Here’s some of what you may have missed:
Khamenei’s son selected as new supreme leader
As initial reports suggested, Mojtaba Khamenei was indeed chosen by senior clerics to be the country’s new supreme leader. As the New York Times’s Farnaz Fassihi points out, this is not just a sign of continuity with the elder Khamenei’s regime, but Mojtaba was also the top choice of the Revolutionary Guard — which may mean an even more hardline bent for the regime.
A seventh U.S. servicemember has died
The soldier succumbed to injuries they received during an Iranian attack on U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on March 1.
Israel set a lot of Iran’s oil ablaze, reportedly irking U.S./Trump
The most dramatic (and apocalyptic) images over the weekend were of massive infernos and black skies in Iran after Israel struck oil infrastructure across the country.
Axios reports that this did not go over very well with Trumpworld:
Israeli and U.S. officials said the IDF notified the U.S. military ahead of the strikes. But a U.S. official said that the U.S. military was surprised by how wide-ranging they were.”We don’t think it was a good idea,” a senior U.S. official said.An Israeli official said the U.S. message to Israel was “WTF”.The White House and the IDF didn’t comment.
While the facilities that were struck are not oil production facilities, U.S. officials are concerned the footage of burning depots could spook oil markets and push energy prices even higher. “The president doesn’t like the attack. He wants to save the oil. He doesn’t want to burn it. And it reminds people of higher gas prices,” a Trump adviser told Axios.
The oil market is indeed spooked
The price of a barrel of oil is now firmly over $100 and reached as high as $120 in overnight trading. It’s currently trading at around $110. Trump is still trying to downplay how a big a deal this is, writing in a late Sunday night Truth Social post that:
Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!
Trump might deploy boots on the ground
There continue to be indications that President Trump is open to the idea of sending troops to Iran. Axios has joined NBC News and Semafor in reporting hat Trump has been presented with options for eventually sending special forces to Iran, possibly as part of a joint operation with Israel, in order to secure or dilute Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. As previously reported, Trump may not consider this “boots on the ground” (but it is).
Trump denied the U.S. bombed girls school, despite growing evidence to the contrary
Footage emerged over the weekend showing a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile striking a target in Minab on the first day of the war, further confirming that the U.S. conducted airstrikes on the city around the same time that a girls’ primary school was bombed, killing 165 children. In addition, CBS News reports that a “preliminary U.S. assessment suggests that the United States is “likely” responsible for the deadly attack but did not intentionally target the school and may have hit it in error, possibly due to the use of dated intelligence which wrongly identified the area as still part of an Iranian military installation.” Nonetheless, Trump over the weekend claimed without providing evidence that, in his opinion, Iran’s regime was responsible:
