war

Last week voters across the country rejected Republican politicians and the Trump administration’s agenda. Democrats gained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate — nabbing historic pickups in Republican strongholds such as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

Notably, Latino voters turned their back on Republicans after giving Donald Trump 48% of the vote in 2024. A New York Times voter analysis found that Latino voters shifted 29 points toward Democrats between 2024 and 2026, compared with a 15-point shift among voters overall.

After the monumental about-face, President Trump processed the defeat by blaming everyone around him for the blue tsunami.

After Trump-endorsed candidates lost pivotal Senate seats, the president posted on social media, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

The resignation of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles last week was perhaps the most telling move about how Trump plans to deal with Republican losses nationwide. Wiles was promptly replaced with far-right advisor Stephen Miller, who previously served as the deputy chief of staff.

“I wanted to make a change,” Trump told reporters Nov. 6. “I think Susie’s done a very good job. … Stephen’s been great and we’ve got to make moves.”

Political observers now fear the appointment signals Trump will double down on an agenda that has alienated broad swaths of voters, including Latinos, who were among the most targeted demographic in the administration’s campaign of aggressive immigration enforcement spearheaded by Miller.

To better understand what Miller’s promotion will mean for the president’s future plans, The Times spoke with New York Times contributing writer and USC associate professor of journalism Jean Guerrero, who literally wrote the book on Miller.

Her 2020 book, “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” examined Miller’s upbringing, the political forces that shaped his ideologies and the origins of his anti-immigrant policies.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

With the big news of this election cycle being that Latinos turned their back on Trump, do you see the appointment of Stephen Miller as an act of revenge by Trump? What do you think he’s trying to signal for his agenda over the next two years with this promotion?

I think he’s trying to signal that he plans to double down on talking down on Latino and immigrant communities because [Trump and his allies] need the war on immigrants to continue their war on the working classes, which is what this is all about.

The general public is fed up with this administration because of how de-prioritized working families have been, and that’s across the board: white, Latino, Black, Asian. The war on immigrants is central to that de-prioritization because by criminalizing a sector of the population and keeping [them] in the shadows and in fear, they are able to suppress wages for the entire working class and they’re able to keep immigrants from being able to organize with their citizen co-workers in the workplace.

What do you think we can expect to happen to immigrant Latino communities specifically under this era of Stephen Miller?

I think what we’re going to see is an extreme expansion of the war on immigrant communities and their allies specifically. That is going to disproportionately target U.S. citizen Latinos — using what power and privilege they’ve been able to accumulate through the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents — who are at the front lines of defending their community members.

Your book discussed how Miller’s high school years helped shape his anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiment and how that seems to have stemmed a bit from going to a public school in Santa Monica. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A lot of people get surprised when they learn that Stephen Miller was from Santa Monica, because it’s a liberal enclave, but he is very much a product of the liberal hypocrisy that he witnessed growing up in California. What he witnessed remains true of establishment and corporate Democrats today, which is a professed concern for marginalized communities and performative support for social justice, while completely neglecting to pursue any concrete policies that would make the lives of marginalized communities any better.

One of the ways he exploited that fact to rise in power was by aligning himself with the conservative movement that was growing rapidly in California during the 1990s, led by David Horowitz — a conservative activist in Studio City — who became one of Stephen Miller’s main mentors and who groomed a generation of young conservatives to use the tools and terms of the civil rights movement against the gains of the civil rights movement. Miller learned to perceive multiculturalism and people of color as an existential threat to the U.S.

Do you think that putting Miller in the position of chief of staff is a way for Trump to reposition this war on immigrants as his main thing and to move away from the more economic and cost-of-living concerns that people also seem aggravated by?

They’re going to continue to try to frame immigrants as the enemies of the working classes, which is masterful gaslighting. By doing that, they are ensuring that citizen workers don’t organize alongside immigrants for higher wages, for economic equality. I think the immigration issue is actually at the heart of the economic issues that people are upset about. I say that because you saw the mass deportations affecting things like construction sites, which were left empty of workers, so people who were trying to build housing at a time of housing scarcity were being targeted. You saw farmworkers getting targeted in the fields, which led to higher food prices.

The war on immigrants is a war on the working classes. By doubling down on it, Trump is going to be trying desperately to confuse people into thinking that immigrants are to blame for the economic pain that everybody is feeling. When in reality, the economic pain that everybody is feeling is because of this war on immigrants which is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into mass surveillance, mass incarceration of people based on their race and language. It is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.

Trump has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth on his immigration messaging. He recently acknowledged that people might have thought he was too tough on immigration, but this appointment of Miller signals that he will be going harder on the issue. What is the calculation there in your view?

He’s trying to exploit the echo chambers, which makes sense for a dear friend of the tech elites for him to know how to do that. He’s hoping that one piece of information will reach one audience and another piece of information will reach the other audience. So the people who are fed up with the war on immigrants will hear him say that he’s scaling it back and they’ll be happy and they’ll support him. The people who love the war on immigrants, which are fewer and fewer every day, will hear about Stephen Miller and get really excited about that. He’s just hoping that the [online] algorithm will work in his favor.

You’ve previously spoken about noticing a shift in Miller’s immigration mindset over the years, can you talk about that change?

During the first administration, he was focused entirely on strangling legal pathways into this country, such as gutting the asylum and refugee systems, and restricting green card access and separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. All of this geared towards racially reengineering the demographics of this country. During the second administration, he’s done some of that with these mass deportations where he’s directed agents to round people up at worksites and where they’ve been racially profiling people and detaining people based on their skin color and language and blue-collar jobs as opposed to their criminal records.

At the same time, Miller has been one of the most vocal proponents of Trump’s foreign interventions and invasions, which have set the stage for the mass displacement of new refugees and immigrants. Watching Miller be so vocally supportive of these interventions, I realized he had shifted, and that he was no longer primarily motivated by restrictionist ideologies and white nationalist ideologies — it was about class.

Trump and Miller are using the war on immigrants to manufacture and maintain a permanent underclass in the United States, which is something that has been done by many administrations for many generations. But they’ve taken it to an astounding level that has caused an unprecedented amount of economic, spiritual and psychological pain across this country.

With Democrats gaining a bunch of seats in the Senate and the House, and taking control of a bunch of state legislatures, what can they do to potentially minimize Miller’s effect in the White House?

It is imperative that the Democrats use their majorities not only to investigate the crimes against humanity that this administration has been committing, but also to deliver on behalf of working families. At the center of that has to be ending the war on immigrants. They have to abolish ICE. They have to pass legislation to protect the longtime undocumented population — who Democrats have said that they’ve been going to protect for many administrations and have not prioritized, even when they previously had majorities in Congress.

If they do not deliver on behalf of working families by emancipating the subjugated classes, then they’re admitting they too are in alliance with the pillaging classes and that they are no different from Trump and Miller. The main thing they have to do is counter any maneuvers that Miller is going to be making from the White House. They can’t just be all talk. They have to deliver in concrete ways for working families and they’re not going to be able to do that if they ignore the immigrant community that has been at the center of the Trump administration’s persecution.

