This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
Israel has launched another wave of airstrikes against Iran, with loud blasts reported in Tehran this morning. As the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran enters a fifth day, the reported death toll in Iran has surpassed 1,000, with the victims including many children. This is a resident of Tehran who was forced to flee to Armenia.
AMIR ZAKHARI: [translated] I am from Tehran. There were constant bombings. … There are 50 to 60 bombings daily. Very scary. It is unimaginable for the people with children. … Food stores are working. The hospitals are working, too. So do the fueling stations. Nothing else is working. … There’s practically nobody in the city of Tehran. Everybody moves in the countryside, those who have cottages over there. Others stay indoors. The city is deserted.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as President Trump said Tuesday the U.S. Navy could soon begin escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, after a commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to set ablaze any ship that passes through there. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S.-Israeli joint attacks, disrupting global energy markets as the strait is a key waterway for oil and gas.
Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration had sunk an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, leaving over a hundred people missing.
Iranian media reported today’s funeral ceremony for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated Saturday, has been postponed. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has reportedly emerged as the front-runner to replace his father as Iran’s supreme leader, according to The New York Times. Israel has said whoever is chosen as new supreme leader will become, quote, “an unequivocal target for elimination,” unquote. Israel has already bombed the Assembly of Experts building in Qom, where the decision was expected to be made.
For more, we’re joined here in New York by Narges Bajoghli. She’s an associate professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS.
Professor, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the latest, the significance of what’s happening right now, and about the killing, the assassination of the Supreme Leader Khamenei.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: So, it seems like one of the first strikes that happened on Tehran in — as soon as this war began was a decapacitation strike on the supreme leader, as well as other military and political leaders in the country. It’s important to note that the supreme leader did not go into hiding this time like he did in June. He didn’t go into bunkers. And so, in many ways, and because he was killed in his compound, he wanted to be martyred this time around.
AMY GOODMAN: He was dying of cancer already.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: He was 86 years old. He was already a very elderly gentleman and sick. But he now has become a symbol of martyrdom and resistance against Israeli and American war, and that has significant meaning within Shia culture. And this is why we’re seeing, as you showed earlier on this show, protests happening in Pakistan, as well as in Bahrain, as well as India and across the Muslim world, because he was not just a leader of a country, but for many Shia Muslims, they also saw him as a spiritual leader.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about Mojtaba Khamenei?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Mojtaba Khamenei is his son, and he’s long been rumored to be next in line. It is still unclear whether that’s actually the case. I know The New York Times is reporting that, but we have to wait and see if he — what we do know is that because the Iranians have been obviously looking at and studying the way that the Israelis and Americans do war across the region, they know that their MO is decapacitation strikes. So, in the lead-up to this war, the leader in Iran had already ordered across the government to create three and four lines of succession for every major post. So, they know that whoever is announced next might be next in line for assassination. And they —
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Israel announced that.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: And Israel knows that, as well, yep.
AMY GOODMAN: They said that the next person would be the target of —
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — of elimination, I think they put it.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yeah, and this is what they’ve done across the region.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the doctrine that Israel is citing, what they’re going to do next.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: So, yesterday, there were reports on Israeli media that Bibi Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said that he wants to start enacting the Dahiya doctrine in Tehran. The Dahiya doctrine is a doctrine that the Israeli military created for striking the southern suburbs of Beirut in the many wars that Israel has waged on Lebanon. And what the Dahiya doctrine is is carpet-bombing residential infrastructure and critical infrastructure of densely populated cities in order to eventually turn the population against their ruling establishments. That’s sort of the idea of it. But what it means is that they want to carpet-bomb really densely populated areas in Tehran.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Iran’s strategy. Netanyahu has been saying that Iran is weak. And now the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is trying to walk back comments that Israel was going to attack Iran no matter what, and the U.S. had to engage in this attack on Iran, because, otherwise, the U.S. would be attacked.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: So, for over a year now in Washington, you would hear over and over again this Israeli talking point that Iran is very weak, that it’s the weakest it’s ever been, and that this is the right time to now strike it. And so, eventually we got to a point, as in this weekend, in which those strikes happened. And, you know, we’re only in day five of the war now, and I think part of what we’re seeing is that the Israelis and the Americans have underestimated Iran’s capabilities to strike back hard against the region.
Iran is up against the biggest military superpower in world history and the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. So, in military terms, yes, it is not as powerful as those countries. However, it has sort of defined and declared and developed its defense doctrine over all of these decades to be asymmetrical warfare against these kinds of forces in the region. And so, what we’re going to see play out, Iran is not going to surrender. Iran is going to continue to fight this and to inflict as much damage, not just on Israel, but, importantly, on the American security architecture in the Gulf region.
AMY GOODMAN: At the White House Tuesday, a reporter asked President Trump about the worst-case scenario in Iran. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I don’t know if there’s a worst case. We have them very much beaten militarily, from the military standpoint. They’re still lobbing some missiles. At some point they won’t even be able to do that, because we’re hitting all of their carriers. We’re hitting all of their missile stock. You know, they built up all these missiles over the last few years. They had a lot of them. They’ve shot a lot of them. And we’re knocking out a lot. I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst. You go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who is no better. So, we’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people. And we’ll see what happens with the people. You know, they have their chance. We’ve said, “Don’t do it yet. If you’re going to go out and protest, don’t do it yet. It’s very dangerous out there. A lot of bombs are being dropped.” But I would say that would be about the worst.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bajoghli, your response?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: The way that Iran is responding to all of these strikes right now is by — it knows that the U.S. has critical low amounts of interceptors in the region, and it’s playing the long game. The Americans do not want a long-term war and a war of attrition. And Iran is absorbing the hits and is going for a long-term war of attrition. And this is something that both the Americans, the Israelis and those in the region have to sort of consider.
AMY GOODMAN: And the CIA arming Kurds?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yeah, the CIA, there’s reporting —
AMY GOODMAN: Where do the Kurds live, right through to Iraq?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Right through to Iraq and also on the border with Turkey. If the CIA does this, and the Kurds come in and sort of foment an internal uprising, we’re going to see this really continue. And then Turkey will probably be giving a lot of intel to the Iranians on this, because this is not in Turkish national interests, either. This is the — this is the danger of this moment. This has already turned into a regional conflagration, and this could turn into a regional war of a scale that will make the past 25 years of forever wars in the Middle East seem like a walk in the park.
AMY GOODMAN: Narges Bajoghli, I want to thank you for being with us, associate professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, also author of Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic.
