#1 Operation Epic Fury: The Day the US and Israel Struck Iran

What the Hell Just Happened?

Okay. So if you’re hearing this, you already know something big went down. And I’m not gonna sugarcoat it or dress it up with a bunch of fancy language. I’m just gonna tell you what happened, as straight as I can.

On Saturday morning — February 28th, 2026 — the United States and Israel launched a massive joint military operation against Iran. The Pentagon’s calling it Operation Epic Fury. Israel’s calling it Operation Roaring Lion. Whatever name you wanna use, here’s the bottom line: this is the biggest American military action in the Middle East since we went into Iraq in 2003. And that’s not me being dramatic. That’s coming straight from U.S. Central Command.

They hit targets across the entire country. Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, Kermanshah — cities all over Iran. We’re talking cruise missiles off Navy ships, fighter jets, precision bombs, even combat drones that have never been used in a real fight before. Hundreds of strikes in the first twelve hours alone. This wasn’t a warning shot. This was a full-scale assault.

And here’s the part that changes everything: they killed the Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the guy who’s been running Iran for over thirty-five years — is dead. His compound in Tehran got hit. Israeli and American officials confirmed it, and eventually Iranian state media confirmed it too. His daughter and grandchild were also killed in the strike. Along with Khamenei, they took out a massive chunk of Iran’s military leadership — the defense minister, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, the head of the National Security Council. Forty senior Iranian commanders killed in the first day alone, according to Israel.

Now, how did we get here? Because this didn’t just come out of nowhere. Let me back up.

Iran’s been a problem for a long time. Decades. But things really started escalating over the past couple years. In 2024, Iran and Israel traded direct strikes for the first time ever. Then last summer — June 2025 — they fought a twelve-day war. The U.S. got involved and hit Iran’s nuclear sites. Things calmed down for a bit, but they didn’t get better. They just got quieter.

Meanwhile, Iran’s been dealing with massive internal problems. Starting in late December 2025, the biggest protests since the 1979 revolution broke out across the country. Over a hundred cities. People were furious about the economy — inflation through the roof, the currency in freefall, food prices skyrocketing. And Khamenei’s response? He ordered a crackdown. And I’m not talking tear gas and rubber bullets. Human rights organizations say at least seven thousand people were killed. The Iranian government itself admitted to over three thousand. Some estimates run as high as thirty thousand dead.

So while all of this is happening inside Iran, the U.S. and Iran were actually trying to negotiate. Oman was mediating talks about Iran’s nuclear program. There were meetings in Switzerland. As recently as Thursday — two days before the strikes — Iran had reportedly agreed to stop stockpiling enriched uranium. The Omani foreign minister said there had been significant progress.

And then Saturday morning, bombs started falling.

President Trump went on Truth Social with an eight-minute video. He said the operation was about eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. He said Iran kept pursuing nuclear weapons and kept building missiles despite every opportunity to make a deal. He said he’d destroy Iran’s navy and its missile industry. And then he looked directly at the Iranian people and said something that’s gonna echo for a long time: “Take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations.”

Now think about that for a second. The President of the United States just told the citizens of another country to overthrow their government. That’s not diplomacy. That’s regime change. And whether you think that’s the right call or the wrong call, you need to understand what that means. Because the last time we went down this road — Iraq, 2003 — it cost us twenty years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives. And we’re still dealing with the fallout.

Iran’s not taking this lying down, either. Within four hours of the first strikes, Iran started firing back. Missiles and drones aimed at Israel, at U.S. bases in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. They hit targets in multiple Gulf countries. People died in the UAE — workers from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh. A missile hit a residential building near Jerusalem and killed six people. Debris from intercepted drones damaged the building housing the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi.

And here’s what really hits you: Iranian state media is reporting that a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab got hit. A school full of kids between seven and twelve years old. Reports are saying at least eighty-five students were killed. Eighty-five little girls. A second school near Tehran was reportedly hit too. Now, there’s an IRGC base near Minab, which might explain why the area was targeted. CENTCOM says they’re looking into the reports. But whatever happened, whatever the explanation ends up being — those are children. And that’s gonna shape how the world sees this for a very long time.