Nithya Raman’s win upends L.A. Latino politics

A few weeks back in this newsletter, I discussed how Latino voters would be the deciding factor in the L.A. mayoral race as the demographic helped carry Mayor Karen Bass in the primary, with her winning 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in the June 2 election.

Five months, much campaigning and the botched response to a massive warehouse fire in heavily Latino Boyle Heights later, Bass’s competitor, Councilmember Nithya Raman, courted the Latino vote in last week’s election. A Times analysis of early election returns showed Raman won big in the heavily Latino neighborhoods such as Wilmington, South L.A. and Pico-Union.

My colleague and Latino voting expert Gustavo Arellano wrote about how Raman’s win was the death knell for L.A.’s Latino political establishment.

Arellano discussed how Bass consistently aligned herself with a cohort of moderate Latino politicians — such as City Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Imelda Padilla, Assemblymember Celeste Rodriguez and Rep. Luz Rivas — at reelection events. Conversely, Raman focused on activating younger, more progressive Latinos throughout her campaign.

The L.A. Latinos’ traditional political machine was in trouble before hitching its wagon to Bass’s failed reelection campaign, Arellano noted. It began in 2022 when three City Council members were embroiled in an audio leak scandal, which created an avenue for two democratic socialists to grab council seats. The Latino old guard also lost two more council members in 2024, and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, bastion of that political class, ran a supremely unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign this year.

Raman’s grassroots approach met Latino voters where they were and not where she thought they were supposed to be — something Bass’ chief campaign strategist, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, could learn a lesson from.

“The mayor ran on a very institutional playbook of getting a bunch of Latino politicians together so they could tell Latinos how to vote,” Marco Santana, who ran for City Council earlier this year, told Arellano. “That doesn’t work anymore. Latinos want deeds.”

One actor’s pursuit to dub “The Lion King” in Quechua

Voice actor Fernando Valencia grew up in the Andean Peruvian town of Huanimpampa, where the Indigenous language of Quechua is still an integral part of everyday life. He noticed that the dialect is never represented in dubbed versions of Hollywood family hits, which creates a barrier for comprehension among children whose primary language is Quechua.

To point out this lack of availability and to show that an avenue for accessibility was possible, Valencia dubbed segments of Hollywood blockbusters such as “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Lion King” into the language spoken by nearly 10 million South Americans.

He has since dared to dub “The Lion King” — the first movie Valencia watched in its entirety as a child — fully into Quechua. Valencia’s attempts are documented in Peruvian filmmaker Augusto Zegarra’s debut feature, “Runa Simi,” which is the name of the Quechua language in Quechua and translates to ”language of the people.”

De Los contributor Carlos Aguilar recently spoke with Valencia and Zegarra about the film and the voice actor’s monumental undertaking.

“If I keep my language and culture in a fragile little jar, someone will come along and trample it, and it will disappear forever,” Valencia said. “But if I open this little jar and build bridges, it will be difficult to eliminate it because it will be integrated into the world.”

A similar linguistic venture to preserve a native language was completed by Tweedie Waititi, the sister of Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi, who partnered with Disney to dub multiple titles into te reo Māori.

Valencia’s mission was given a major bump after Peter and Benjamin Bratt, whose mother, Eldy Banda, is an Indigenous activist of Quechua descent, signed on to the project as executive producers.

“It felt like a statement to have someone who has never heard of the Quechua language, maybe someone in Europe or the U.S., ask what runa simi is and then being able to tell them: ‘You’re already speaking it! By saying the words runa simi, you’re already using the language,’” Zegarra said.

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Unless otherwise noted, stories below were published by the Los Angeles Times.

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Moscow blames Kyiv for a series of car bombings that have targeted people linked to the war with Ukraine.

A car bombing in Moscow has critically injured an adviser to Ukraine’s former prime minister a day after a similar attack killed a military officer in St Petersburg.

The explosion on Friday was the latest in a series of bombings and shootings that have targeted people involved in the fighting in Ukraine. Moscow has blamed Kyiv for the attacks.

The Moscow explosion struck a car driven by Sergei Zavorotnyi, who previously worked as an adviser to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee.

Zavorotnyi was hospitalised with injuries, the committee added. It did not identify possible suspects pending a criminal inquiry.

Azarov served as prime minister under Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced from office by protesters and fled to Russia in February 2014.

Azarov, who also lives in Russia, told state-run TV that he was “shocked” by the attack that left his former adviser critically injured. He said he believes Zavorotnyi was targeted because of his criticism of the Ukrainian government.

Zavorotnyi. 72, had worked as a journalist for Russia’s daily Komsomolskaya Pravda before becoming Azarov’s adviser. He wrote a book about Yanukovych’s ouster and ran an online outlet critical of Ukrainian authorities.

Russia’s REN TV channel said he lost his left arm, suffered multiple other injuries and was in a coma after the explosion.

Explosive devices triggered remotely

Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova, reporting from Moscow, said an explosive device was reportedly planted under the man’s car and detonated remotely as he was driving on Friday.

“The investigative committee has already launched a criminal case into this explosion,” she said.

A day earlier, in St Petersburg, a military serviceman was killed by a bomb in his vehicle, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee. It did not identify the victim or say who could be behind the bombing.

The Fontanka news outlet said Thursday’s victim was a colonel, while other Russian online media said the victim was a senior air force officer.

Shapovalova said preliminary reports indicated that the victim was a military serviceman, rather than a colonel of the Russian Air Force.

Like the attack on Friday, he was also driving the car when the bomb went off, she added.

“In both cases an explosive device was triggered remotely, and it was planted under their car,” Shapovalova said. “Here in Russia, all the attacks are considered to be orchestrated by the Ukrainian side.”

Ukrainian authorities have not commented on either bombing.

As Ukraine, Russia and the United States engaged in their first peace talks since February this week, the front lines continued to deteriorate for Moscow as its casualties rose to a possible new record without any significant territorial gains.

Ukraine’s military said it had caused more than 26,000 Russian casualties – meaning those killed and seriously wounded – in the first 10 days of November, suggesting this month’s figure could mark a new record topping October’s 54,400.

On November 9, Ukraine also claimed a new daily record of 2,980 Russian soldiers killed or wounded. That marked the fourth reported daily record this year.

Al Jazeera cannot independently verify casualty claims by either side.

This cluster of new casualty records in the autumn, accompanied by a lack of any significant territorial gains by Russia, suggested that Moscow was not coming any closer to its goal of seizing the last remaining quarter of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region this year.

A group of pro-Ukrainian hackers from Belarus said they had accessed records of the Russian state statistical service, Rosstat, and discovered an official tally of 450,000 Russian fatalities for the entire full-scale invasion, since 2022.

Independent assessments indicate that Russia has seized a net 117sq km (45sq miles) this year, a poor showing for its pains.

Yet, Russia was as defiant as ever at peace talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10-11.

Presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who headed the Russian delegation, told Vesti television after the talks concluded that he would be satisfied “only when we win and sign a peace agreement on our terms”.

Russia has demanded territory Ukraine is not willing to surrender, and said NATO needs to pull out of all the former Soviet bloc countries which joined it since 1997.

Medinsky called for “a new, comprehensive, and just security system in Europe,” because the one put in place after World War II “is functioning very poorly, and, in fact, the entire system is sick. In Ukraine, a festering wound has simply burst.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saw it differently.

“When the Russians now talk about a security architecture for themselves … What they really want is to freely interfere in the affairs of other countries, and to use force whenever they want, and to make sure that no one can support liberty inside Russia,” he told the Danish parliament, the Folketing, on the day the talks concluded.

Although US negotiators agreed to table the subject of a European security architecture at Abu Dhabi, the three European powers present – Germany, France and the United Kingdom – did not, and they were excluded from the proceedings.

“We did not communicate with them. We don’t really understand what their status is here,” Medinsky said.

Europe agrees with Ukraine that such a discussion puts the cart before the horse.

“The idea of discussing European-Russian security infrastructure is a complex and potentially dangerous one,” Zelenskyy said on the eve of the talks. “First, we must discuss how to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Second, what the security infrastructure will be for Ukraine.”

Ukraine has asked for an ironclad guarantee of military intervention if it is attacked again, as offered in NATO’s Article 5.

Instead, Zelenskyy said, the Trump administration offered “something similar to NATO”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin received the US negotiating team in Saint Petersburg after talks in Abu Dhabi, and repeated the Russian position that the presence of European peacekeepers in a post-war Ukraine would also be “absolutely unacceptable”.

Zelenskyy attributed Russia’s absolutism to its inaccurate understanding of realities on the ground.

“Putin lives in a different reality,” he told journalists in Copenhagen on November 11. “When I received the second report from our negotiating group after the meetings in Abu Dhabi, they told me that the Russians believe and claim that they have already occupied half of the [part of the] Donbas region which is actually under our control. These were military officers, Russian intelligence.”

Russia’s defence ministry has claimed to have seized 3,600sq km (1,400sq miles) of Ukraine this year, and Putin has repeated the claim.

Still, Abu Dhabi did produce some results.

Russia and Ukraine said there would be a new POW exchange of at least 1,000 or possibly 1,500 prisoners on each side. And Zelenskyy said de-escalation steps were discussed.

‘Ukraine faced constant alarms’

In the run-up to Abu Dhabi, Russia pounded Ukraine’s cities.

“For 10 days and nights, Ukraine faced constant alarms,” said its General Staff. During that period, Russia launched 3,519 drones, and Ukraine managed to intercept 3,068 of them, they said, including 83 percent of the jet-powered drones, which now comprise roughly half of the swarm.

On the night of November 7, Russia unleashed 36 ballistic missiles into Ukraine, including some reportedly manufactured by North Korea, striking energy infrastructure.

Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi has asked European allies to provide generators and battery packs for homes, as well as mobile shelters and buses to keep urban transport moving during blackouts.

On November 12, Ukraine reported it was experiencing renewed restrictions on its use of the Starlink satellite service, which it needs to coordinate interceptors to incoming Russian drones.

“This directly impacts our ability to intercept Russian kamikaze drones,” said Zelenskyy. “Due to the speed limitations, we simply cannot intercept them in time.”

This came as Ukraine continued its own strikes inside Russia, targeting ballistic missile launchers and factories as a forward defence.

On November 7, a fire burned almost a hectare of storage space next to an Almaz factory in Rostov, which makes communications equipment. It was unclear whether Ukraine caused it. On the same day, Ukraine fired Neptune missiles into the Proton-Electrotex conglomerate which makes parts for Kormoran cruise and Iskander ballistic missiles, and destroyed two ballistic missile launchers.

On November 9, Ukraine struck the Morozov plant near St Petersburg, which makes solid rocket fuel for ballistic missiles, and the Redkino plant in Tver, which makes chemical products used in missiles.

On November 10, Ukraine struck the 123rd Aircraft Repair Plant in Novgorod, which services Russia’s increasingly rare A-50 early warning and targeting aircraft.

On November 11, Ukraine struck the Naro-Forminsk cruiser, which launches Kalibr and Onyx cruise missiles.

“We are acting asymmetrically,” Ukrainian defence minister Yevhenii Khmara told his Dutch counterpart. Ukraine had struck a total of 12 ballistic missile launch sites inside Russia, he said without specifying the timeframe, and said the strikes on factories were reducing Russian production capacity.

Zelenskyy renewed his call for German Taurus missiles with which to strike Russian launchers.

Ukraine also struck a series of refineries during the past week, including the Afipsky, Saratov, Kirishi, Ust-Luga and Omsk refineries. Russian military reporters said three Russian helicopters had been downed by friendly fire during attempts to defend the Ust-Luga refinery.

Since the end of October, its General Staff said, Ukraine had struck Russia’s five biggest refineries.

Sources told Reuters that Ukraine has destroyed at least 30 percent of Russia’s refining capacity.

The purpose of refinery strikes is to diminish Russian export revenue for petroleum products and to disrupt its economy. Those goals appeared to be working last week, as Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service reported Moscow projecting a $63bn-$67bn deficit for 2026, double its intended figure, and Russian media reported staff layoffs at the parliament, or Duma, and the Russian Federation Council.

Mohammadjamal Azizi, an Iranian refugee living in Tujunga, panicked when his wife called him last month about a message from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement instructing her to contact Iranian government officials in Washington about her case.

The United States and Iran have been at war for months, and the pair claimed asylum to enter the country as Christian converts, so Azizi’s wife was surprised and terrified. She thought that after close to two years in a detention facility, it meant the U.S. government planned to deport her.

“If they send me back to Iran, what will happen to me?” Azizi recalls his wife saying through tears.

Documents in a lawsuit brought against U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio unsealed last week contend that the Trump administration has been in secret conversations with Iran to plan deportations, even as the two nations have been at war.

The lawsuit, filed in July by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund in U.S. District Court in Washington, accused the U.S. immigration officials of sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with their home country and described a coordinated effort between the two governments to identify Iranians and pressure them to return.

At a hearing Oct. 15, court transcripts show, the Trump administration acknowledged its plan to deport Iranians back to the country, saying “the government is executing lawful orders of removal.”

In a statement to The Times, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended its talks with Iran, saying that ICE “actively coordinates” with countries to secure travel documents and is “committed to ensuring that illegal aliens are informed of their right to communicate with their consular representatives.”

In the Los Angeles area, which is home to the largest population of people of Iranian descent outside of Iran, the confirmation of deportation talks has sparked fear among refugees and immigrant advocates.

Yasmine Chubin, executive director of the Iranian advocacy group, said the organization’s attorneys knew of at least a dozen detainees approached about removal in recent weeks. All were asylum seekers and a majority were Christian converts who entered the U.S. through the Southern border, and were held in detention for 18 months or longer. One attempted suicide upon hearing he might be returned to Iran, Chubin said.

