BREAKING — UPDATED The War That Would Not Stay Over

Nine months after a ceasefire ended the 12-Day War, the United States and Israel have launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. The region — and Britain — will never look quite the same again.

By TBMag International Desk

We had written this story once before. In June 2025, we covered the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel — a brief, terrifying eruption that killed more than 140 people, rattled the global financial system, and ended with a ceasefire brokered in Geneva. We wrote about delay, not detente. We wrote that no one wanted a full-scale war, but that no one was quite stepping back, either. We held the article. The ceasefire held. And then, on the night of Saturday 28 February 2026, it didn’t.

What began at 2:30am Eastern Time as a joint US-Israeli military operation — codenamed Operation Epic Fury — has, within 72 hours, killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, triggered retaliatory strikes across the Gulf from Doha to Dubai to Dhekelia, paralysed civilian air travel across the Middle East, put 200,000 British nationals in the region at risk, and drawn Britain — however reluctantly — into the arc of conflict. This is no longer a regional story. It is a British one.

1. How We Got Here

The prelude to Operation Epic Fury was longer than the operation itself. Since the turn of the year, Iran had been convulsed by what analysts called the largest nationwide protests since the 1979 revolution — driven by economic collapse, the fall of the rial, and a government that responded to dissent with violence. On 8 and 10 January 2026, security forces massacred protesters in scenes that drew global condemnation. Khamenei, watching his legitimacy erode, reportedly took shelter in a Tehran bunker.

In Washington, Donald Trump — who had already sent an ‘armada’ of naval assets towards the Gulf in January — issued a 10-day deadline for a nuclear deal on 20 February. When indirect talks in Geneva on 26 February yielded no agreement, the deadline expired. Forty-eight hours later, the strikes began. Trump declared the objectives plainly: destroy Iran’s missile capability, prevent nuclear weapons, and — in an 8-minute video statement delivered in the middle of the night — regime change. ‘The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost,’ he said. ‘That often happens in war.’

“We had written this story before. We held the article. The ceasefire held. And then, it didn’t.”

1. The Strikes — and the Toll

Operation Epic Fury struck hard and fast: Iranian leadership compounds, nuclear-related facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure, naval assets, and command structures were all targeted. The compound of Leadership House was hit on 28 February. The IRGC Malek-Ashtar building in Tehran was destroyed on 2 March. Iran’s state broadcaster headquarters was struck overnight into 3 March. One strike damaged Golestan Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — a cultural wound that has provoked international outrage.

The human cost is staggering and still rising. Iranian authorities report at least 555 dead from US-Israeli strikes. Among the most devastating incidents, a girls’ elementary school in Minab was hit — state media reported 148 students killed and 95 wounded. Those figures are contested, but footage verified by The Washington Post and The New York Times confirmed the devastation. At 2:30am on 1 March, Iranian state media confirmed what had been reported hours earlier: Khamenei was dead.

Iran’s response has been equally indiscriminate. Missiles and drones have struck Israel, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Dubai International Airport was hit; the luxury Fairmont The Palm hotel was struck; a bomb shelter beneath a synagogue in Beit Shemesh was destroyed. Iranian forces closed the Strait of Hormuz, stalling 150 freight ships and sending crude oil surging more than 8 per cent in a single day.

III. A War of Perceptions — Again

What the June 2025 conflict taught us about information warfare, this one has confirmed with greater intensity. Within hours of Operation Epic Fury beginning, competing narratives were already fully formed. Trump called it the ‘best chance to eliminate intolerable threats.’ Netanyahu insisted it would ‘usher in an era of peace.’ Iranian state media called the school strike a war crime. Pentagon briefers quietly acknowledged to congressional staff that Iran had not been planning to strike US forces unless attacked first — directly undercutting the administration’s stated justification.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the US-Israeli action ‘unacceptable.’ Russia echoed the condemnation. Meanwhile, Trump publicly announced that the operation aimed at regime change — a position that his own Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth then contradicted, insisting the US was aiming to ‘destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes’ — not nation-building. The internal contradictions were glaring. The fog of this war is thickest in Washington.

1. Türkiye: Between Mediation and the Margins

For Turkish readers, and for the broader diaspora community that TBMag serves, the question of where Türkiye stands is not merely academic. Reports during the first days of the conflict suggested that NATO AWACS surveillance aircraft were operating out of Konya Airport to monitor Iranian airspace — a claim that Ankara promptly and firmly denied. Turkey has no interest in being seen as a logistics partner in a war it did not endorse.

Ankara has condemned the strikes and called for restraint — the same careful neutrality it adopted during the June 2025 conflict. President Erdogan has offered Türkiye as a potential mediator. Whether that offer will be taken up is another matter; Turkey’s credibility as a neutral broker in this particular theatre is complicated by its NATO membership and its own complex history with both Iran and Israel. But the aspiration reflects something genuine: a Turkish foreign policy that increasingly defines itself by the spaces it occupies between great-power blocs.

For the Turkish diaspora in Britain — watching events in a region they know intimately, from a country that is now directly implicated — this conflict sits at an uncomfortable intersection of identities. Many have family in Turkey, some in Iran, some in the Gulf. All of them, right now, are watching the news with the particular dread of those who know that ‘the region’ is not an abstraction.

1. Britain: Reluctant but Implicated

Britain did not join Operation Epic Fury. Prime Minister Keir Starmer made that decision deliberately, and he has defended it with notable composure. At the House of Commons on 2 March, he told MPs plainly: ‘We believe that the best path for the region is through a negotiated settlement.’ Trump publicly expressed his disappointment. Starmer did not waver.

But events have a way of narrowing options. As Iranian retaliatory strikes widened across the Gulf, hitting airports, hotels, and military bases where British personnel were stationed — including a base in Bahrain where 300 UK troops were positioned within a few hundred yards of a strike — Starmer’s position evolved. He authorised British jets for defensive intercept operations. He agreed to allow the US to use British bases for limited defensive purposes. And then, overnight on 2 March, an Iranian Shahed drone struck RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The war had arrived on British soil.

“Britain did not start this war. But the war has found Britain anyway.”

Starmer’s statement to the Commons was measured, legally precise, and — by Westminster standards — quite brave. He drew a firm line between defensive action and offensive participation. He acknowledged the tension with Washington without capitulating to it. He reminded the House, twice, of Iraq. He was, in the estimation of this desk, doing exactly what a serious prime minister is supposed to do in a crisis: holding a position, explaining it clearly, and not pretending that the situation is simple when it is not.

Whether that position holds as the conflict deepens is the question that now hangs over British politics. Trump wants more. The British left wants less. Nigel Farage has already criticised Starmer from both directions in the same week. And Iran, having struck a British base, has made Britain part of the story whether it chose to be or not.

Conclusion: The Long Shadow

Nine months ago, we wrote that the June 2025 ceasefire represented ‘delay, not detente.’ We stand by that analysis. What we are witnessing now is not a surprise. It is the consequence of a region where structural conditions — Iranian internal fragility, Israeli electoral calculation, American strategic impatience, and the accumulated grievances of populations long accustomed to being collateral damage — were always pointing towards this moment.

What happens next is genuinely uncertain. Trump says four weeks. Analysts say longer. Iran says it will not negotiate. Netanyahu says this will bring peace. The dead in Minab and Beit Shemesh and Dubai have no comment to offer. At TBMag, we will keep watching — as a British publication, as a Turkish-rooted one, and as a magazine that believes that understanding the fog of conflict is, always, the first step to defusing it.