So that’s where we are right now. This is not some contained, limited strike. This is a full-blown military operation, and it’s still going. Trump told Axios it could last a few days, maybe longer. He said he has off-ramps, but he also said he could “go long and take over the whole thing.” Iran’s president is calling this “open war on Muslims.” The UN Secretary-General is warning that this could ignite a chain of events nobody can control.

That’s not noise. That’s reality. And we need to pay attention. Because this thing is far from over.

The People Caught in the Middle

So now I wanna talk about something that I think gets lost whenever missiles start flying and generals start giving press conferences. The people. The actual human beings living through this. Because when you strip away the politics and the military strategy and the cable news graphics, there are real people on the ground in Iran right now whose lives just got turned completely upside down.

And here’s the thing that makes Iran different from a lot of places we’ve been involved with — the Iranian people are not one thing. They’re not all on one side. What’s happening over there right now is complicated in a way that I think most Americans don’t fully grasp. So let me try to break it down.

When news broke that Khamenei was dead — that the Supreme Leader, the man who’s controlled every aspect of life in Iran for over three decades, was gone — something extraordinary happened. People poured into the streets. Not to mourn. To celebrate.

I’m talking about people in Tehran leaning out their windows, playing music, setting off fireworks. In a city called Fuladshahr, crowds packed the streets waving their arms, whistling, honking horns. In Kurdish cities in western Iran — places where the government had brutally cracked down on protesters just weeks earlier — young men and women came out dancing. In Shiraz, in Abadan, people were out until the early hours of the morning. The state TV anchor who announced Khamenei’s death broke down crying on air. But blocks away from the studio, people were cheering.

And this wasn’t just inside Iran. Iranians all over the world came out. Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Madrid, Toronto. Hundreds of thousands of people at rallies, waving the old lion and sun flag — the Iranian flag from before the 1979 revolution. They were singing the old national anthem. Dancing — and I need you to understand something about that. Dancing has been illegal in Iran since 1979. The clerics declared it sinful. So when you see Iranians dancing in the streets, that’s not just a celebration. That’s an act of defiance that could get you arrested or worse.

Girls at a school in Tehran were filmed chanting against the clerical government. People were shouting from their windows. Businesses shut down to join national strikes. Surveillance cameras were being torn down. Before the government cut the internet — and they did cut it, down to about four percent of normal levels according to monitoring groups — videos were flooding out showing scenes that would’ve been unimaginable even a month ago.

So you’ve got this massive wave of joy and relief from a huge portion of the population that has been living under a regime they hate. People who watched seven thousand of their neighbors get killed in January for protesting. People whose currency is worthless, whose economy is in ruins, who can’t speak freely or dress how they want or listen to music or go online without the government watching. For those people, Khamenei dying feels like the walls of a prison cracking open.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Because not everyone’s celebrating.

In Isfahan, there were memorial rallies for Khamenei. In Tehran, hundreds of government workers gathered to mourn. The state TV anchors were in tears. Iran’s president called this a “cowardly” attack and said revenge was their “legitimate right and duty.” The regime still has supporters. The Revolutionary Guard still has loyalists. The clerical system that’s been in place for forty-seven years didn’t just evaporate because one man died, no matter how powerful he was.

And then there are the people who aren’t celebrating or mourning. They’re just scared. Think about it. Your country is being bombed. Fighter jets are overhead. Explosions are shaking your city. You can’t get online. You can’t call your family. You don’t know what’s been hit. You don’t know if your neighborhood is next. One resident in western Tehran told a reporter — before communications went down — that people were panicking, trying to get home, and children were running out of schools.

And then you hear that a girls’ school in Minab got hit. Eighty-five kids dead. Little girls between seven and twelve. You hear about a second school near Tehran. And suddenly the celebration you might’ve been feeling turns to ice in your stomach. Because bombs don’t check your politics before they land. They don’t ask if you’re pro-regime or anti-regime. A seven-year-old girl at school on a Saturday morning doesn’t have a political position. She just has a lunchbox and a backpack.