“We’re at war and it’s unsafe to send anyone back to Iran,” Chubin said. “We find it really alarming, both the level of coordination between ICE and Iran and the unrestricted access officials have to Iranian nationals.”

Pastor Kevin Kang of Tujunga United Methodist Church, who has helped to house Azizi and other formerly detained refugees from Iran and elsewhere, said asylum seekers are under immense pressure to include detailed information in their application, but are afraid the information they include could end up in the hands of the government they fled from.

“All of this is horrifying,” Kang said. “These are people who have fled to this country because they want to be able to worship in the way they want.”

Homeland Security said “As promised, the Trump Administration is employing all lawful options to execute the largest deportation operation in history.”

The department said its handling of asylum seekers is “in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”

Historically, the U.S. has rarely deported people to Iran, and has often welcomed Iranian dissidents, exiles and others who fled the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But the Trump administration has reversed decades of that approach in service of its broader hard-line immigration crackdown. This, despite the fact that Trump has encouraged Iranians to rise up against their government, telling them during January protests that “help is on its way,” and at the outset of the war: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Some 600 Iranians were put in immigration detention last year, according to records obtained by the National Iranian American Council, another advocacy group. Between September 2025 and January 2026, the U.S. arranged three flights to return more than 100 Iranian nationals to Iran, according to information ICE disclosed in a court filing in the ongoing case.

ICE attempted to remove at least eight Iranians over the weekend, but the flight set to leave from Arizona, routed through Pakistan, was abruptly canceled for unknown reasons. The group has still been told they could be put back on a flight in coming days, according to immigration attorneys involved.

Homeland Security declined to comment on the canceled deportation flight or confirm future removal operations.

During the Oct. 15 hearing, Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney for the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, described a June incident in which Iran officials who operate out of Pakistan’s embassy in Washington interrogated an Iranian man in California.

The man, whose name is redacted in court documents, was picked up by ICE when he attended a scheduled appointment at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service office in San Jose, and taken to the California City Detention Facility.

A week later, a detention officer led him to a private room where two men were waiting to speak with him. He was not told who they were beforehand, according to court documents. The visitors told the detainee they knew “a great deal” about him, including that he had been affiliated with an Iranian opposition group and lived in Camp Ashraf, just across the border in Iraq, before resettling in the U.S. in 2015.

“We know everything about you, do not worry,” the detainee recalled one of the men saying, according to court filings.

The fact that Iranian officials showed up that soon after the man’s detainment and were familiar with his case was “really indicative” of information sharing between the two governments, Kirkpatrick said in an interview.

At the Oct. 15 hearing, Judge Ana C. Reyes expressed surprise at the government’s position, according to the transcript.

“What you’re telling me is that the United States of America is going to send individuals back to that region facing what you and I and everyone who would ever look at this would know would be at a minimum a serious threat of certain death” she asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. It is — the government is executing lawful orders of removal,” replied Justice Department attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel.

Though Reyes did not ultimately issue a preliminary injunction, she did order the administration to notify her in writing five days before the government sends any detainees to Iran.

It has left those in custody unsure of what will happen next.

Azizi and his wife, Hannaneh Alikaram, left Iran and requested asylum in the U.S. in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they could face as Christian converts. Back home they had twice been arrested which they said was due to their faith, according to their testimony in court.

To enter the country, they flew to Brazil and took the perilous overland route through the Darien Gap. They entered the U.S. at the southern border and were taken into custody.

Azizi was freed from detention about a year ago, with his asylum application approved. Alikaram’s nearly identical application, however, was rejected, with the judge overseeing her case citing consistencies in her testimony. Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their case.

When Azizi, who goes by his Christian name Liam, contacted Iranian officials on behalf of his wife last month as instructed, he was told only that she was not on a current list of Iranian nationals scheduled to be deported.

“That was a relief,” he said.

In the spring, the couple filed a habeas corpus petition challenging Alikaram’s detention, which is still pending, as well as a motion to expedite the request due to a heart condition she has. She remains in custody at Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana.

“I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” Azizi said. “We are still waiting.”

On November 10, Gulf defence ministers approved the establishment of a forward command in Kuwait under the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Unified Military Command, with forces to be allocated to it. The decision marks another step towards Gulf states taking greater collective responsibility for their security.

One day earlier, after meeting Qatar’s prime minister, US President Donald Trump had said: “Iran militarily is effectively over.” He also said the US blockade would continue and left open further military action. His remarks fell short of announcing an agreed end to the war.

Any opening for diplomacy deserves support. But even a lasting agreement would leave the Gulf’s underlying security problems unresolved. The Kuwait command’s value will depend on implementation and on how it connects with the region’s other security partnerships.

The answer requires abandoning the expectation that one grand security arrangement can resolve every threat facing the region. That expectation assumes a degree of agreement about enemies, priorities and acceptable risks that does not exist.

Iran’s attacks on Gulf states during this war, together with Israel’s September 2025 strike on Qatar, demonstrate the breadth of the challenge. A security architecture designed around only one adversary will leave serious gaps. Armed militias and terrorist groups add other risks, alongside cyberattacks, maritime disruption and the consequences of state failure in the neighbourhood. The erosion of international restraints on the use of force makes all of these problems harder to manage.

The most credible response to this complex set of threats is a security architecture that is both layered and networked. Gulf states are already moving in this direction. The task now is to make those arrangements work together and sustain the effort when the immediate pressure of war recedes.

Layering starts with the recognition that different partnerships do different jobs. National capabilities and cooperation within the Gulf Cooperation Council provide the foundation. The relationship with the United States remains central, while additional arrangements address needs that a single partner cannot meet.

Cooperation with US Central Command supplies an operational layer. The air and missile defence coordination cell opened at Al Udeid in January, for example, was designed to improve regional coordination, share threat warnings and prepare for contingencies.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan, adds a collective defence commitment among its members. The Badr memorandum, signed in October by Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan and Indonesia, sets out cooperation in defence manufacturing, research and technical training.

These arrangements should be judged by the gaps they fill. Collective defence, operational coordination and industrial capacity reinforce one another, but none can substitute for the others. Buying an interceptor, producing its components and deciding who will use it in a crisis are separate problems.

The next step is to connect these layers so that capabilities developed through one partnership strengthen what countries can do through another. This is what makes the architecture networked.

Qatar offers a useful example. It shares GCC membership with Saudi Arabia and participates in Badr alongside Turkiye and Pakistan. It therefore connects to all three Mecca signatories through other arrangements, despite not being a party to Mecca itself.

Those connections create opportunities. Stronger production capacity or better coordination among shared partners could improve the capabilities available to Qatar through its own relationships. A more effective deterrent against attacks on a neighbour could also improve the wider security environment.

Such benefits depend on deliberate cooperation. Qatar acquires no automatic Mecca guarantee through association. Information, equipment and expertise travel through a network only when governments agree to make that possible. The connections need as much attention as the agreements themselves.

