The Levant Files

Ποιος είναι ο πιο επικίνδυνος στρατός στον κόσμο; Η απάντηση κρύβει το απόλυτο στρατηγικό παράδοξο: Ένας στρατός χωρίς κανέναν απολύτως διοικητή. Βρισκόμαστε στον Μάρτιο του 2026. Η Μέση Ανατολή φλέγεται υπό τη σκιά της κολοσσιαίας σύγκρουσης με την κωδική ονομασία "Operation Epic Fury", ανάμεσα στις ΗΠΑ, το Ισραήλ και το Ιράν. Μέσα σε λίγες ώρες, η ανώτατη στρατιωτική και πολιτική ηγεσία της Τεχεράνης εξαλείφεται πλήρως. Η λογική και η ιστορία υπαγορεύουν πως ο ιρανικός στρατός θα παραλύσει. Όμως, συμβαίνει το αδιανόητο: οι εκτοξεύσεις βαλλιστικών πυραύλων όχι μόνο δεν σταματούν, αλλά εξαπολύονται μαζικά και ανεξέλεγκτα. Το μυστικό αυτής της ασύμμετρης απειλής ονομάζεται «Ψηφιδωτή Άμυνα» (Mosaic Defense). Πρόκειται για ένα ψυχρά υπολογισμένο σχέδιο αποκέντρωσης που τέθηκε σε εφαρμογή το 2008. Η στρατιωτική μηχανή έχει χωριστεί σε 31 ημιαυτόνομες διοικήσεις. Λειτουργώντας σαν ένα δίκτυο "smart home" που χάνει την κεντρική του σύνδεση, οι τοπικοί πυρήνες μπαίνουν σε ...

If you sever the arm of an octopus, the limb doesn't just go limp. Thanks to a highly decentralized nervous system, a severed tentacle can still independently react, grasp, and even hunt. For centuries, traditional military doctrine has been built around the exact opposite biological concept: cut off the head of the snake, and the body dies. But what happens when a modern nation-state intentionally engineers its military to function like an octopus? The year is 2026, and the Middle East is navigating an unprecedented crisis. Following a catastrophic US and Israeli decapitation strike, the absolute apex of Iran’s central leadership has been wiped out in a single night. By every conventional metric of war, the conflict should be over. The brain is gone. Yet, the missiles are still launching, drones are still swarming, and the region is spiraling into a chaotic abyss. Welcome to the terrifying reality of the "Mosaic Defense" doctrine. Anticipating a centralized collapse, the...

In the fog of a war that has already claimed Iran’s supreme leader and its top military brass, a new and perhaps more dangerous threat is emerging from the rubble of Tehran’s shattered command structure: a Revolutionary Guard Corps that, by design, no longer needs orders from above. Sources with direct knowledge of the situation confirm that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) continues to prosecute strikes across the region not under the direction of the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, but according to pre-programmed autonomous protocols embedded deep within its decentralized “mosaic defense” architecture. The result is a war machine that has become, in the most literal sense, self-propelling — and increasingly difficult for anyone to stop. A New Supreme Leader With Limited Command Mojtaba Khamenei was formally elected Supreme Leader on 8 March 2026, succeeding his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening wave of the US-Israeli “Operation Epic Fury...

As President Donald Trump calls on friendly nations to dispatch warships to the Strait of Hormuz, two NATO allies with deep and distinct stakes in the outcome — Turkey and Greece — are nowhere to be found in his list of named partners. That silence, however, conceals two very different stories. On Saturday, March 14, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that "many countries" would be sending warships "in conjunction with the United States" to keep the strait open, singling out China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom as nations he hoped would contribute. The call came on the fifteenth day of the US-Israel war on Iran, with commercial shipping through the waterway — which carries roughly one-fifth of global daily oil supply — effectively at a standstill and global energy markets rattled to their foundations. Neither Turkey nor Greece was mentioned by name. Neither has publicly committed to the US-led effort. Yet the two countries' positions coul...

