At around a quarter past one in the morning on 28 February 2026, the sky over Tehran filled with the sound of aircraft that the Iranian air defence network could no longer see. Within the first twelve hours, American and Israeli forces flew something on the order of nine hundred strikes against a single category of target: the men who ran the country. Command bunkers, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Ministry of Defence, the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Organisation, and — most consequentially — the residential compound of the Supreme Leader. By the morning of 1 March, the Iranian government had confirmed what the world already suspected: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the Islamic Republic for thirty-six years, was dead.
This was not the first time in eight months that Israeli and American jets had struck Iran. But the June 2025 war had been about centrifuges. This one was about the state itself. The campaign — codenamed Operation Epic Fury on the American side and Roaring Lion on the Israeli — was a decapitation strike in the most literal sense: an attempt not merely to set back a nuclear programme but to break the system that had governed Iran since 1979. Whether it succeeded is a question that will be argued for a generation. What is beyond argument is that the war it opened reshaped the Gulf, sent oil above $100 a barrel for the first time in years, and demonstrated — again — that the age of restraint among the great powers is over.
The Road to the Second War¶
To understand February 2026, start eight months earlier. In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile factories, and senior commanders. The United States joined on 22 June with Operation Midnight Hammer, in which B-2 bombers dropped the thirty-thousand-pound GBU-57 “bunker buster” — its first operational use — on the deeply buried enrichment hall at Fordow. The “Twelve-Day War” ended in a ceasefire on 24 June, and on paper Iran had lost. In practice, the outcome was ambiguous in exactly the way that invites a sequel. The strikes had damaged Iran’s enrichment infrastructure badly but not completely, and the location of roughly 440 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium — enough, if further enriched, for several weapons — was unknown. Western assessments concluded Iran could reconstitute its programme within about two years.
Diplomacy then did what diplomacy does when both sides have stopped believing in it. Iran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency; by October 2025 the IAEA reported, bleakly, that it had “no information” on the status of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile. In late August, Britain, France, and Germany — the European parties to the 2015 nuclear deal — triggered the “snapback” mechanism, and at the end of September the full architecture of pre-2015 UN sanctions crashed back down on Tehran. Russia and China protested the procedure; it changed nothing.
What made the second war possible, though, was not the nuclear file. It was Iran’s weakness. The Islamic Republic entered 2026 in the worst condition of its existence: inflation running near 50 percent, the currency in free fall, and protests spreading across the country from late December. To planners in Washington and Jerusalem, this looked less like a problem to be managed than a window to be exploited — a chance to finish what June had started against an adversary that had rarely been more vulnerable. That logic, seductive and old, is the logic that produces wars of choice.
Operation Epic Fury¶
The opening blow was built around overwhelming superiority in the air. The Israeli component, Roaring Lion, put roughly two hundred aircraft — F-35I stealth fighters foremost among them — against some five hundred targets, the largest strike sortie in the history of the Israeli Air Force. The American contribution, Epic Fury, was a small air force in its own right: F-22s forward-deployed to Israel, F-35s, F-15Es, carrier-based F/A-18s, a fleet of nearly ninety aerial tankers, and a quartet of B-2 stealth bombers. Sea-launched cruise missiles and one-way attack drones rounded out the package. Adversary air defences, already degraded in June, were systematically blinded in the opening hours.
The first wave deliberately targeted the nervous system of the Iranian state rather than its nuclear sites. Only after the leadership had been struck did the campaign turn to the familiar list of nuclear facilities — Natanz hit around 2 March, the Taleghan 2 complex around 12 March. Whether the Americans used the GBU-57 again, as at Fordow in June, was never confirmed; the Pentagon declined to say, and the question of exactly what munition struck what site remains one of the war’s open technical puzzles. By mid-March, independent analysts assessed that Iran’s principal enrichment facilities had been destroyed or rendered inoperable for the foreseeable future — though, as in June, the fate of the enriched stockpile and the surviving cadre of Iranian scientists meant the programme was suppressed rather than erased.
The Death of Khamenei¶
The killing of a head of state by air strike is rare, and rarer still when that head of state is also the supreme religious authority of a nation of ninety million. Iran confirmed Khamenei’s death on 1 March. The mechanics — reported, never independently verified — described American intelligence locating several gatherings of senior officials and striking them within seconds of one another; Iranian state media reported that members of Khamenei’s family died alongside him. Israel claimed to have killed a long roster of the Iranian high command in the same opening blow: the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, the chief of the armed forces’ general staff, the defence minister, and a clutch of senior security advisers.
Decapitation is a tactic with a poor strategic record, and the reason is simple: it removes individuals, not institutions. The Islamic Republic’s power has never resided in one man alone but in the interlocking machinery of the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment, and the security services — a structure designed, after 1979, precisely to survive the loss of its founder. Killing Khamenei was an extraordinary operational feat. Whether it amounted to a strategic victory depended on what came next, and what came next was not collapse.
Succession by Bloodline¶
What came next was a Khamenei. With the country under bombardment and its Assembly of Experts unable to convene safely in person, the body met online and, on 9 March, named the late leader’s fifty-six-year-old son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the third Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. The speed was telling. By multiple accounts the Revolutionary Guard had tried to install a successor within hours of the strike, then leaned on the Assembly to ratify the choice — a hereditary succession in a state founded on the rejection of monarchy, and one the elder Khamenei had reportedly resisted in life.
The irony was not lost on anyone. A revolution that began in 1979 by toppling a shah ended, in a sense, by crowning one. American and Israeli intelligence could not confirm whether Mojtaba actually governed or merely reigned over a state now effectively run by the Guard. Either way, the war had failed at its most ambitious aim. The system did not fall. It closed ranks.
