Tehran and Arak under chemical siege
Iranian media reported on 8 April that US-Israeli strikes hit the Iran Aluminium Company in Arak, the country’s largest aluminium producer, along with the Amirkabir petrochemical complex in Mahshahr. A strike on a plant of that scale is the ultimate act of terrorism. Aluminium fires generate dense aluminium oxide smoke and release a cocktail of corrosive and toxic gases.
Health guidance warns that inhaling aluminium fumes can trigger metal fume fever, chest tightness and coughing, while fire runoff can contaminate the surrounding environment. Workers know all too well what a furnace does when it explodes and now families living downwind know it too.
That strike belongs to the same barbaric campaign that set Tehran’s fuel depots alight in March. Since then, sunrise in the capital has arrived with dread. Mothers bend over children whose wracking coughs have ricocheted off soot-stained walls since the night the sky burned. Older people die choking on congestion. Black grit gathers on the sill, on the leaves in the courtyard, on the chair left out in the rain. Domestic animals lie dead in the streets.
Weeks have passed, yet the aftermath has seeped into everyday life, a poltergeist that lives in the walls, in the ceilings and in the laboured breathing of a newborn child.
On the night of 7 March, Israeli jets hit oil reservoirs at Shahran, Shahr-e-Rey and Kuhak, reservoirs holding roughly 215 million litres of fuel. Fire rose over a city of 13 million people. Thick black smoke hung over Tehran for hours as the heat at the source proved too fierce for firefighters to penetrate. The acrid stench of burning moved through neighbourhoods. Chemical absorption into condensation then unleashed the toxic load in rain beating down over homes, streets, gardens and drains.
Iranian authorities placed medical centres on high alert and urged people, especially children, older people and those with respiratory or cardiovascular illness, to remain indoors. The World Health Organization backed that warning. This was no abstract strike on infrastructure. The city inhaled a planned assault on daily life.
It is the residue chemistry that tells the story better than any news report can. Akshay Deoras said the strikes released soot, smoke, oil particles, sulphur compounds and likely heavy metals from damaged structures. Experts compared the event to a very severe industrial accident involving an exploding refinery. Anna Hansell warned of immediate lung injury and longer-term disease, including cancer. Gabriel da Silva identified hydrocarbons, particulates and heavy metals in the plume. The UN Environment Programme (Unep) then warned that people in Iran, including young children, were directly inhaling hazardous smoke from burning oil and that pollution from uncontrolled fires may enter soil and water, leach into groundwater and pass into crops. While these findings describe contamination, they also establish a chain of injury planned well before the first bomb fell.
Israel chose targets at the heart of domestic survival because its planners know that fuel in a capital powers ambulances, clinics, refrigeration, generators, pumping systems, buses, food distribution and the hidden routines through which a city keeps people alive. Aluminium and petrochemical plants sit inside another layer of social life. They employ workers, anchor towns, shape the air and store hazards that can spread across whole districts once fire takes hold. A state that chooses such targets has long chosen impunity as a method. It deploys mass bodily harm as a strategy. It initiates stealth terror that enters the house by way of smoke, residue, contaminated rain and poisoned trust in air and water. This is terrorism in one of its most modern forms.
The damage does not stop at city life. In Tehran, the fallout reached the Rey plain, where soil and water feed the capital. Petroleum compounds and heavy metals entered the ground and poisoned crops, fodder, livestock and the aquifers below. The same poisoned rain and soot laid waste to the city’s old quarters, its museums, gardens, tilework, stucco, marble and stone. More than four hundred cultural-historical monuments, more than 150 museums and the wider historical fabric of Tehran came under chemical assault. A child’s feverish cries, a mother’s desperate tears, an elder’s failing heart and a city’s ruined archive now share the same source. The strike targeted the collective body and memory in a single movement.
International humanitarian law has finally named this attack for what it is. Volker Türk has stated that the foreseeable impacts on civilians and the environment from the oil fires in Iran raise serious questions about proportionality and precaution.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival, including food supplies, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and irrigation works. Attacks on oil facilities, electricity production sites and other civilian-serving infrastructure may amount to war crimes when those rules are breached. But these laws apparently do not matter to Israel and the US. They rip through international law with demonic indifference and strike sovereign countries in their vital organs with maximum force and psychopathic indifference. No amount of international pressure seems able to stop their depraved approach to war.
This approach has been long in the making. The International Court of Justice had already imposed provisional measures on Israel in South Africa’s genocide case in January 2024. The International Criminal Court had already issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024. Reuters reported that ICC judges found reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a weapon of war. Washington then moved against the court itself and sanctioned ICC judges over the court’s work on Israel, while earlier vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that every other member supported. Law spoke. Power trumped law and Israel heard, loud and clear, that imperial protection gave it the go-ahead to continue killing babies and children in Gaza.
Much of the Western press still sanitises these acts through the stale language of escalation and exchange. That language cleans the shameful stain from the scene. It removes the worker who knows what a burning aluminium plant means for the people living nearby. It removes psychopathic strategy from the target list and replaces it with procedure. Iran’s own accounting of the Tehran attack cuts through that evasion. The strikes poisoned air, damaged health, threatened food security and scarred the city’s cultural inheritance. The recent strike on the aluminium plant extends the same brutal logic. The US-Israeli regime has targeted industry, fuel and the ordinary conditions of life as a field of punishment.
Tehran still breathes what Israel unleashed into its sky. Arak now faces the danger of metal-oxide smoke and industrial fire. The victims do not need another lesson in the rules of war. They already know what barbarity looks like. It looks like an infant shuddering its last laboured breath before dawn while powerful men discuss pauses, deadlines and leverage. The United States and Israel have methodically placed terror into the intimate world of homes, bodies, food, labour and memory. History will record the legal arguments, and they will show that Israel has surpassed the cruel megalomania of Hitler’s regime. This is the unbridled gassing of 13 million people in one location. The tally of impact from the aluminium plant in Arak is yet to be factored. Both are gross violations of international law. The people of Iran are already living the verdict.
Gillian Schutte is editor-in-chief of The Counterhegemon. She has an academic background in African politics, postmodern literature and semiotics. She is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.