As Iranian ballistic missiles and drones rain down on Israeli cities and military installations, a parallel battle is being fought — not in the air, but over the image. Israel's military censorship apparatus, one of the most institutionalised in the democratic world, has been mobilised at full capacity to control what the public, at home and abroad, can see, hear, and know about the strikes. The result is a carefully managed information environment in which the scale of destruction, the location of damage, and the true toll of Iran's campaign remain, by design, only partially visible. Written Orders to Editors: The Censor Moves First From the earliest hours of the current Iran–Israel confrontation, Israel's Military Censor — a body with legally binding authority over all media operating within the country — issued written guidelines to editors setting out what could and could not be published. The rules are specific: no precise locations of impact sites near security facili...

Yemen’s Houthi movement, known formally as Ansarallah, is signaling that it is prepared to join the expanding confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. For now, however, the group appears to be holding back from full-scale entry, while positioning itself to escalate if the conflict broadens or certain red lines are crossed. A Message of Readiness The Houthi leadership has adopted an increasingly assertive tone as regional tensions intensify. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the group’s leader, has declared that Ansarallah’s “fingers are on the trigger,” signaling that the movement stands ready to act at any moment depending on how the US-Israeli campaign against Iran develops. That message has been reinforced by senior political figures within the movement. Members of Ansarallah’s political bureau have said Yemen is already in a declared state of war and that the group will join the confrontation against the US-Israeli coalition when its leadership determines that the timing i...

In the crowded field of wartime hyperbole, Turkish columnist İbrahim Karagül has never been content with mere exaggeration. His latest offering, published Friday in the conservative daily Yeni Şafak, reads less like political analysis and more like the fever dream of a medieval sultan who has just discovered Twitter. It is, by any sober measure, a remarkable document — and not in a good way. Karagül opens with a triumphalist assessment of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran that will strike most observers as detached from available evidence. In his telling, America and Israel have achieved nothing except bombing girls' schools and civilian infrastructure — while Iran, far from being weakened, has blinded Israeli radar systems, set American bases ablaze, driven a US aircraft carrier out of the region, and is now preparing "the largest oil shock in history" and targeting American banks across the Middle East. HSBC and Citigroup, he reports, have already begun wit...

The US-Israeli war against Iran has done more than redraw military balances in the Middle East — it has forced a reckoning with the very conceptual frameworks through which the region is understood. So argues Turkish political commentator Yasin Aktay in a wide-ranging piece published Saturday, which draws on recent academic literature to make the case that Iran's strategic behavior cannot be reduced to ideology, and that Turkey stands at a pivotal crossroads as a result. Iran Is a State, Not Just a Revolution The central intellectual move in Aktay's analysis is a turn away from purely ideological readings of Iranian foreign policy. He highlights a recent article by political scientist M. Hakan Yavuz, published on atlasthink.org under the title "Iran's Strategic Logic: Fuller, Nasr, and the Consequences of the 2026 War," which synthesizes the work of scholars Graham Fuller and Vali Nasr to argue that Iran behaves above all as a geopolitically constrained state rath...

Tensions along Turkey's southern flank escalated sharply overnight as sirens wailed over Adana near the İncirlik Air Base — just hours after the first public message was issued in the name of Iran's newly installed Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. A flash of light streaking across the night sky underscored warnings that Turkish security officials had delivered to journalists only hours earlier: Turkey was prepared for further missile strikes originating from Iran or elsewhere, but any such strikes would carry consequences. Writing in YetkinReport, veteran Turkish political analyst Murat Yetkin frames the moment as a decisive inflection point — one he calls the shift to "Mojtaba Gear." A New War-Mode Leadership The question of whether Mojtaba Khamenei is gravely wounded, or even alive, is secondary to the strategic signal his ascension sends, Yetkin argues. The decision by Iran's Assembly of Experts — a clerical body — to elevate him was as much a political and mi...