This is also where the Gulf’s interests converge with those of a wider group of countries. European states, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Pakistan all have reasons to resist a world in which force routinely overrides sovereignty and access to trade depends on political coercion.

Energy exporters and importers face different consequences when shipping is disrupted, but both need these routes to remain open. Countries need not share a political system or an identical relationship with Washington to recognise the costs of an international order becoming less predictable.

There is already a diplomatic basis for cooperation. The EU and GCC have jointly defended freedom of navigation through Hormuz. ASEAN and GCC ministers have reaffirmed sovereignty, the protection of civilian infrastructure and the need for diplomacy.

These states should become more active defenders of the basic rules on which their prosperity depends. They have an opportunity to shape the emerging international order collectively. Their combined economic, technological and diplomatic resources can give weight to rules that individual states struggle to defend alone. The same networks that help protect infrastructure can support coordinated diplomacy when those rules are violated.

Credibility will require consistency. Sovereignty must matter when the aggressor is a partner as well as an adversary. Civilian protection must apply in Palestine, Ukraine and the Gulf. Mediation must remain possible even when the parties at the table are politically inconvenient.

At the operational level, the immediate task is to connect existing security arrangements. Gulf governments and their partners should agree on how warnings can be shared across arrangements, which capabilities can be made available, and who has authority to request assistance. Joint exercises should test those connections under pressure, including when one partner cannot participate.

The next priority is protecting the systems that allow societies to function. Energy and water facilities, ports and communications networks deserve sustained cooperation on protection and repair. A partnership that can restore an essential service quickly contributes directly to security, even if it has no mutual defence clause.

Diplomacy to prevent escalation must form a layer of its own. Channels with Iran, arrangements to prevent incidents at sea and mechanisms for managing escalation remain necessary alongside stronger defences. Gulf states should use any opening created by the current talks to pursue reciprocal, verifiable restraint.

This wider security architecture would give Gulf, European and Asian partners practical work around which to organise. Some can contribute defence technology, others maritime expertise, industrial production, financing or diplomatic access. Cooperation should allow states to contribute where they have both the capacity and the political willingness to act.

The difficulty is that every participant remains sovereign. Gulf states themselves do not have identical interests. Their external partners face different constitutional requirements, domestic pressures and relationships with other powers. Some constraints are enduring; others reflect political choices that can change.

A government willing to provide intelligence may be unwilling to deploy forces. Another may support maritime protection but oppose an operation on land. Those limits should be understood before a crisis, when there is still time to plan around them.

Overlapping partnerships also carry risks. They can duplicate effort, create false expectations or draw countries into disputes they intended to avoid. Clear responsibilities and consultation procedures are essential. Adding agreements without clarifying what they deliver would produce more complexity without more security.

Nor should we promise that such an architecture will deliver a long peace. The rivalries and political grievances shaping this region will not disappear because its governments cooperate more closely.

A more attainable objective is relative peace and security: fewer opportunities for coercion, crises contained before they widen, and civilian life less exposed to each new confrontation. That means reducing the frequency and consequences of violence while continuing to work towards durable settlements. Permanent emergency cannot become an acceptable destination.

Gulf states should use this moment to connect their partnerships, strengthen their own capabilities and establish clearer limits on escalation. The aim is a region with more partners able to act together, and fewer crises capable of dragging everyone into war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

IRGC claims Bahrain radar strike is a response to attacks on Iranian telecom tower in southern Hormozgan province.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has targeted a US early-warning radar in Bahrain in retaliation for what it described as an air attack on a telecommunications tower in southern Iran.

The claim came hours after Iran’s state news agency IRNA, citing official sources, reported that the port city of Sirik in Hormozgan province was hit by “enemy fire” on Thursday.

In a statement carried by the semi-official Tasnim news agency, the IRGC called the strike a “serious warning” to the “aggressor enemy” to stop what it said was a series of aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the Strait of Hormuz.

“Should these violations and acts of aggression recur, the IRGC Aerospace Force stands in full readiness to engage without limits,” the statement said.

The IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency said the IRGC’s Aerospace Force had “targeted and destroyed” the radar installation.

There was no immediate comment from Washington or Manama.

Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

First Bahrain attack since September

According to the Reuters news agency, it is the first time since early September that Iran has claimed an attack on US military assets in a Gulf country.

The claim comes as Israel’s security cabinet has ordered the military to step up preparations for a possible attack on Iran, according to Israeli media, including the public broadcaster KAN.

Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei has warned that if the US launches another war, every military base involved, anywhere from West Asia to Europe, would be a legitimate target for Iranian strikes.

US President Donald Trump has said he is prepared to return to war if the diplomatic track offered by Qatar fails to deliver a deal.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, has said economic pressure on Iran is working well enough that resuming large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Iran’s parliament speaker and lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said the Strait of Hormuz would never go back to how it was before the war, and that “the ball is now in the American court“.

Meanwhile, US Central Command says its forces are still strictly enforcing the naval blockade on Iranian ports.

The war began on February 28 with US and Israeli attacks on Iran.

Speaking at the White House, Trump says Gulf countries asked him to hold off on further attacks against Iran.

Doha, Qatar — Late one morning in March 1999, a United States B-52 bomber took off from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, headed southeast. Seven more jets followed, at two-minute intervals.

It was the start of the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a campaign in which the Fairford base served as both a pivotal launchpad for American jets and as a fuel station for fighter planes. The British base had served a similar role during the Gulf War in 1991, and would do so again during the 2003 Iraq war and in the early stages of the US-Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, 2026.

But in October, the US pulled all 12 of its B-1 Lancer bombers from the Gloucestershire base, amid fears that they were no longer safe there from a growing Iranian threat. Days earlier, British security forces had made several arrests, and the country’s government has accused Iran of being behind a plot to target the base — a charge Tehran has denied.

RAF Fairford is not alone. Earlier this month, the US withdrew a dozen planes from another British base, RAF Mildenhall. And in July, reports said that the US had relocated many of its military assets from its bases in the Gulf that were badly hit by Iran during the war, instead moving them to bases in Jordan, while also considering a proposal to shift them to Israel.

For decades, these bases have served as the sharp edge of the US military’s ability to project power and wage wars thousands of miles from home. For close allies, whether in Europe or the Gulf, they also worked as security guarantors against other threats.

But Iran’s ability to severely damage US facilities in the Middle East during the war, and pose a threat as far as the UK, has for the first time turned these critical strategic assets into potential liabilities, both for American allies and for the US itself, say analysts.

“The US security umbrella is becoming a double-edged sword,” Simon Mabon, a professor of international politics at Lancaster University, told Al Jazeera. “When the security of US bases is called into question, it changes Washington’s calculation of their strategic benefits. It also gives European and Gulf states reason to think seriously about the bases, given that they are becoming targets.”

How the Iran war changed the bargain

Hosting American bases has long been perceived as integral to how US allies, whether in Europe, the Gulf or East Asia, deter threats that they themselves face.