Iran Strikes Back¶
Iran’s retaliation was wide and indiscriminate. Ballistic missiles and drones flew not only at Israel but at the American bases scattered across the Gulf and at the Gulf states that hosted them — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia — as well as at Iraq and Jordan. On 1 March, an Iranian missile struck a synagogue and the shelter beneath it in Beit Shemesh, Israel, killing nine civilians, four of them teenagers — the deadliest single incident inside Israel during the war. Strikes hit airports and industrial sites in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait; airspace across the region emptied; airlines suspended their Gulf routes.
The most consequential Iranian move, though, was at sea. On 4 March, Tehran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and began enforcing the declaration with mines, ship seizures, and attacks — choking the artery through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves and turning a regional war into a global energy crisis. That story is told in its own account of the Hormuz crisis.
Militarily, the asymmetry told. By American and Israeli accounts — claims relayed by analysts rather than independently confirmed — Iran’s missile output collapsed by some 90 percent within a week, the bulk of its navy was sunk, and most of its missile launchers were destroyed. Iran could impose pain. It could not win.
The Ledger¶
The human cost is genuinely uncertain, and any honest account says so. The figures come from belligerent health ministries and militaries, and they diverge wildly depending on source, date, and definition. By late May, Iran’s health ministry counted on the order of 3,500 dead and more than 26,000 wounded; Iran’s own UN ambassador had earlier claimed far higher civilian tolls. Lebanon, drawn in through Iran’s proxies, reported casualties in the thousands. Israel reported a few dozen dead and several thousand wounded; the United States lost thirteen service members, most in a single refuelling-aircraft crash. UNICEF reported more than a thousand children killed or injured across the region. The only safe statement is that the dead numbered in the thousands and that the precise figure was, and remains, contested.
The material ledger was clearer. Iran’s nuclear facilities were wrecked. Gulf airports and energy infrastructure were damaged. And — a point that received less attention than it deserved — American stocks of precision munitions and interceptor missiles were drawn down so heavily that analysts warned replenishment would take years, with knock-on consequences for readiness in Europe and the Pacific. Wars of choice are rarely as cheap as their authors expect.
The World Reacts¶
In Washington, the war detonated a constitutional fight. The administration had acted without congressional authorisation, and the War Powers resolution that followed split both parties; a handful of Republicans in both chambers broke with the President, though the effort to compel a withdrawal failed. Israel, whose prime minister had lobbied hard for the joint strike, framed the operation as the dismantling of an existential threat. The Gulf states, targets of Iranian missiles, edged closer to the American–Israeli axis even as they counted their own dead; Saudi Arabia condemned the “Iranian aggression” against Arab states.
Russia and China condemned the strikes in the strongest terms. Moscow called the killing of Khamenei a “political assassination” and an act of “aggression.” Beijing called it a “grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty,” opposed any move toward externally imposed change in Tehran, and — together with Russia — used its Security Council veto to block a Gulf-sponsored resolution that would have authorised an international naval effort to reopen Hormuz. Europe, as so often, was reluctantly aligned with Washington: the E3 leaders issued careful statements calling for restraint and the end of Iran’s nuclear programme, while critics across the continent called the war illegal and lamented Europe’s irrelevance to a conflict on its own periphery. At the United Nations, a Gulf-sponsored resolution in mid-March condemned Iran’s attacks on its neighbours and said nothing whatever about the strikes that had started the war.
Did It Work?¶
The honest answer, as of mid-2026, is: not in the way its planners hoped. Measured against its tactical aims, Epic Fury was a triumph — Iranian air defences blinded, the nuclear programme shattered, the high command decimated, the navy sunk. Measured against its strategic aim, it failed. The Islamic Republic did not collapse. It produced a successor in eleven days and kept its grip on power, and the most plausible reading is that decapitation merely swapped one set of anti-Israel hardliners for another, angrier set.
Three uncomfortable conclusions follow. First, on proliferation: a state that has watched its enrichment infrastructure bombed twice, lost its leader to an air strike, and been told it cannot have a deterrent has every incentive to conclude that the only mistake was not building the bomb sooner. The war may have set Iran’s nuclear timeline back by a couple of years while strengthening its resolve to weaponise — the worst of both outcomes. Second, on regime change: the easier it looks to remove a government from the air, the more tempting “mission creep” becomes, and the longer the shadow of Libya and Iraq grows. Third, on cost: a war sold as surgical produced a global energy shock, thousands dead, depleted Western arsenals, and a Gulf one miscalculation away from catastrophe.
Edward Luttwak once observed that the paradoxical logic of strategy punishes the side that mistakes tactical brilliance for strategic success. Iran lost almost every engagement of the 2026 war and may yet emerge from it more dangerous than before. That is the puzzle the planners did not solve — and the one their successors will inherit.
Sources & Further Reading¶
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“Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Reimposition of UN Sanctions” — Congressional Research Service (Library of Congress). The authoritative public account of the 2231 “snapback,” the IAEA findings, and Iran’s nuclear status going into 2026.
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“Iran in Crisis: The Landscape After the Twelve-Day War” — Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), December 2025. The single best analysis of Iran’s nuclear, political, succession, and economic condition between the two wars.
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“Who Is Winning the Iran War?” and “Would Regime Change Solve the Iran Challenge?” — Daniel Byman and colleagues, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Two clear-eyed think-tank assessments of the strategic balance and the perils of regime change.
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“The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran” by David Crist (2012). Essential background on the long American–Iranian shadow war, from the Tanker War to the covert campaigns that prefigured 2025–26.
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“Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy” by Trita Parsi (2017). The making — and the fragility — of the nuclear agreement whose collapse set the stage for war.