Will blow up Kharg, desalination plants unless...: Trump Mon, 30 March 2026
17:20
US President Donald Trump shares a post on Truth Social on the when the war will end.
"The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately "Open for Business,' we will conclude our lovely "stay' in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet "touched.'
"This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime's 47 year "Reign of Terror.' Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP."
Middle East Expert, Waiel Awwad, on Monday, asserted that the ongoing war in West Asia is benefiting rich countries like the US, citing President Donald Trump's growing assets as evidence.
Speaking with ANI, Awwad said that Trump is prolonging the war to appease his billionaire associates and fulfill Israel's agenda. "You see, the problem is that the rich countries become richer in the wars and the poor countries become poorer. So you can see most of the countries all over the world, including the United States, people in the States are demonstrating against their government, against Trump, why he went for this war," he said.
"So basically, Trump is trying to please the billionaire club that he surrounded himself with. You could see his assets, how they have been increased. You can see that he has been doing whatever the Prime Minister of Israel tells him to do. So he's not finding any way out to come out," he said.
Awwad provided a significant counter-report to Trump's claims of military dominance. While Trump spoke of "knocking out" the Iranian Navy, Awwad cited reports from Tehran claiming that US Marines and commandos attempted a ground landing on Kharg Island (Iran's vital oil hub) and were captured.
Awwad warned that with the Easter holiday approaching, there are fears of a "dirty bomb" or a "false flag" operation designed to create havoc in South Asia and warned that the conflict may escalate, citing Trump's rhetoric and troop deployments.
Indian Dies in Kuwait Attack: Impact of West Asia Conflict on Indian Nationals
Source:
PTI March 30, 2026 16:53 IST
An Indian national tragically died in Kuwait after Iranian strikes hit a power and water desalination plant, highlighting the escalating dangers faced by Indian citizens amidst the ongoing conflict in West Asia.
Key Points
An Indian national was killed in Kuwait due to Iranian strikes on a power and water desalination plant.
This incident brings the total number of Indian fatalities in the ongoing West Asia conflict to eight.
The Indian Embassy in Kuwait is coordinating with Kuwaiti authorities to transport the deceased's remains.
India has increased diplomatic efforts to ensure the safety and security of the 10 million Indian nationals living in West Asia.
Kuwaiti officials have described the strikes on the power and water desalination plant as "brutal."
An Indian national has been killed in Kuwait in Iranian strikes on a power and water desalination plant, taking the total number of Indian fatalities from the ongoing conflict in West Asia to eight since it began a month back.
Kuwait's Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy said a service building at the facility was damaged in Sunday's attack, Kuwait's state-run KUNA news agency reported.
It was the fifth Indian fatality on land since the Iran-US conflict erupted on February 28.
The embassy of India in Kuwait, confirming the death, expressed its "deepest condolences" at the "tragic demise" of the Indian national.
Ambassador Paramita Trpathi visited Kuwait's central mortuary on Monday where the mortal remains of the Indian national who lost his life last evening during the attack on a desalination facility, were brought, the embassy said on social media.
"The Embassy is in touch with the family of the deceased Indian national and is coordinating with Kuwaiti authorities for expeditious transportation of mortal remains," it said without sharing details of the deceased.
Kuwaiti officials described the strikes on the power and water desalination plant  as "brutal". However, they did not identify the plant.
Fatima Jawhar Hayat, a spokesperson at the Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy, said the strike resulted in the death of a worker of Indian nationality.
Technical and emergency response teams were immediately deployed to the site to contain the situation and manage the aftermath in line with the ministry's laid down protocol, she added.
Hayat said specialised teams are working to secure the facility while coordinating closely with security authorities and other relevant agencies.
The ministry said that operational efficiency across the electricity and water network in the country remains intact.
Rising Casualties and Regional Impact
Last week, an Indian national was among two killed in the UAE when debris of missiles intercepted by the country's air defence system fell on a street. On March 18, another Indian national was killed in an Iranian attack on Riyadh. Two Indian nationals were killed and 10 others injured in a drone strike in Oman's Sohar city on March 13. Three Indian sailors were killed in attacks on merchant vessels earlier.
In the last couple of weeks, India has ramped up its diplomatic efforts to ensure safety and security of 10 million Indian nationals living in West Asia.
'Big day in Iran': Trump amid claims of 'regime change'
Source:
ANI March 30, 2026 16:05 IST
Donald Trump claims the US military decimated Iran's Navy and Air Force, hinting at regime change while Iran accuses the US and Israel of planning a ground invasion.
