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Iraq’s top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani warned against targeting Iran’s leadership and said that the Iran-Israel war could plunge the whole region into chaos
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Iraq’s
top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani warned against targeting Iran’s
leadership and said that the Iran-Israel war could plunge the whole region into
chaos, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Sistani
said in a statement on Thursday that any targeting of Iran’s “supreme religious
and political leadership” would have “dire consequences on the region”.
He warned
that it could spark “widespread chaos that would exacerbate the suffering of
its [the region’s] people and severely harm everyone’s interests”.
Sistani
urged the international community to “make every effort to end this unjust war
and find a peaceful solution” to Iran’s nuclear programme.
Sistani,
an Iranian, is the highest religious authority for millions of Shia Muslims in
Iraq and around the world, with the power to mobilise a huge portion of that
base in Iraq.
With
warnings of all-out regional war intensifying following Israel’s surprise
assault on Iran last week, fears are growing over an intervention by
Iran-backed Iraqi factions, mostly against American interests in the region.
Here’s the latest.
Updated
June 19,
2025, 4:00 a.m. ET44 minutes ago
Adam
Rasgon Ephrat
Livni and David E. Sanger
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/19/world/iran-israel-trump-news
Here’s
the latest.
Israel’s
defense minister warned on Thursday that the Israeli military would intensify
its strikes on “strategic targets” in Iran, after a barrage of Iranian missiles
hit several locations including the largest hospital in southern Israel.
The
threat from Defense Minister Israel Katz came after the Israeli military
launched a wave of strikes against targets in Iran, including a nuclear
complex. Stepping up Israel’s attacks, Mr. Katz said, would “remove the threats
to the state of Israel and to destabilize the ayatollahs’ regime” in Iran.
The
Israeli hospital, the Soroka Medical Center in the city of Beersheba, said it
had sustained widespread damage and asked people to stay away. The hospital
said the building that was hit had been largely evacuated in recent days, and
that it was treating several patients with mild injuries. It is the first
Israeli hospital to be hit directly since the war with Iran began last Friday,
the Israeli military said.
The
latest exchange of strikes came as uncertainty hung over the Middle East about
whether or not President Trump would send American forces to join Israel’s
sweeping campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and military.
“I have
ideas as to what to do,” Mr. Trump said during an Oval Office event. He added,
“I like to make a final decision one second before it’s due, you know, because
things change.”
The
supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had earlier warned that the
United States would suffer “irreparable” harm if it joined the Israeli
campaign.
Israel
has pressed Mr. Trump to use powerful American weapons to attack Iran’s
underground nuclear sites, and the prospect of American involvement in the war
has added to fears that it could spiral into a wider conflagration in the
Middle East.
There
were conflicting signals from Iran as well on Wednesday, with a senior diplomat
telling The New York Times that Iran was open to negotiations with the United
States, hours after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
rejected Mr. Trump’s call for an “unconditional surrender.”
Mr. Trump
has also suggested it was not too late for diplomacy to head off a wider war,
and he has held out the possibility that his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, or
even Vice President JD Vance could meet with Iranian officials to seek a
negotiated deal. A senior official in Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday
that the country’s foreign minister would accept such an offer to talk.
Here’s
what else to know:
Diplomatic
effort: A senior Iranian foreign ministry official said that Iran would accept
Mr. Trump’s offer to meet soon. The official said the country’s foreign
minister, Abbas Araghchi, would accept a meeting with senior American
representatives to discuss a cease-fire with Israel, though Mr. Trump has
indicated he wants talks to focus on Iran’s nuclear program. Read more ›
Internet
blackout: Iran has been under a near-total internet blackout for more than 12
hours, NetBlocks, a connectivity monitor, reported late Wednesday. There have
been severe internet disruptions in Iran since the war began. Press TV, an
Iranian state news outlet, said the government was taking steps to prevent
Israel from using Iranian networks for spying and military operations.
Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’
News
Analysis
Trump,
Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’
President
Trump is pondering swift military action in Iran. There were similar
expectations that the war in Iraq would be quick and triumphant.
