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US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.

“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.

“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.

Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.

In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.

Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.

“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”

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For some U.S. military commanders, the emerging war in Iran is part of a biblical plan to bring about the end of the world as we know it, according to complaints filed by over 100 service members.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received a litany of complaints about religious ideology seeping into military orders since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, independent journalist Jon Larsen first reported.

Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, a nonprofit group established 21 years ago that focuses on ensuring constitutional protections for service members, spoke with HuffPost by phone Tuesday morning and illuminated some details of the complaints, which have come from more than three dozen military units situated in at least 30 different military installations.

“We started getting calls in the wee hours of Saturday morning from people saying their commanders were just jubilant about this and trying to tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all part of God’s plan,’” Weinstein said.

Weinstein said the “metric promised” in the Bible’s Book of Revelation is horrifying and should worry everyone.
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“They are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon,” Weinstein said. “That’s a lot of blood.”

Part of what makes the accounts so disturbing, Weinstein said, is that service members aren’t able to push back when they’re given orders that blur the line regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is all about time, place and manner,” he said. “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony.”

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Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) tore into Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a 10-minute tirade criticizing her from everything to her handling of the deaths of two Minnesotans to killing her own dog in a monologue that garnered applause from the audience of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I’m giving you a performance evaluation here – I’m not looking for a response,” said Tillis, adding that “time after time after time, I’ve been disappointed.”

Tillis, who is retiring at the end of his term next year, accused Noem of holding up federal emergency funding, violating U.S. citizens rights in carrying out immigration enforcement and quashing independent oversight of her department in a move he said would prompt him to renew his hold on DHS nominees.

He faulted her for indiscriminate immigration enforcement.

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As groups of families and others gathered Sunday evening at cafes around Niloofar Square—a middle-class area in eastern Tehran—after breaking their fast for Ramadan, a series of explosions struck the area, leveling several buildings and killing over 20 people, according to witnesses at the scene and later reports from local news sources.

Witnesses who spoke to Drop Site said two explosions hit the area—a smaller strike in the vicinity, followed by a larger one that devastated much of the neighborhood, a tactic known as a “double tap” strike that is used to inflict maximum casualties.

Videos of the immediate aftermath of the attack showed several individuals dead and wounded as well as massive destruction on the street outside. In Cafe Ahla, next to the square, blood and debris soaked the floors. Several patrons who had been sitting there when the attack struck could be seen dead on the floor or with their mutilated bodies still sprawled across their seats.

“We were sitting here around 8:00-8:30 p.m. and suddenly there was the noise and explosion. We got up and a few people ran away. We turned around to get our belongings and we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone’s hand had fallen on the floor, a head had fallen on the floor,” said Shahin, a witness who had been at the cafe and asked to be identified by first name only. “There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up and two people were martyred.”

As has been the case with nearly all of the bombings in Iran, it remains unclear whether this attack was carried out by the U.S. or Israel. Israel has used “double tap” strikes in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere. In one prominent incident, the Israeli military killed 22 Palestinians, including five journalists, in a double tap strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in August. The U.S. repeatedly engaged in double tap strikes during the so-called “War on Terror” in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and, most recently, in a September 2025 attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean.

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The search for the dead in the apparent U.S. or Israeli missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school in Iran has officially ended.

But the questions surrounding the attack that killed at least 175 people have just begun, as international condemnation and calls for investigations – and accountability – were amplified March 2.

“All alleged violations − including indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian infrastructure, and attacks on medical facilities and schools − must be promptly, independently, and transparently investigated,” one of the world’s oldest human rights organizations, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), said in a statement.

“Where evidence of war crimes or other serious violations is found,” it added, “those responsible, regardless of rank or official capacity, must be held accountable in accordance with international law.”

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Concerns about an extended conflict, the mounting U.S. death toll and a perceived lack of clarity about the mission’s purpose are percolating among President Donald Trump’s MAGA base as the military operation in Iran puts the president at odds with some of his most ardent supporters.

Hanging over the debate is the memory of previous Middle Eastern conflicts, which stretched for years and claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

Trump's presidential campaigns tapped into the American public’s disenchantment with the long and costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He described the Iraq war as a "disaster" and "one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of our country."

But Trump’s second attack on Iran has already resulted in the deaths of six American service members, and the president is warning that more lives could be lost in a conflict with an uncertain timeline.

The president has launched a series of dramatic military operations in his second term, though. The first two in Iran and Venezuela were quick, and no U.S. soldiers died, limiting the blowback from his political base.

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The Supreme Court on March 2 backed parents' right to be told if their child changes their name, or pronouns they're using in school, blocking California rules aimed at preventing teachers from outing transgender students to their parents.

"Under long-established precedent, parents − not the State − have primary authority with respect to 'the upbringing and education of children,'" the majority said in an unsigned opinion. "The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health."

The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision to grant the parents' emergency request.

Justice Elena Kagan criticized the conservative majority for making a rushed decision about a case "raising novel legal questions and arousing strong views" that is at an early stage of litigation.

"The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly," she wrote of the decision that came without the full rounds of briefing and oral arguments for cases.

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Cuba’s communist government is facing a breaking point in its battle for survival under pressure from President Trump, whose energy quarantine against the country is aimed at collapsing the regime.

The consequences are hitting the population of 10 million people hard, with the U.S. fuel blockade exacerbating a decades-long economic crisis, disrupting access to water and worsening food and medicine shortages.

“There’s a number of epidemics rippling through the population right now, repression is increasing as the regime feels cornered, and they are not signaling any willingness to negotiate with the United States,” said Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

“These people are really, really bad guys, and they have shown this capacity to survive difficult crises,” he added. “I don’t think they can survive this one.”

Trump on Friday suggested the U.S. could achieve a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, perhaps mirroring America’s approach to Venezuela, where the military took out its leaders but kept the regime largely in place while demanding greater economic cooperation.

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