Key Points
- Donald Trump claims the US military has destroyed key targets in Iran, including the Navy and Air Force.
- Trump hinted at regime change in Iran, stating a new group of people are acting reasonably.
- Trump claims Iran agreed to most of a 15-point peace plan and sent boatloads of oil as a sign of respect.
- Iran accuses the US and Israel of planning a ground invasion under the guise of diplomacy.
- Iran's Parliament Speaker warns Tehran will not yield to pressure from the US and Israel.
Former United States President Donald Trump said it's a "big day" for Iran, stating that the US military has destroyed many key targets in the country.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the US military had destroyed many sought-after targets in Iran.
He said, "Big day in Iran. Many long-sought-after targets have been taken out and destroyed by our GREAT MILITARY, the finest and most lethal in the World. God bless you all! President DJT."
Earlier in the day, when being gaggled with the press on Air Force One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Trump said that Iran's entire Navy and Air Force have been knocked out, and most of their missiles are gone.
Trump also hinted at regime change in Iran, saying the current leadership is "very reasonable" and a "new group of people".
He said, "I just have lots of alternatives. We have a tremendous number of ships over there. We don't need them all because of, you know, the power. If you had said that in three days we were going to knock out 158 ships, their entire Navy, which we did, we knocked out their entire Air Force, we knocked out most of their missiles. That's why you see missile attacks, but they're down to just sputtering. And we have a group, it's really a new regime. It's the new group of people, people that we've never dealt with before, that are acting very reasonably. It is truly regime change."
When he was asked if Iran's dead leader Khamenei's son was alive and a part of the ongoing conversation.
"We think he may be. Nobody's heard about him and he's... he may be alive, but he's obviously very seriously in trouble. Really, he's seriously wounded," Trump replied.
On being asked about the 15-point peace plan sent by the US to Iran, Trump said, "Yeah, they came back on the 15-point plan. They gave us most of the points. Why wouldn't they?"
Trump mentioned that Iran has agreed to most of the 15-point peace plan sent by the US and has even sent 20 boatloads of oil as a "sign of respect".
"Well, they're agreeing with us on the plan. I mean, we asked for 15 things, and for the most part, we're going to be asking for a couple of other things. And just to prove that they're serious, they gave us all these boats. When I talked about four days ago, a present, I said they gave me a present, but I didn't think I was at liberty to say what it was. What it was was 8 plus 2; it's 10 massive boatloads of oil. And today they gave us another present, they gave us 20 boatloads of oil. That starts being shipped tomorrow. We're having very good meetings, both directly and indirectly, and we're getting a lot of very important points," Trump further said in the gaggle.
Iran's Response to US Claims
Earlier, Iran's Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on Sunday accused the United States and Israel of planning a "ground invasion" under the guise of diplomacy, warning that Tehran will not yield to pressure, according to Iranian state media Press TV.
As quoted by Press TV, he said, "The enemy talks of negotiations but plans a ground invasion. The US seeks in a 15-point list what it couldn't win in war. Our forces are ready, and we will never be humiliated."
Does The US Plan To Continue This War For 'One Or Two Years'?
March 30, 2026 14:59 IST
This weekend, Donald Trump has begun to say the quiet part out loud -- that he wants to take control of Iran's oil, a formulation more in line with his robber-baron style of international relations.
There comes a moment in any war when diplomacy, though invoked by rote, ceases to matter. This feels like one of those moments.
The fourth week of the war had begun with loud optimism about the prospects of mediation.
The news cycle spoke of Pakistan as both venue and facilitator; names of possible interlocutors, at least on the American side, were floated and as quickly rejected, Trump injected optimism into the markets (with little success, though)...
A week later mediation, such as it is, appears to have been given the go-by, though it is still occasionally referenced.
The United States talks of backchannels; Iran dismisses them; and on the ground, the war proceeds with an accelerated brutality that makes both positions feel beside the point.
IMAGE: Iranian missiles streak across the sky towards Israel, captured with long exposure from Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, March 23, 2026.
Photograph: Mussa Qawasma/Reuters
Israel and Iran are no longer probing each other's defences. They are hitting sensitive targets regularly, with the kind of force that suggests as far as they are concerned, the war has settled into a phase of attrition. [
Guardian (
external link)]
Washington, for its part, seems to be preparing for a much longer conflict than was originally envisaged (Vice President J D Vance said over the weekend that the US does not want to be in Iran 'for more than one or two years' -- years, note, not weeks).