This is what I mean when I say this is complicated. You can hate the Iranian regime with everything you’ve got — and there are very good reasons to hate it — and still look at dead children and feel sick. You can believe Khamenei deserved what he got and still recognize that the people living under his rule are now caught between a government that was killing them in the streets and a military operation that’s bombing their cities. Those things can both be true at the same time.

The Iranian Red Crescent says over two hundred people have been killed across the country so far. That number’s going to climb. And most of those people aren’t generals or politicians. They’re just people who happened to be in the wrong place when the missiles found their targets.

And let’s talk about what comes next for these people. Because even if this operation ends tomorrow, their problems don’t. The economy was already shattered. The currency was already in freefall. Food was already hard to get. Now you’ve got a country with no supreme leader, a military leadership that’s been gutted, retaliatory strikes hitting neighboring countries, and an internet blackout that’s cutting people off from the rest of the world. What does daily life look like next week? Next month?

There’s a group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran — an opposition group in exile — that’s already announced a provisional government and a ten-point plan for a democratic future. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, is calling on Iranians to prepare to resume protests and saying the regime is collapsing. But experts who study this stuff are pumping the brakes. One think tank I read pointed out that the Islamic Republic has multi-layered support structures and a cadre of people who will use force to maintain power. Bombing a regime out of existence almost never works the way you hope. Iraq taught us that. Libya taught us that.

So when you’re watching this on the news and you see people dancing in Tehran, I want you to hold two things in your head at once. One: their joy is real, and it’s earned after decades of oppression. And two: the hardest part for them might still be coming. Because getting rid of a dictator is one thing. Building something stable in the aftermath? That’s where it gets really, really hard. And it’s the people — not the politicians, not the generals — who pay the price while that gets sorted out.

That’s the human side of this. And it matters. Because if we’re gonna talk about war, we need to remember that war doesn’t happen to countries. It happens to people.

So What’s This Gonna Cost Us?

Alright, so we’ve talked about what happened and we’ve talked about the people caught in the middle. Now let’s talk about the part that’s gonna hit a lot closer to home. Because I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: okay, this is terrible, but what does it mean for me? What’s this gonna cost? And that’s not a selfish question. That’s a practical one. So let’s get into it.

First, let’s talk about the word everybody’s gonna be hearing a lot this week: the Strait of Hormuz. If you don’t know what that is, here’s the short version. It’s a narrow waterway — about twenty-one miles wide at its tightest point — that sits between Iran on one side and Oman and the UAE on the other. And roughly twenty percent of the world’s entire oil supply passes through it every single day. We’re talking about twenty million barrels of oil. Every day. From Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran itself. If that waterway gets blocked or disrupted, the global economy feels it immediately. Not next month. Not next quarter. Immediately.

And here’s the thing — Iran knows this. They’ve always known this. The Strait of Hormuz is their biggest card to play. They’ve been threatening to close it for years, and they’ve done drills in it as recently as two weeks ago. Well, now that card is on the table. Reports are coming in that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is broadcasting radio warnings to ships saying no vessels are allowed to pass. An EU naval official confirmed that ships in the area are getting these messages. Some oil companies and trading firms have already paused shipments through the strait.

Now, has Iran officially closed the Strait? Not formally. Not yet. But it doesn’t have to fully close it to cause chaos. Just the threat of closure, just a few ships turning around, just the insurance companies getting nervous enough to jack up rates on tankers — that alone moves markets. And right now, markets are closed. They don’t reopen until late Sunday. So we’re all sitting here waiting to see what happens Monday morning when the trading bells ring. And I’m gonna tell you right now: it’s not gonna be pretty.

Oil was already at about seventy-three dollars a barrel on Friday, and it had been creeping up for weeks just on the anticipation that something like this might happen. Analysts are saying we could see a five to ten dollar jump immediately when markets open. Some are saying eighty dollars a barrel is realistic if this drags on through the weekend. And if this turns into a prolonged conflict — if the Strait actually gets closed for any real length of time — we’re looking at a completely different scenario. One analyst I read said a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a guaranteed global recession. His exact words. Because there’s not enough spare capacity anywhere else in the world to replace what flows through that waterway.

