On the eighth day of the war it has become clear that the attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran have neither remained limited to nuclear and missile facilities nor been a “precision war”. Trump declared today that Iran would be struck “very hard” and spoke about targeting new regions and new groups. At the same time, field reports and images indicate attacks on a police station in Tehran, Gandhi Hospital, Bandar Abbas, Mehrabad Airport, oil refineries and other defence-industry facilities. According to today’s reports, the number of people killed in Iran has approached 1,500 and the number of wounded has reached around twenty thousand.
At the same time, the war has spread across the entire region. Ports, cities and oil installations in the Persian Gulf have come under attack. Kuwait declared force majeure today and reduced oil production, and Reuters reports that Iraq and Qatar have taken similar steps. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have now reached a point where roughly 20 percent of global oil and gas production has been halted and oil prices have risen by more than 25 percent. This war threatens not only Iran and the Middle East but also workers and the poor across the world through rising energy prices, inflation and economic slowdown.
Yet war does not only bring destruction; it also pushes the political development of society backwards. The religious authoritarian regime, which in recent years had been weakened by uprisings, women’s protests, workers’ struggles and social erosion, now finds in war a new opportunity to intensify repression, securitise society and rebuild its worn-out system. At the same time, parts of the expatriate opposition, Western-based middle-class layers and defectors from the Islamic regime – who before the war supported an attack and a “regime change from above” – have effectively opened the path for social protests to become fuel for a proxy war. Society must draw a lesson from this setback: liberation will come neither from American and Israeli bombers nor from the survival of the Islamic regime.
The cheering waves of Iranian neo-fascism and the applause for Trump and Netanyahu will sooner or later give way to disillusionment, frustration and cynical power bargaining by political scarecrows and mercenary media. At the same time, anti-war protests will gradually grow. But the anti-war movement we need today is neither liberal pacifism nor state-driven “anti-imperialism”. We stand neither with the Islamic regime nor in the camp of the war-making powers. An internationalist anti-war movement has meaning only if it simultaneously stands against war, against capitalism, against nationalism and against both reactionary blocs. The practical expression of this policy is the creation of anti-war and anti-capitalist centres and networks in workplaces and communities — nuclei capable of pushing back war propaganda, strengthening the bonds between workers and the oppressed in Iran, the region and the world, and demonstrating that wars of states mean the suffering of peoples.
If resistance from below is not organised today, the current destructive war will drag society into top-down power deals and new proxy wars.
No to imperialist war
No to the survival of the Islamic regime
Towards anti-war and anti-capitalist centres
Long live the internationalist solidarity of the working class
8 March 2026
Internationalist Workers’ Organization