Each day brings news of fresh troops being committed to 'limited' ground operations. [
Guardian (
external link)]
IMAGE: Ground crew prepare a US Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress at RAF Fairford airbase in Gloucestershire, Britain, March 23, 2026.
Photograph: Toby Shepheard/Reuters
US Prepares Long Iran War
Key Points
- Iran-Israel conflict has shifted into sustained attrition, with intensified strikes and diminishing prospects for meaningful diplomacy.
- US signals preparation for prolonged engagement, with troop movements and logistics suggesting potential expansion into extended ground operations.
- Global oil and LNG markets face tightening supply as disruptions in Hormuz and Red Sea threaten critical trade routes.
- Multiple conflict zones, including Ukraine strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, are compounding global energy instability.
- Asia, especially India and developing economies, faces immediate energy stress as LNG shortages and rising prices ripple across markets.
More importantly, the stated objectives of the war are shifting in plain sight.
The 'emancipation of Iranian women' has fallen out of sight; 'regime change' merely succeeded in replacing relatively moderate leaders with hardline successors.
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was in any case risible -- the Strait was open before the war began, so all that means is a return to status quo ante. [
Al Jazeera (
external link)]
Houthis Expand Red Sea Conflict
This weekend, Donald Trump has begun to say the quiet part out loud -- that he wants to take control of Iran's oil, a formulation more in line with his robber-baron style of international relations.
Beyond the battlefield, the consequences are no longer abstract. Oil markets are tightening as traffic through the Strait remains sporadic.
Prices are climbing, even as key links in the supply chain are breaking.
As far as the world at large is concerned, the war is no longer a contained conflict -- it is taking on the contours of a spreading systemic shock. [
Axios (
external link)]
As if all this were not enough, another front is opening up.
The Houthis have stepped up on the side of Iran, extending the theatre of conflict into the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb, another narrow artery through which global trade is forced to pass. [
Reuters (
external link);
Guardian (
external link)]
IMAGE: An F/A-18E Super Hornet lands on the
USS Abraham Lincoln during operations linked to strikes on Iran, February 28, 2026.
Photograph: US Navy/Handout via Reuters
Hormuz Disruption Hits Global Oil
Layer onto this a second front in everything but name.
In Ukraine, strikes on Russian oil infrastructure are now biting deep into production capacity, adding further strain to an already unstable energy landscape.
The effect is cumulative: Multiple conflicts across different geographies, all converging on an increasingly fragile system. [
CNN (
external link);
Al Jazeera (
external link)]
It is hard to see recent developments as the outcome of some coherent strategy.
A war prosecuted with no clearly defined outcome now appears to be making its own decisions, with each move narrowing the available options for the next one.
For Iran, the problem is how to hang on and continue inflicting damage till the US and Israel decide they have had enough.
And for the two aggressor nations, the question is no longer how to win, but how to stop and exit with a semblance of face.
IMAGE: A solar resource map of Iran illustrates the country's energy landscape and geographic spread.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Solargis/wikipedia.org/Creative Commons
What the war looks like from Tehran's streets: Al Jazeera's Maziar Motamedi reports from a city that is trying to hold its shape in the midst of severe bombardment.
Armed checkpoints, Basij patrols, loudspeakers summoning residents to mosque gatherings, children as young as 12 being recruited into security patrols.
The Internet has been blacked out for a month. Nearly 2,000 killed, the government says.
And still, people walk to the gym, visit neighbours, try to find a routine inside the fear.
Such reporting lives on its details, and the one that stayed with me is this: A woman in the affluent north of Tehran who has left her home three times in a month, worried that an official in an adjacent alley might make her family collateral. [
Al Jazeera (
external link)]
IMAGE: A woman reacts near a residential building damaged by a strike in Tehran, March 27, 2026.
Photograph: Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters
The morning after that nobody planned for: Eric Alter, dean of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, asks the question Washington appears to have avoided: what happens the day after?
He walks through Iraq and Libya as case studies in what fills the vacuum when military success outruns political planning.
Iran, he argues, is even harder: a civilization with two thousand years of self-governance, a technocratic class that has accommodated successive regimes, and a regional militia architecture (Hezbollah, the Houthis, the PMF in Iraq) that has grown its own roots and will not simply switch off when Tehran changes hands.
Then there is the uranium: current whereabouts uncertain.
'The question of what happens to the enriched uranium during a governance transition is not a technical detail that can be addressed later.' [
The National Interest (
external link)].
The escalation nobody wanted to name: Simon Tisdall in
The Guardian does not pull punches.
