Israel-Iran live: 'Bullseye!!!' Trump claims Iran strikes caused 'monumental damage' and says he's open to 'regime change'
Donald Trump has asked why there would not be a "regime change" in Iran after US strikes, saying "make Iran great again". Meanwhile, Iran's UN envoy says the current situation provides a "historic test" for the body. Follow the latest.
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Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Shelter in place ordered for Americans in Qatar amid growing fears of Iran retaliation
The US Embassy in Qatar has ordered Americans in the nation to 'shelter in place' as fears grow of an Iranian retaliation to the US strikes on Saturday night. The Embassy warned Americans to seek shelter 'out of an abundance of caution.' It did not say how long the shelter in place order is expected to last. There are up to 15,000 American residents in Qatar, and the United States also has 19 military facilities in the Middle East nation. Qatar has served as an intermediary between the United States and Iran in the past and was coordinating negotiations over Iran's nuclear resources earlier this month before Israel ended the talks by attacking Iran on June 13. This is a developing story, check back for updates.
Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Iranian-Americans' praise Trump for bombing of their home nation
Iranian-Americans have backed President Trump's strikes on their home nation as they hope the intervention could trigger a revolt against the Ayatollah's regime. In Maryland, one of the largest Iranian communities in America where over 16,000 Iranian people live, residents have expressed a cautious optimism over the strikes. An Iranian-American DC resident called Alireza, who declined to give his second name, told the outlet that the news of Trump's 'bunker buster' bomb raid on three key Iranian nuclear weapon factories on Saturday night filled him with hope. He said world leaders in the past had ignored the oppression of the Iranian people at the hands of the regime, but after Trump's strikes, 'it shows that they can't do anything and they are weak.' Hashemi said that Iranian political identity has been 'deeply shaped by the fact that Iran has been on the receiving end and the humiliating end of external intervention.' '(This) created the social conditions for the 1979 revolution', he said, when the country's liberal shah was replaced by a hardline Islamic regime that remains in power to this day. Israel began bombing Iran last week in a bid to stop the country building nuclear weapons, after its leaders vowed to use them to obliterate Israel. On Saturday night, Trump dispatched B-2 bombers with huge 'bunker buster' bombs to try and destroy three nuclear weapons factories, including the infamous Fordow facility that sits buried under a mountain. Alireza and others hope that Trump's strikes will finally topple the country's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Pushing for regime change in Iran has long been avoided by US presidents, before Donald Trump on Sunday night stunned the Middle East again as he called to 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.' In a shock post on Sunday night to Truth Social, Trump wrote: 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!' The message from the president directly contradicted remarks from his top allies just hours earlier, with Vice President JD Vance telling ABC: 'We don't want to achieve regime change. We want to achieve the end of the Iranian nuclear program.' A majority of Republicans support America's entry into the war - but there has been vocal criticism too, from leading MAGA figures including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Steve Bannon. However, direct American intervention to end to the Ayatollah's regime is exactly what many Iranians in America are hoping for. Reza Rofougaran, a 72-year-old real estate broker in Maryland, told the Baltimore Sun that he emigrated from Tehran shortly after the 1979 revolution, and worked as a journalist in his home country before the regime censored his newspaper. After being randomly arrested on the street, he said he 'decided that no matter what, I'm going to leave the country and come back to the U.S.' He said he is '100 percent against the Islamic regime in Iran and hope for a regime change.' Rofougaran, a US citizen since 1997, added that he was unsure if American intervention would have the desired effect given past foreign policy struggles in the Middle East, and would 'prefer this regime goes down by the people of Iran themselves.' 'A good majority of Iranians' oppose the regime, he said, but at the same time they 'are saddened by these attacks.' 'I am not happy with any attack on my homeland,' he said. The divide between the desired outcome of regime change and skepticism over how to achieve it follows decades of US presidents floating strikes on Iran but backing down due to the risks involved, before Trump pulled the trigger on Saturday night. 'Unfortunately, no one helped us. Obama didn't help us. Biden didn't help us,' Rofougaran added. 