faisal al-asaad

Solidarity with Fadiah who is facing repression by the Singapore Government for her opposition to genocide and imperialist violence.

US–Israel have just attacked Esfahan and Khuzestan Mobarakeh Steel plants; the largest steel production plants in the entire West Asia and North Africa region. Our infrastructure, industries, and systems are not just metal and cement. They are the means by which we produce, survive, and sustain life under sanctions, built over decades by a nation under constant pressure, constraint, and economic strangulation. To destroy them is not only to wound the present; it is to reach forward and diminish the future. What is being dismantled is not only what exists, but what could exist: capacity, stability, and the possibility of growth. I have no doubt in our nation’s ability to rebuild, to recover, and to emerge stronger than before. History has already proven that resilience. But our resilience does not absolve the crime. The scale of destruction does not shrink simply because we will endure it. What has been done here is not diminished by our capacity to rise again—it is defined by the deliberate attempt to break what sustains life, industry, and possibility. And that must be named for what it is: crimes against humanity.

And some relevant background on Bahrain: jadaliyya.com/Details/31951

Re. Kuwait/Iraq, a relevant extract from my PhD about Britain's desire in the 1930s to keep Kuwait 'apart from Iraq' and how without Britain stopping it, assimilation between the two would be a "natural development".

Clip from my interview with @jaybeware, where I note the callousness of the US strategy against Iran, killing Iranians, Arabs & Americans for a war no one wants. The only lawful path is full recognition of Iranian & Arab sovereignty. youtube.com/live/-Of6uQJIq…

New article out today in @MidEastCritique: 'Moving Beyond Imperialist Frameworks: The False Equivalence Between Palestine and Xinjiang' — a historical materialist demolition of the 'Palestinization' thesis and its function in US imperial strategy. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/194361… 👇🏽

In this article, Fares Abi Sa'b gives a brief history of the US-Israeli project of "New Middle East." Read the full article here: alrifaq.substack.com/p/america-isra…

Not a translation this week, but incisive analysis by the brilliant @comradefahd @mahdismaki

This week, we are sharing an essay written by a member of our collective, @comradefahd, and our comrade @mahdismaki, titled 'The War on Iran, Sovereignty, and Development in the Middle East' alrifaq.substack.com/p/the-war-agai…

This is the heaviest report we have made since the US-Zionist aggression began. A heinous war crime. I did not have the heart to talk to children. But their parents taught me otherwise: “If they kill our children, they must bear witness to their truth.” Follow @sov_media, @VocalPolitics1 & @VoxUmmah for reports.

Follow @Helyeh_Doutaghi and watch her poignant and vital reporting from Iran like this:

The systemic and historical role of sanctions is vast and debilitating to ALL Global South countries. The International Development Complex plays a vital role in sustaining the US-led sanctions regime. My article at @MidEastCritique. #openaccess bit.ly/4lxGhGo

It wasn’t Russian air defenses It wasn’t Chinese air defenses It wasn’t American air defenses It was a fully domestically built Iranian air defense system that tracked & hit the “stealth” F-35. Built by Iranian engineers during MAXIMUM sanctions. Never been more proud to be Iranian.

Iranians see this war as rooted in anti-colonial internationalism. A story written in blood and in hope, but never in surrender/Zahra Makki

Iran is ready for the new year, and for the new world 🌸🪻☘️

ترميهم بحجارة من سجّيل

The killing of Ali Larijani, like that of Ali Khamenei before him, is best understood as an instance of strategic martyrdom, a dynamic that exposes the fundamental irrationality of Israel’s and the US’ continued reliance on decapitation strategies, especially given their repeated historical failure. The decapitation-attrition-invasion playbook that the US and Israel keep drawing from reveals systems locked into a familiar repertoire of counterproductive violence that have consistently failed to adapt to reality. This failure is so glaring that even Trump acknowledged it, when he recently admitted that the US attacked Iran "out of habit." The underlying premise is that by removing senior leaders, the system they sustain will weaken and/or fragment. Yet this assumption reflects a narrow instrumentalist rationality in which leadership survival is treated as the paramount strategic objective and the threat of death is presumed to function as an effective form of coercion. But Iran operates from a value-strategic rationality whereby martyrdom itself can perform important political work and generate strategic effects that not merely resist but reverse the intended consequences of assassination. That Larijani attended the mass rally and made statements openly embracing the possibility of martyrdom before his death only underscores how consciously this logic is adopted by those who bear its consequences, a logic articulated most clearly by Khamenei himself, who declared that “either we are martyred on this path, whose honour is eternal, or we achieve victory; both are victories for us.” By transforming assassinated figures into sacred symbols of justice and resistance, in the tradition of Imam Hussein at Karbala, martyrdom converts the intended effects of decapitation into a strategy that successfully mobilises collective resolve, legitimises the political order, and regenerates both the system's continuity and its societal resilience. In short, strategic martyrdom ultimately contributes to deterrence by regeneration, whereby repeated attempts at decapitation are subject to a law of diminishing returns as adversaries discover that killing leaders neither fractures the system nor compels submission but instead contributes to its consolidation.

Rumors of Larijani’s assassination, if true, would be terrible news—far more for the US and Israel than for Iran. The assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, as the world witnessed, backfired immensely for Washington and Tel Aviv, ending Iran’s strategic patience and shifting it from defensive to offensive. If a pragmatist like Larijani is also targeted, he will be replaced by someone more resolute and steadfast in defending Iran. That would only strengthen Iran’s resolve and set the stage for a far more determined confrontation. It is striking how the US and Israel insist on repeating their own mistakes.

Patrick Higgins writes on the criminally under-known life and work of Dr. Basil Kubaisi– the Iraqi historian, Arab nationalist, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary assassinated by Israel in April 1973. liberatedtexts.com/reviews/choosi…