Trump is caught between maximalist demands he cannot deliver and a ground war he cannot afford, either politically or militarily.
Iran's surviving leadership, dominated now by hardliners, believes it is winning by surviving.
Trump's 15-point peace plan amounts to a demand for total surrender; Iran's counter-demands include reparations and guaranteed sovereignty over Hormuz. Neither side is close to the other.
Tisdall's summary of the trap is blunt: 'Cave or escalate'. The piece is opinionated in the way
Guardian commentary tends to be, but the structural analysis is sound. [
The Guardian (
external link)]
The man who saw it coming -- and was shown the door: Nate Swanson spent nearly two decades in the US government, most recently on Trump's Iran negotiating team.
Days before the February 28 strikes, he published a piece in Foreign Affairs predicting exactly what Iran would do.
He was pushed out after a tweet from Laura Loomer flagged him as an Obama holdover.
In this Politico interview, he is careful but clear: both sides are "irrationally confident," there is no off-ramp in sight, and the most likely forcing function for de-escalation is not diplomacy but markets, the one indicator Trump actually watches.
His read on what Iran wants is worth noting: a permanent toll on Hormuz, and a guarantee this doesn't happen again in six months.
Neither is something Washington can easily give. [
Politico (
external link)]
IMAGE: A man points at a building damaged by Israeli strikes in Beirut's southern suburbs amid escalating hostilities, March 28, 2026.
Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
Ground War Signals Emerging
The logistics tell the story: Robert Pape, writing in his Substack Escalation Trap, offers the most structurally rigorous analysis of where this is heading.
His argument: The signal of ground war is logistics.
In Vietnam, the shift from air war to ground war was visible weeks before Johnson's July 1965 announcement, in the expansion of port capacity, fuel stockpiles, and airlift cycles. The same indicators are now appearing around the Gulf.
Around 5,000 Marines are in theatre; elements of the 82nd Airborne have deployed; the Pentagon is drawing up contingency plans for sustained ground operations.
'The ground war did not begin when troops landed. It began when the system to sustain them was built.'
Watch the C-17 cycles, not the press conferences. [
Escalation Trap (
external link)]
A note on what Iran just demonstrated: Worth pausing on a data point that has not received the attention it deserves.
Iranian forces appear to have damaged or destroyed multiple USAF KC-135 aerial refueling tankers parked in the open at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia.
KC-135s are what keeps US strike aircraft aloft over Iran. Losing them degrades sortie capacity directly.
The broader point, made sharply by analyst Ron Filipkowski: Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb destroyed a significant portion of Russia's strategic aviation by targeting planes parked in the open.
Did the Pentagon look at that, and conclude it didn't apply to them?
Iran's precision missile capabilities are, by most assessments, orders of magnitude beyond Ukraine's. The question answers itself. [
Twitter/X (
external link)]
Track the weapons, track the war: For those who want to follow the military dimensions day by day, the Iran War Weapons & Attacks Tracker, built and maintained by Anushka Saxena and drawing on CENTCOM, ISW, and official defence ministry statements, is the most comprehensive open-source resource currently available.
It covers the battlefield timeline, weapons systems deployed by every party, maritime attacks, and the broader ecosystem of actors. [
Iran War Tracker (
external link)]
IMAGE: An illustrative model of an LNG tanker highlights the vulnerability of energy shipping routes amid rising tensions.
Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters
Asia Faces LNG Supply Crunch
When the gas runs out:
The New York Times today carries the piece that puts the energy consequences in their starkest form.
The buffer of LNG cargoes that left the Persian Gulf before Hormuz closed is running out. The last of those ships arrive this week.
Asia, which buys roughly 90 percent of Middle Eastern LNG, is about to feel the physical impact of non-delivery.
India is ordering coal plants to run at full capacity for three months. Pakistan has closed schools to conserve fuel.
In Vietnam, factories are slowing. Taiwan, which has retired much of its coal capacity and phased out nuclear, has few options.
The richer economies such as Japan, South Korea and China, can bid on spot markets, but as one analyst notes, that comes at the direct expense of poorer countries who cannot.
The longer-term damage may be structural: 'The entire concept of LNG being a reliable fuel is undermined.'
For India, caught between two stressed chokepoints simultaneously -- Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb -- this is a catastrophe knocking on the door. [
New York Times (
external link)]
In passing...
The war is a month old, and it has already outgrown every framework used to explain it: Limited strike, regime change, negotiated exit.
What remains is a conflict that is generating its own momentum and sending its costs outward in every direction.
The bill, as usual, will be paid by people who had no vote in any of it.