So what does that mean for you and me? Let’s bring it right down to the kitchen table.

Gas prices. Right now, the national average is around three bucks a gallon. One tracking firm is already saying we could see three-ten, three-fifteen a gallon in the next week or two — and that’s the optimistic number. That’s if this stays relatively contained. If it escalates, if the Strait stays disrupted, if Iranian oil comes fully off the market? You’re looking at numbers we haven’t seen in a while. And it won’t just be gas. It’ll be everything. Because oil isn’t just what goes in your car. It’s what moves the trucks that stock your grocery store. It’s what powers the factories that make the stuff you buy. When oil goes up, everything goes up. That’s just how it works.

And remember, this comes at a time when people were already feeling squeezed. The president just gave a State of the Union where he was bragging about bringing prices down — gas, eggs, consumer goods. He even claimed gas was a dollar ninety-nine in some places. Well, that narrative might be about to run into a wall, because nothing drives inflation faster than an energy shock. And dropping bombs on the country that sits on top of the world’s most important oil chokepoint is about as big an energy shock as you can create.

Now, the administration’s got some tools. They can tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. They can try to get Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states to pump more. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pipelines that can bypass the Strait, so not all Gulf oil is trapped. But here’s the problem: the countries that are supposed to help us replace that oil are the same countries that are currently getting hit by Iranian missiles. Qatar’s getting bombed. The UAE’s getting bombed. Bahrain’s getting bombed. It’s hard to keep the oil flowing when your ports and infrastructure are under attack.

And then there’s the broader economic picture. China gets about half its crude imports through the Strait of Hormuz. India depends on it for nearly half its oil and sixty percent of its natural gas. Japan, South Korea — same story. If those countries start hoarding oil because they’re afraid the supply is gonna get cut off, you get what one analyst called “the mother of all bidding wars.” Prices don’t just go up — they go up fast, and they drag everything else with them.

And we haven’t even talked about what this military operation itself costs. This is the biggest concentration of American military firepower in the Middle East in a generation. Aircraft carrier groups, fighter jets, cruise missiles, drones. Every Tomahawk missile that gets launched costs about two million dollars. We’re firing hundreds of them. The aircraft carriers, the support ships, the fuel, the logistics — we’re talking billions of dollars. And who pays for that? We do. The taxpayers. The same people who are gonna be paying more at the pump and more at the grocery store.

And there’s something else that keeps nagging at me. Trump told Axios he could end this in two or three days, or he could “go long and take over the whole thing.” Think about what “go long” means. It means an extended military campaign. It means more money, more resources, more risk. He also said Americans should expect casualties. His own words: “That often happens in war.” So now we’re not just talking about dollars. We’re talking about American lives.

And I keep coming back to Iraq. Because the parallels are hard to ignore. We went in with shock and awe. We decapitated the leadership. We told the people to take their country back. And then we spent the next twenty years and trillions of dollars trying to put the pieces together while the whole region destabilized around us. Now, Iran isn’t Iraq — it’s bigger, it’s more unified in some ways, and it has deeper roots. But the pattern of going in hard and then not having a clear plan for what comes after? That should sound familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention.

So here’s where I land on this. I’m not gonna tell you what to think politically. That’s not what this show is about. But I will tell you to pay attention to the numbers. Watch oil prices Monday morning. Watch gas prices this week. Watch the grocery bill. Watch the stock market. Because this isn’t just a foreign policy story anymore. This is an everything story. It touches your wallet, your job, your daily life. And the decisions being made right now — today, this weekend — are gonna ripple through the economy for months, maybe years.

We’re in it now. Whether you support the strikes or oppose them, whether you think this was overdue or reckless, the bill is coming. And like always, it’s regular people who are gonna pay it. Over there, and over here.

That’s the reality. And that’s really the whole point of this show. Not to hype it. Not to downplay it. Just to cut through the noise and understand what’s actually happening. Because everyone knows something’s going on. But not everyone knows what it means.

Now you do.

That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.

I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at EveryoneKnws1. If this hit you, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com. We're building something here and you're welcome to be part of it.

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