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Bulletins and International News Discussion from April 1st to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - Keeping It Rial In Hormuz (hexbear.net)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net
1813 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of a destroyed American AWACS plane in Saudi Arabia, of which there is a very limited supply and each of which is enormously expensive both monetarily and in terms of components. Iran hit this with a precision drone strike that likely cost ~$20,000.

I don't have much to add from the last megathread description. This isn't to say that nothing has happened or has changed since then - decades are still happening in weeks - but the general flow of the war is remaining the same. Trump sometimes threatens to open the Strait with troops and flatten Iran to rubble, and other times threatens that he's gonna back off and let other countries handle it if they really want little trifles like "fuel" and "energy" so much. Iran continues to strike across the Middle East. The West continues to bomb civilian infrastructure due to their relative inability to affect the missile cities. In all: things are generally getting worse for America and the Zionists.

April is the month where the last ships that left Hormuz before it was closed will arrive around the world, so the last month of economic turmoil has been a mere prelude to what's going to occur in the near-future. The silver lining is that Iran appears to be formalizing the new state of affairs in Hormuz, creating a rial-based toll to allow passage between a pair of Iranian-controlled islands where they can be monitored, meaning that, as long as the US doesn't do something exceptionally stupid, the global energy crisis may "only" last a couple years instead of simply being the new reality from now on. Some countries have already agreed to this arrangement, and others will inevitably follow despite their consternation as their economies increasingly suffer.

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Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
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https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
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https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
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https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

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[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 37 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Not really news per se, so apologies for that, but I wanted to share ArmchairWarlord's theory of what has happened over the last few days with the pilot thing - I think it's the most plausible explanation as most others have gaping inexplicable holes or rely on strange coincidences, but perhaps people here have other explanations. Simplicius and others are coming to very similar conclusions.

In summary:

largeish wall of text

  1. As has been publicly known, Trump wants to try and take Iran's enriched uranium, which is widely regarded by those with any sense at all as infeasible due the time and manpower it would require under heavy fire from Iran. Hegseth firing the generals may or may not be related to this (perhaps they objected to the operation), but the timing is, at a minimum, suggestive.
  2. On the evening of April 2nd, the mission begins. US aircraft enter Iranian airspace and breach as far as Istafan, aiming to knock out local air defense so as to open a window for an extraction team in the coming hours or days. Exactly how much success they achieved is unknown, but clearly it wasn't successful enough because an F-15 gets hit and crashes.
  3. The F-15 crash is reported by officials to be near a border province, for unknown reasons. Following information back to its source is very difficult in this conflict. [Personally, I can think of at least three reasons: Pessimistically, it could have been Iran trying to depict their air defense as more effective than it actually is. Optimistically, it could have been to ensure civilians weren't hunting for pilots in the vicinity of the actual crash and getting in the way of IRGC troops. Or it could have even been because communicating things in Iran in a timely manner is difficult given current constraints on sending radio/electronic messages with so much surveillance ongoing, so information was muddled or not specific by the time it was released to the public.]
  4. The US certainly knew of the crash right after it occurred, and immediately started an emergency rescue mission that entered Iran in the following hours, flying very low, at night, and with few aircraft (perhaps just helicopters), to the site of the crash in Istafan. The pilot was located, put on the helicopter, and begun to extract. The WSO could not be found and was left behind, because day was approaching or had already arrived and so stealthily extracting would be much harder. By the time the pilot was on the way out, aircraft had moved into position to facilitate the escape - this is where we saw that footage of the refueling aircraft and the two helicopters (which were damaged), as well as the A-10 (which was hit and crashed into the sea).
  5. At this point, anybody with any sense would say "Okay, mission is off - Iran clearly has functioning air defense and a strong military presence in Istafan." Trump does not have any sense. The mission goes ahead. The WSO is still missing at this point. Iran is likely looking for them with drones but is unable to find them as they are hiding somewhere and it's a wide area to search.
  6. On the night of April 4th, the mission begins. The WSO, who is still near Istafan of course, makes contact with the US military and is extracted in a similar way to the pilot - under cover of night, with a helicopter or two flying low. At more-or-less the same time, five C-130s carrying a total of 100 Special Forces fly into Iran towards Istafan, making their way to an abandoned airfield not too far from a nuclear facility which they plan to raid and... do... something? It seems unlikely to any reasonable military analyst that they would succeed in carrying out all this enriched uranium without major opposition and in a good timeframe, so perhaps the objective was more about causing some flashy explosions and claiming that the US now had the uranium or had destroyed it.
  7. These C-130s are detected at some point and Iran begins firing on them (the images of the wreckage have clear bullet holes/marks on the metal). This could have occurred mid-flight, or perhaps Iran noticed them landing and immediately sent out forces to counter the Special Forces who then fired upon the planes.
  8. Clearly detected and the mission ruined, the Special Forces are commanded to leave before they can do much of anything. They ditch the two most damaged C-130s, scuttle them with explosives, and all fly off in the remaining three. The two C-130s that were blown up were not stuck in mud or whatever - they're designed for landing in tough conditions and the ground in the area is very dry. Again, the WSO was already on their way out of Iran on a separate aircraft while this whole fiasco was going down.
  9. Trump sends out his post saying that the mission to extract the WSO was a huge success, as if that was the only objective and as if that required 100 Special Forces and five C-130s to achieve. Rumors of massive firefights and dozens/hundreds Iranian casualties were wild exaggerations. It's likely that some were killed and injured during the Special Forces mission, and perhaps the original mission killed some Iranian soldiers while they were contesting the airspace. But we aren't talking about a thousand IRGC troops getting mowed down by supersoldiers performing a lethal kinetic operation to extract a high-value operative against Islamic-style enemy combatants under classified mission code two-niner Foxtrot Alpha Bravo (that sentence should be read in Felix's operator voice).

Thoughts?

I've seen others generally agree with the idea but contest aspects of this narrative. For example, it's possible that indeed only two Special Forces aircraft were flown in for the mission and that three other aircraft were sent in later. It's possible that the landing site chosen by Special Forces was actually forced upon them due to air defense kicking in as they approached (which would perhaps explain why they were still a good number of kilometers from the nuclear facility, though apparently they did bring helicopters). It's possible that the two aircraft landed very hard to the point they were disabled, though most/everybody on the planes survived.

Regardless of exactly what happened, though, this conflict is being very badly managed by the US and I wish many more "wildly successful missions" like this, or however Vance put it, for the US military. Go for Kharg with something like this next, please.

[–] Parzivus@hexbear.net 10 points 1 hour ago

I don't see a situation where it makes sense to send multiple C-130s on a rescue operation for one or two pilots. It's comically unstealthy and a hundred soldiers are not gonna do meaningfully more than 10-20 for a rescue in the middle of nowhere. Not sure if this was an attempt at grabbing nuclear material though, seems pretty under-equipped for an operation like that.

The timing of Hegseth firing a general the day the F-15E got shot down is pretty funny. If half the shit coming out about the Trump admin is true, these generals are very likely saying "we cannot extract uranium from a warzone" and getting fired for it.

[–] Lovely_sombrero@hexbear.net 33 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

This emerged as the leading theory once proper geolocation was done. I think it makes sense, but lets wait for smarter people to comment. The operation was 100x larger than needed to recover one person.

Looks like the planes took some hits before or after landing on the preexisting rural airfield, followed by a hasty retreat. The story about setting up a Forward arming and refueling point in order to recover the pilot (who crashed around ~100 miles away) was put out as cover for the failed mission.

P.s.: It might be helpful to use spoiler for large walls of text.