Former US President Barack Obama once spoke of an “ironclad commitment” to Gulf security, while Britain regularly invokes its so-called “special relationship” with the United States. In doing so, Britain and the Gulf have long cast themselves as willing partners to a power that — at least before current President Donald Trump — presented itself as the benevolent guarantor of its allies’ security.

But a spate of recent security incidents, many linked to the war on Iran, is testing that narrative and raising questions about whose interests these commitments serve, and whether hosting American forces could be bringing danger closer to home.

US prosecutors have charged three men they describe as Iranian-backed operatives over their alleged roles in plotting nearly 20 attacks across the United States and Europe, including on RAF Fairford.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf, Iran explicitly cited the presence of US bases as justification for targeting its neighbours, bombing Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait. Iran also bombed Oman, which does not have a permanent US base; and Jordan and Iraq, beyond the Gulf, which do host major US military facilities.

A report by the Pentagon’s watchdog released in September revealed that Iranian attacks damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US military installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan in the first four months of the war.

At least five KC-135 aerial refuelling tankers were damaged when they were hit at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. At least one of these airborne early-warning and control aircraft was damaged on the ground in a subsequent strike.

Experts say these incidents are sharpening a security dilemma for US allies in the Gulf and Europe. Hosting US forces can expose them to retaliation in a war they had no say in starting, while those same bases help defend some of those host countries from attacks, including by intercepting missiles and providing weapons transfers.

The war has disrupted flights and shipping, threatening the oil and gas exports on which much of the region depends. US President Donald Trump said on Monday that further military action against Iran was unnecessary for now. But the US naval blockade remains in place, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has yet to return to normal.

“While the utility of hosting foreign military bases has always involved a calculus of risk versus the assumed assurance it provides, the perception among Gulf Arab states is certainly shifting,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, a Middle East analyst, told Al Jazeera. “The vulnerability of these assets is increasingly front-of-mind for host governments, who have not sought war, yet have been drawn into it without having had any real say.”

The US calculation

Washington faces a dilemma of its own. Bases in Europe or the Middle East give it the reach to fight faraway wars, but their presence has also provided Iran with a litany of targets.

In March, an Iranian drone hit a hangar at a British base in Cyprus that the US also uses for intelligence and logistics operations. Tehran threatened Bulgaria after reports emerged that the Eastern European NATO nation had allowed the US to use its Bezmer airbase for refuelling of planes used to attack Iran. Weeks later, Bulgaria’s defence minister announced that the US air tankers had left Bezmer for good, with the country’s president declaring that the “mission is over,” bringing relief to the village that the base draws its name from.

And in the Middle East, several key bases used by US troops have been almost rendered unusable, with those in Kuwait suffering the heaviest damage, say analysts. An attack on the Port of Shuaiba killed six US service members and destroyed an army operations centre. Iranian drones and missiles damaged aviation facilities and injured personnel at Ali Al Salem airbase, while strikes on Camp Buehring damaged maintenance and refuelling facilities.

In Qatar, an Iranian strike damaged the early warning radar system at Al Udeid airbase, which houses the headquarters of US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) air operations. In Bahrain, an Iranian drone struck communications equipment at the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.

This damage raises a question about how much the US can still use these bases once they come under attack. Gerd Nonneman, a professor of international relations and Gulf studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera the war had shown that some bases were “themselves very vulnerable” and “unable to fulfil many of the tasks they were established for”.

Why bases are harder to defend

Mark Hilborne, a senior lecturer at the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera “large bases are indeed becoming more easily targeted”.

“One of the technologies that has allowed this, alongside fairly cheap ballistic missiles, is drones,” he added.

Iran has invested heavily in developing cheap, domestically produced drones that inflict disproportionate damage to targets and exhaust far more expensive interceptor missiles.

Meanwhile in the UK, drones present US airbases with different challenges. While the nature of the reported threat to RAF Mildenhall remains unclear, the Fairford case concerns an alleged plot. “The range of actors who might target bases has changed,” Urban Coningham, a research fellow and course lead at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in the UK, told Al Jazeera. “Bases are more vulnerable, and that changes the risk calculation.

“Anyone can manufacture a drone in a basement … People looking to create mischief or mayhem can recruit organised criminals, making attacks harder to attribute.”

All of that, he said, makes bases “more vulnerable, and that changes the risk calculation”.

‘Policy conundrum’

As Washington moves some military assets out of bases in the Gulf and Europe, it could also come to rely more heavily on Israel, its closest ally in the Middle East. Shabani said there were “already signs that CENTCOM is moving towards using Israel as a key forward base”.

Israel launched the war on Iran in February alongside the US. With the oil and gas exports on which Gulf economies depend at risk, keeping US forces nearby allows Washington to respond, but it also leaves those forces exposed to Iranian attacks.

“The longer-term solution is to work with partners and ensure that allied forces are ready to fend for themselves,” RUSI’s Coningham said.

“There is a debate within the US policy establishment, and the Iranians are referencing it and saying that as long as US forces are there, they are a target,” he said. “That is the policy conundrum for the US. Ultimately, they can’t see any alternative to having bases in some form.”

The meeting with Kushner and Witkoff comes after two days of trilateral talks in the UAE yielded no breakthrough.

United States envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have ⁠arrived in ⁠Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in their latest push for a peace deal ⁠in Ukraine.

Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy, met Kushner and Witkoff at their plane on Thursday morning and accompanied them to central Moscow.

The meeting comes on the heels of two days of trilateral peace talks in the United Arab Emirates that concluded in the capital, Abu Dhabi, on Wednesday with news of another planned major prisoner exchange but no breakthrough on ending the nearly five-year war.

The US said differences remained on major issues, including territory, but some progress had been made on post-war security guarantees.

Kyiv has strongly rejected Putin’s demands to surrender all of its eastern region of Donbas in ⁠return for peace.

The Abu Dhabi talks were the first direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine mediated by the US in nine months.

Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova, reporting from Moscow, said one of the goals of Thursday’s visit would be for the US team to persuade Putin to invite Europeans to the negotiation process.

“Ukraine and the US want the European partners to be involved while Moscow is adamant about talks without the Europeans, and that’s why they’ve been largely excluded from the process,” she said.

Shapovalova added that the US delegation would bring Putin an updated proposal for a peace plan and the presence of Dmitriev in the talks was an indication that they would address some of the more complex issues.

European leaders meet in Dublin

During the US-backed effort to revive talks, leaders from more than 40 European countries gathered in Dublin on Thursday for a summit focused on the continent’s security.

The meeting of the European Political Community (EPC) brought together heads of state and government from the European Union and other European countries, including the United Kingdom. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte also attended.

The EPC was established in 2022 as a forum for countries both inside and outside the 27-nation EU.

Zelenskyy and his European allies are expected to discuss this week’s talks in Abu Dhabi.

Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and Witkoff are scheduled to meet Zelenskyy in Dublin on Friday after talking to Putin.