Elisabeth
Bumiller
By Elisabeth
Bumiller
Reporting
from Washington
June 18,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/us/politics/trump-iran-iraq.html
A little
more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a president stood on the
precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would
be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished.”
By the time
the United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and
100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of
miscalculation and unintended consequences.
The specter
of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump,
who campaigned against America’s “forever wars,” is pondering a swift
deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some
200,000 American troops massed in the Middle East, or antiwar demonstrations
around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the
same.
“So much of
this is the same story told again,” said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who
is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
“Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about
Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”
There are
many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of
Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as
liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified
the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of
Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq.
And America
held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final
decision.
Today Trump
allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker
buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off
event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over
intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national
intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear
weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she
said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon.
Some of the
same neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq are now pushing for war
with Iran. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” said William
Kristol, a Never Trumper and editor at large of The Bulwark who was a prominent
advocate of war with Iraq. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear
weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.”
And once
again the nation is waiting for a president to decide. “I may do it, I may not
do it, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday when asked
about his thinking on striking Iranian nuclear facilities.
There are
the familiar questions about an endgame. Mr. Bush landed on the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln, and under a “Mission Accomplished” banner he
triumphantly declared combat operations in Iraq were at an end. But the country
was in chaos as he spoke.
Today many
American officials fear there will be a wider war if the United States bombs
Fordo, including retaliatory attacks on U.S. bases in the region by pro-Iran
militias and strikes on ships in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Adm. William
F. Fallon, who in 2007 and 2008 oversaw all American military operations in the
Middle East as head of U.S. Central Command, said on Wednesday that he had
concerns about Iran spiraling out of control after an American strike.
“What’s the
plan?” he said. “What’s the strategy? What’s the desired end state? Iran not
having a nuclear weapon is something few people would disagree with. But what
is the relationship we would have with Iran in the bigger Middle East? We’re
just knee-jerking.’’
One person
who sees little similarity between the run up to Iraq and now is David H.
Petraeus, the general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and
led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion in Baghdad. “This is
clearly the potential run up to military action, but it’s not the invasion of a
country,” he said on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump,
he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme
leader of Iran, and order him to agree to the complete dismantlement of his
nuclear program or face “the complete destruction of your country and your
regime and your people.” If the supreme leader rejects the ultimatum, Mr.
Petraeus said, “that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them
to smithereens.”
Mr. Nasr
said a hopeful scenario after a strike would be the total destruction of Fordo
and an Iran that comes to the table and agrees to a negotiated end to its
nuclear program. But if the Iranians respond militarily, as they say they will,
Mr. Nasr said that Mr. Trump would be compelled to counterattack, particularly
if Americans are killed on U.S. bases in the region.
“And then
you don’t know where it’s going to stop, and Trump is really risking a repeat
of the Iraq war,” he said. Iran is larger than Iraq, he noted, with a
population of roughly 90 million and a far more capable, nationalistic military
than the Iraqi army.
John Bolton,
a neoconservative who served as one of Mr. Trump’s first term national security
advisers, was a big advocate for the war in Iraq, and is now a supporter of a
U.S. attack on Iran.
“Bomb Fordo
and be done with it,” he said on Wednesday. “I think this is long overdue.’’
Mr. Bolton
wrote a book about his time working for Mr. Trump that enraged the president,
and Mr. Trump retaliated by revoking Mr. Bolton’s Secret Service protection,
despite death threats that Mr. Bolton faces from Iran.
The two no
longer speak, so Mr. Bolton said he had no idea what Mr. Trump would decide. He
was not sure if Mr. Trump knew himself. But in his experience, Mr. Bolton said,
Mr. Trump was “frantic and agitated” in national security crises.
“He talks to
a lot of people and he’s looking for somebody who will say the magic
words,” Mr. Bolton said. “He’ll hear
something and he’ll decide, ‘That’s right, that’s what I believe.’ Which lasts
until he has the next conversation.”
Elisabeth
Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The Times. She was most recently Washington
bureau chief. Previously she covered the Pentagon, the White House, the 2008
McCain campaign and City Hall for The Times.
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