Why are the US and Israel attacking Iran? Trump’s airstrikes explained
Donald Trump announced the US had launched a ‘massive and ongoing operation’ in Iran.
The move followed several ‘pre-emptive’ strikes on Tehran by Israeli forces early on Saturday morning.
Several columns of smoke were pictured rising from buildings in the Iranian capital this morning, home to 9.7million people.
The US president vowed to prevent the regime, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, from ‘threatening America and their core national security interests by’razing their missile industry to the ground’.
In an eight-minute speech uploaded to his Truth Social platform, he urged Iranian people to ‘take over your government’.
Here’s all you need to know about what is happening and why.
Why have the US and Israel launched strikes on Tehran now?
The latest intervention comes as talks between the US and Iran ended in Geneva on Thursday without a breakthrough despite ‘significant progress’.
On Friday night, Trump insisted he had yet to make a ‘final decision’ on whether to launch a military intervention but was ‘not happy’ with Tehran following the latest impasse.
However, in a sign of what was to come, the US was urging its citizens in Iran to leave ‘immediately’ while non-emergency embassy staff in Israel were told they could leave the country while commercial flights were still available.
By Saturday morning, columns of smoke were reported in Tehran as a result of ‘pre-emptive’ Israeli strikes.
Among Trump’s key demands to Iran was an end to uranium enrichment, which Tehran had stopped since the US bombed three sites last June.
But the UN’s nuclear watchdog said there was growing concern after it had been prevented from accessing the uranium sites.
Trump had assured the international community that Iranian nuclear capabilities had been ‘totally obliterated’ after the US dropped ‘bunker buster’ bombs on Iranian sites last summer.
However the president made the same pledge again in his speech today.
He said: ‘The United States military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally, again obliterated.
‘We are going to annihilate their navy. We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilise the region or the world, and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs – or roadside bombs, as they are sometimes called – to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people including many American. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.’
Trump told Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to stand down or ‘face certain death’.
Emboldened Trump believes Iran is a threat to West
Dr Dafydd Townley, senior teaching fellow in International Security at the University of Portsmouth, said Trump sees Iran as a major destabilising factor in the Middle East, which could explain his desire to get involved.
He said that while the president favoured a more Western-friendly government in Iran, but had also been torn between direct military action and taking a diplomatic route including supporting protesters and opposition figures.
However Trump is emboldened following events in Venezuela last month, in which US forces removed Nicolas Maduro in a slick overnight operation in Caracas.
(Picture: AP)
Dr Townley added: ‘It is quite interesting that Trump, who has been very reluctant to get involved in international causes before, has suddenly become very vocal over the last two months.’
Trump also faces some resistance within the MAGA movement, sections of which have urged him to prioritise domestic issues over foreign interference.
Vice president JD Vance is thought to be among figures in Trump’s cabinet most opposed to military intervention in the Middle East.
What does this mean for Ali Khamenei’s regime?
While Trump has urged Iranians to overturn the current regime, it seems unlikely any attacks will have that impact just yet.
Mobile phone services were reported down across Iran on Saturday morning, with internet outages having become a routine occurrence since the wave of protests which erupted in December.
According to reports, Khamenei was not in Tehran during the strikes and had been moved to a ‘secure location’.
The Ayatollah has not been seen in public in Iran for several days.
Thousands were thought to have been killed after the government launched a brutal crackdown on dissent following weeks of unrest.
Experts also believe that key resistance figures are keen to distance themselves from the US due to widespread anti-West sentiment.
Many Iranians have expressed fears that what happened in 1953 could happen again – a Western-backed coup, like the one orchestrated in the 50s by the US and UK, could leave many Iranians without a say in their future.
There’s no appetite in the international community for the chaos seen in the aftermath of US intervention in Libya and Iraq.
Dr Andreas Krieg, associate professor in the Department of Defence Studies at King’s College London, argued that even if strikes did topple the Ayatollah’s iron grip on power, the world would not be prepared for the power vacuum it would create.
He said: ‘‘The biggest danger is not only chaos in Tehran, but fragmentation in the provinces, score-settling among armed actors, and a scramble over strategic assets and prison.’
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