Audrey Macalpine, reporting from Kyiv, said Ukrainians do not believe the talks in Moscow will yield results. “Over the past two days, we saw just another prisoner exchange, which has been the case in previous talks,” the correspondent said.

“When it comes to the negotiations, not much has changed in terms of where these two sides stand,” Macalpine added. “Perhaps the biggest thing of note [in the talks] was that they took place at all.”

Meanwhile, French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad on Thursday ‌said the ⁠EU will approve more sanctions ⁠against Russia.

“On Monday, we will take new sanctions against ⁠Russia on 150 additional ⁠entities, 50 banks, and it’s ⁠France which proposed the ⁠bulk ⁠of the entities to add,” Haddad ‌told LCI television.

An emotional war movie streaming on Netflix has been hailed a ‘masterpiece’ by viewers who have compared the ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘fantastic’ gem to Schindler’s List.

When it comes to truly powerful war films, one title currently streaming on Netflix has left viewers absolutely floored, with many unable to get past its ‘haunting’ and ‘visceral’ portrayal of a combat drama rooted in devastating true events from the Second World War.

Audiences are declaring the film will ‘stay in your mind well after it’s over’ – and the most gut-wrenching element is that it’s grounded in little-known real events from World War II. Some viewers argue that’s precisely what makes it far more hard-hitting than other war films of its kind.

The Bombardment, also known as The Shadow in My Eye and Skyggen i mit øje, is a 2021 Danish-language war film written and directed by Ole Bornedal.

The ‘brilliant’ war drama has absolutely ‘wrecked’ viewers emotionally, focusing on Operation Carthage – an air raid carried out by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Copenhagen during the Second World War – in which a school packed with children was tragically misidentified as a target and bombed.

The film’s official plot states: “The fates of several Copenhagen residents collide when a WWII bombing mission accidentally targets a school full of children.”

The Bombardment stars Alex Høgh Andersen, Fanny Bornedal, Ella Josephine Lund Nilsson, Ester Birch, Danica uri, Susse Wold, Bertram Bisgaard Enevoldsen, Malena Lucia Lodahl, Alban Lendorf, Caspar Phillipson, and Patricia Schumann alongside a larger ensemble cast, reports the Express.

Boasting a flawless 100% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film landed on Netflix in March 2022 and has since garnered rave reviews from critics and audiences alike.

One critic said of the war drama: “By showing us the people caught at the crossroads of beginnings and endings, this film becomes a timely nod to a difficult truth.”

Another reviewer stated: “While The Bombardment struggles to figure how to lay the foundation for the larger narrative of the film…this terrible tragedy is not for the faint of heart, but the story deserves to be told, and the impact of the lives lost should never be forgotten.”

Yet another critic added: “The Bombardment is a little unwieldy, but it’s reverential to its tragic central subject and buoyed by the work of some fine young actors.”

Viewers have been similarly transfixed, with one fan comparing it to Schindler’s List: “Wow……just Wow. I hope this won some really high award in Europe because it blew me away. What’s worse, is that this is a true story. This was as intense as Schindler’s List. This is a very serious film about a horrendous mistake when Britain bombed a Gestapo building in Denmark, but mostly hit a large school instead.”

Another viewer said: “Absolutely fantastic, heart breaking, intense all wrapped in one, amazing directing and even at the ending, moments stay in you’re mind. Great actors/actresses. Well portrayed 5 stars.”

Meanwhile, one fan called it a ‘masterpiece’: “Masterpiece. Very sad to see, but this was done so well. Acting on the spot, cinematography brilliant, you get sucked into the action and just brilliant. Very very tragic story, be warned this is hard to swallow…”

Another viewer said: “The Bombardment is a cinematic tour de force. It’s an emotional journey that simultaneously disturbs and inspires, showcasing the strength and resilience of the human spirit amidst the chaos of war. This film is more than just entertainment; it’s an important exploration of humanity in its darkest and brightest moments.”

The Bombardment is currently available to stream on Netflix.

Israel has reportedly ordered its military to step up readiness for possible strikes on Iran as Tehran warned it would expand the war beyond the region if attacked.

Israel’s security cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the military to step up preparations for an attack on Iran, Israeli media reported on Wednesday evening.

“The directives issued by the security cabinet to the Israeli military could lead it to carry out activities that could trigger a war,” public broadcaster KAN reported.

KAN said the directives were made public after Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot issued a statement telling Netanyahu – who is serving as prime minister in a caretaker capacity – not to deploy the military “without a direct and immediate threat” until the next government is formed.

Eisenkot was offered the chance to form a new government by Israeli President Isaac Herzog over the weekend after Netanyahu’s ruling coalition lost its parliamentary majority in the October elections.

Netanyahu, who is on the cusp of losing power if the opposition succeeds in forming a government, has been adamant that the war on Iran will continue until the collapse of the government in Tehran.

‘From West Asia to Europe’

Reports of Israeli preparations to attack Iran come at a time of intense diplomatic efforts to avert further conflict and reach a diplomatic solution.

US President Donald Trump has said that he is prepared to return to waging war if a diplomatic track offered by Qatar fails to facilitate a deal between Washington and Tehran.

Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei said in a social media post, “If the US launches another war against Iran, every military base involved in the aggression, from West Asia to Europe, will be a legitimate target for Iran’s lethal strikes.”

“No safe distance. No safe haven. No immunity,” he added.

Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar Atas, reporting from Tehran, said the Iranian leadership has been discussing whether or not to appoint the hawkish Rezaei as Iran’s new chief negotiator.

“In Tehran, there have been voices saying that if this status quo goes on for quite a long period of time, Iran will not wait and might take pre-emptive action,” Atas said, adding that the current lead negotiator, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has commented on Iran’s determination to move beyond this state of “no war, no peace” through “sustainable deterrence” if negotiations fail.

Ghalibaf told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview published on Wednesday that the Strait of Hormuz will “never return” to its status prior to the US-Israel war on Iran and that “the ball is now in the American court”.

“What stands in the way of an agreement is our lack of trust in the United States,” he said.

‘Position to declare victory’

In Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said Trump is still justifying why he went to war with Iran and saying that it would end soon.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also said the Trump administration’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving so effective that a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

“Over the last few days, both the president and Marco Rubio have said, effectively, that large-scale military engagement is over. They do not see the need to restart it unless Iran crosses red lines,” Fisher said, adding that the “key issue for this White House is always to be in a position where Trump can declare victory”.

“But it is clear there is some movement behind the scenes as far as negotiating a settlement,” he said.

Despite the push for peace, US forces “continue to work around the clock” in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for commercial shipping, strictly enforcing the “ironclad” naval blockade against Iran, according to the US Central Command.

Meanwhile, oil prices rose about 1 percent on Wednesday after Tehran rejected a US proposal to transfer its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium to a third country.

Brent futures settled $1.27, or 1.39 percent, higher at $92.76, while US West Texas Intermediate crude gained 49 cents, or 0.57 percent, to $86.53.

In the previous session, oil prices had initially fallen by more than $3 a barrel after US officials played down the need for further military strikes against Iran.