'The current situation, actually, I'm sort of happy, that actually, Israelis start supporting Iranian people.' A National Iranian American Council survey of Iranian Americans shortly before Israel's strikes on Iran found that 53 percent strongly or somewhat opposed US military action. The number that strongly or somewhat supported American intervention stood at 36 percent. Trump's strikes did not target or kill any civilians in Iran. Experts say many Iranian-Americans fled to the US to escape persecution, with that life experience explaining their support for potential regime change. 'Many Iranian Americans are here fled the regime because of either economic deprivation or political persecution,' Nader Hashemi, the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at Georgetown University, told the Baltimore Sun. Rofougaran said Iranians he has spoken to both in the US and his home country say they are 'happy' with the Israeli strikes 'because of the precise attack' that only killed or injured soldiers and no civilians. 'You are not attacking civilians, people. They are attacking the mullahs, the top [IRGC] commanders and the people in charge,' he said. Now, with the world waiting for Iran's response to the US strikes, he hopes the Iranian people will see the bombings as an opportunity to push for regime change. 'The whole thing is changing in 10 days,' he said. 'They want to have a peaceful government.'
Daily Mirror
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'Trump let Iran make nukes he's mad about - he's at war for a Nobel Peace Prize'
If there is one disease which lies behind the constant spasms of horror with which our days our currently blighted, it is the human race's inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. Once upon a time, journalists would go to the pub, and then bed. Sometimes they'd go to bed with each other, because they'd been to the pub. But they'd wake up in the morning and go "blimey, an earthquake in Japan. I had better find a good story of my own about this". And they would have to go deeper into a story and its origins. Today they don't drink, barely know their colleagues, and wake up to emails from a 24-rolling news ecosystem that demands constant feeding. Journalists think "blimey, everyone else is ahead of me" and scramble to catch up. No-one has time to think, which is why no-one has told you that Donald Trump just bombed Iran for making nuclear weapons that Donald Trump let them make. I wish I was making this stuff up, but no-one's got time for that. It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." And so he destabilised and raised the oil price with sanctions, screwed regional trade which meant the price of wheat rose and people starved across several countries, and gave fresh targets to jihadis. Back in office for a second time, Trump wants a legacy and more than anything he wants the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got, largely for diplomatic efforts with the Muslim world. Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine "on day one" and it only got worse; he suggested building a golden beachside golf club in Gaza, and got laughed at. So his eye turned to Ayatollah Khameini, and the country which the US has done so much to make worse, for so long. Anyone with an ounce of realism in their body might wonder at the convenience with which the B-2 bombers and their bunker-busting payload were able to fly in unmolested, after the Israelis had suddenly switched attention from Gaza to take out the Iranian air defences a week earlier. It does seem odd that the imminent threat Netanyahu had predicted in 2018 bloomed 7 years later, 6 months after Trump returned to office and only after his other draft entries for the peace prize had evaporated. We might also ponder why the US president with the worst personal polls in history at this point in his leadership might be in want of some surgical strikes to appease his Muslim-hating base, and whether it would do him any harm if there were a couple of small terror attacks on US bases that would give an excuse to bomb the mullahs to the table. And having thought this far, we could ask ourselves how close to the edge of nuclear catastrophe Trump will allow the world to careen before he picks up the phone to "make a deal" which will be the bigliest, most beautiful peace deal of all time. And whether it will be worse than the one we used to have, before he ripped it to shreds out of petulance and exploited the disastrous consequences for the sake of vanity. With Iran alone, Trump has cost the world trillions. Now he is about to march an entire planet to the gates of hell, just so he can look good for marching everyone back again. And this plan works if he is a diplomatic genius able to unpick decades of crapola, and capable of remembering why and how it happened in the first place. But when all he watches is 24-hour rolling news, with constant updates about new stuff that isn't new at all, the best we can hope for is that the Nobel Committee gives him the prize now, just to make him stop.
