaker, said two months into his country’s invasion, sticking to the Kremlin’s official terminology. “If Russia had started a full-scale war, it would have been over long ago.”
Shifting objectives, an exaggerated threat, an ambiguous mission: The many Russian echoes in the White House’s messaging on Iran underscore the risks of a vaguely defined, open-ended war in which the attacking party pins its hopes on regime change.
“We haven’t even yet started anything in earnest,” Mr. Putin said in July 2022, trying to project defiance after months of fighting.
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” Mr. Trump told CNN last Monday.
I was in Moscow when Mr. Putin gave an early-morning address to his nation on Feb. 24, 2022, announcing his “special military operation,” a term now so ingrained that its Russian initials, “S.V.O.,” are shorthand for the war against Ukraine.
The speech portrayed decades of grievance with Ukraine and the West as leaving Russia “no other choice” but to attack. One of its most chilling moments was Mr. Putin’s plea to Ukrainian soldiers to “immediately lay down arms and go home,” and his warning that if they did not, “responsibility for the possible bloodshed will lie fully and wholly with the ruling Ukrainian regime.”
So it was startling when Mr. Trump struck similar notes, albeit in a “USA” baseball cap, in an overnight speech last weekend declaring “major combat operations” in Iran.Overstating the threat of Iran’s missiles, Mr. Trump spoke of decades of Iranian “bloodshed and mass murder,” and asserted that “we can’t take it anymore.” He said Iranian soldiers needed to “lay down your weapons” or “face certain death.”
I did another double take when Mr. Trump the next day repeated his call for Iranian soldiers to disarm, and urged Iranians to “seize this moment” and topple their government. Mr. Putin, too,tried againon the second day of his war to get Ukrainian soldiers to stop resisting, and to “take power into your own hands.”
Western officials and Russian elites expected the war to be over quickly. Russian officers were told to pack their dress uniforms in anticipation of a quick military parade in Kyiv. But even as Russia was falsely claiming to have established “total air superiority” over Ukraine, its overextended supply lines in the military’s disastrous sprint for Kyiv became easy targets for Ukrainian artillery.
Days turned into weeks, which turned into months, which turned into years. The Ukrainians used ever-more-sophisticated Western weaponry for deadly strikes well behind the front lines, using coordinatesprovided by the United States.
Along the way, Mr. Putin’s goals narrowed: from regime change — he called it the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine — to a focus on capturing all of the eastern Donbas region and keeping Ukraine out of NATO.
Now the toll of Mr. Putin’s waris approaching 500,000 lives. Ukraine’s military did not surrender, and President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge in Kyiv, leading what the Kremlin casts as a cabal of neo-Nazis.
Mr. Trump is only a week into his war, but there is no evidence that Iranian officials or soldiers are starting to surrender — maintaining the hold of a regime that Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Washington’s loudest Iran hawks,refersto as “religious Nazis.”
As the Trump administration has floated shifting timelines for the Iran war, bothpro-andanti-Kremlinbloggers from Russia started referring to Mr. Trump’s plan as “Tehran in three days.” It was a reference to “Kyiv in three days,” the ironic shorthand used to describe the Kremlin’s hubris in believing that Ukraine would quickly crumble.
Of course, Mr. Trump could still end the Iran war soon and claim success. On Saturday, he said Iran was “being beat to HELL,” and that he was considering “complete destruction and certain death” for more areas of the country.
But Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister at the time of Russia’s invasion, said that given the expansive U.S. goals, the Trump administration may be suffering from the same overconfidence that doomed Russia’s initial war plan.
“American commentators are again talking about a ‘short war,’” Mr. Kulebapostedon social media on Friday. “They said the same about Russia’s war against Ukraine. It will be short only if Washington quietly scales down its goals, gives up on regime change in Iran, and sells a much smaller outcome as victory.”
“Breaking a large country,” he added, “is hard even for the United States.”
One striking difference is the poor performance of the Russian military and the sophistication of the U.S. and Israeli air campaign. But analysts say that the value of military firepower is limited when it is not clear what it is supposed to achieve.
And the United States’ objectives keep shifting. Mr. Trump on Friday demanded “unconditional surrender” by Iran, while members of his cabinet have presented various, more limited goals, like destroying Iran’s nuclear program and its missile arsenal.
Michael Kofman, a military analyst focusing on the Russia-Ukraine war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that the war reflects “enduring historical lessons.” They include “the need for an alignment between military means and political aims, adjusting plans once initial assumptions are disproven, the need to think through second- and third-order effects.”
Maria Lipman, a visiting professor of international studies at Northwestern University who focuses on Russia, said the echoes she saw in Mr. Trump’s war began with “the very improbability of what is happening.”
Russians largely tuned out the possibility that their president could start an all-out invasion of their neighbor, even as he massed troops. After the initial shock, many came to accept Mr. Putin’s claim that Western aggression against Russia left him no choice but to start his “special military operation.” Hundreds of thousands signed up to join the war, attracted by lucrative signing bonuses.
Hundreds of thousands more fled abroad, including to Dubai, which has been attacked by Iranian drones similar to the ones Russia has used for years against Ukraine.
“By starting a war with Iran, Trump stepped into the unknown,” Ms. Lipman said. “I think that there is more instability in store for the United States and the American people than they realize at this time.”
Oleg Matsnevcontributed reporting.
Anton Troianovskiwrites about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin."
Live Updates: Iran Says It’s Close to Naming New Supreme Leader as Attacks on Infrastructure Grow
Iranian state media reported that top clerics were finalizing their decision on a successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel and Iran appeared to be ramping up attacks on infrastructure targets.