Prices later pared some losses when an Iranian official said no talks were taking place between the two sides.

Israel orders military to step up preparations for a possible attack on Iran, as Tehran says will retaliate if attacked.

EXCLUSIVE

Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator says Tehran is waiting for an official US response to its seven conditions for ending war.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, has told Al Jazeera that the Strait of Hormuz will “never return” to its status prior to the US-Israel war on Iran.

In an exclusive interview published on Wednesday, Ghalibaf said Iran and Oman reached an understanding to oversee the critical waterway as part of Tehran’s seven-point proposal to end the eight-month conflict.

“There are no ‘free waters’ [international waters] there, and the 1982 [UN Convention on the Law of the Sea] does not apply to the strait … The regulations within the Strait of Hormuz are governed by the laws of the two littoral states that border it,” he said.

Seven conditions

Ghalibaf said Tehran provided a clear response to the US through a Qatari mediator that included its seven conditions for peace talks, adding that Iran is waiting for an official response.

“The ball is now in the American court,” he said.

Iran’s conditions, as outlined by the chief negotiator, include lifting the US-imposed naval blockade and sanctions, the release of Iranian frozen funds, ending fighting on all fronts, and an explicit announcement of an end to the war.

He said these demands were part of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding signed in June and their implementation was necessary before entering negotiations with the US.

“If America limits itself to what has been agreed upon without making excessive demands or engaging in behaviour that breeds distrust, then, naturally, reaching an agreement is possible,” he said.

“What stands in the way of an agreement is our lack of trust in the United States.”

Renewed conflict

Ghalibaf said US officials asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to mediate direct negotiations with Tehran during a visit to Moscow.

He warned against new US attacks against Iran, saying that US President Donald Trump will face another defeat and political pressure from the new Congress that takes office in January.

Iran is determined to move beyond a state of “no war and no peace”, he said, urging a sustainable deterrent capability, including military capabilities.

Yemen mediation

On the ongoing fighting in Yemen between the Saudi-backed internationally recognised government forces and the Houthis, an armed group also known as Ansar Allah (Arabic for “Supporters of God”), Ghalibaf said that “no one should interfere” in it.

“If both the government in Yemen and Saudi Arabia were to ask for our help, we would certainly offer our assistance to help resolve their conflict,” he said.

Iran has previously offered to facilitate talks between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi group in October following a series of deadly attacks on the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has boosted crude outputs to their highest levels since before the Iran war disrupted supplies in February, triggering a global energy and shipping crisis.

An OPEC report issued on Wednesday said the world’s biggest oil exporter pumped 10.563 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude in October, up by over two million bpd from its September output.

That is the highest level since the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in late February, when Saudi Arabia produced 10.882 million bpd.

Rising oil production by Saudi Arabia and Russia helped increase outputs for the OPEC+ group, which includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and other nations including Russia.

OPEC+ pumped 41.23 million bpd in October, up by about 2.04 million bpd from September, according to its monthly report. Russia’s output increased as US President Donald Trump lifted sanctions on Russian energy and announced an “energy ceasefire” between Ukraine and Russia in mid-October.

Fuel prices ease

Riyadh sharply increased its production in February ahead of US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Saudi Arabia’s reported increase in oil production “could help ease some of the inflationary pressure facing American consumers”, Umud Shokri, an energy strategist and senior visiting fellow at George Mason University, told Al Jazeera.

“When more oil enters the global market, prices generally come under downward pressure, which can eventually translate into lower gasoline, transportation, and production costs in the United States,” he said. “However, higher Saudi production does not automatically mean lower prices at American gas stations.”

While US prices for petrol or gasoline fell below $4 a gallon for the first time in months this week, concerns over the stubbornly high cost of living drove the Democratic Party’s sweeping victories in US midterm elections last week.

Inflation has spiked since February, when it stood at 2.9 percent. Annual personal consumption expenditures (PCE) shot to a three-year high of 4.1 percent in May, when energy prices soared as the conflict closed off roughly one-fifth of global oil supplies transiting through the Strait of Hormuz.

Other producers managed to regain their supply positions, including the US.

However, the report noted a decline in imports by one of the world’s largest economies – Japan – where “crude imports fell sharply in September amid renewed disruptions to trade flows”.

The report data, while based on secondary sources, indicate that Gulf oil producers are recovering exports by using workarounds such as ship-to-ship transfers to bypass disruptions caused by the conflict.

“The UAE regained its position as the top supplier in September with a share of 49 percent, compared with 25 percent the previous month. The US was second with 28 percent, followed by Saudi Arabia with 14 percent,” the OPEC report noted.

The report indicated that Saudi Arabia’s exports have stabilised despite a secondary oil supply route – Saudi’s East-West Pipeline – coming under attack by Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen. The Houthis, who are fighting the Saudi-backed internationally recognised government in Aden, continued to target the pipeline this week.

Shokri explained that “one reason Saudi Arabia has been able to recover some of its exports is its East-West Pipeline, which allows crude oil to move across the country to the Red Sea port of Yanbu without passing through the Strait of Hormuz”.

While no longer an OPEC member, the United Arab Emirates remains a major supplier and “has a similar advantage through its pipeline to Fujairah, located outside the strait”, he said.

“The bigger picture is that Gulf countries are learning how costly dependence on a single maritime chokepoint can be,” Shokri warned. “They are looking for ways to make their exports more resilient, but Hormuz remains too important to the global energy market to be easily bypassed.”

Oil forecasts unchanged

Oil output in October was equivalent to 97 percent of the 42.72 million bpd produced by OPEC+ in February, according to Reuters.

OPEC left its forecasts for global oil demand growth unchanged after cutting them for six straight months, and made no changes to its 2027 outlook.

The producer group expects global oil demand to rise by 2.55 million bpd next year to an average of 108.3 million bpd. It forecasts growth of 180,000 bpd in 2026.

The report also forecasted that Qatar, Canada, Brazil and Argentina will drive growth in energy-related liquids production in 2027.

The report offered an optimistic outlook for the Middle East’s economic performance in the near term.

“In 2027, the region’s economy is expected to rebound and economic activity to recover, supported by a resilient non-oil sector and robust domestic demand,” it said.

Tehran, Iran – After months of oscillating between new bouts of fighting and negotiations, the administration of United States President Donald Trump has reportedly opted for a third option – gradual economic pressure on Tehran.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told his Group of Seven (G7) counterparts in Paris on Tuesday that a naval blockade, stringent sanctions and overland border disruptions could continue without a clear endpoint in sight, according to US media. He later said that Iran’s economy “continues to collapse” and predicted worsening conditions over the next one to three months.

Tehran-based economist and market analyst Isaac Saidian said that if the persistent economic siege on Iran brings the country’s oil incomes down to near-zero levels, Tehran will be faced with one of the most difficult challenges in its recent history.

“The issue is not just a decline in foreign currency incomes, but the government’s ability to account for current expenditure, paying salaries and pensions, providing essential goods, preserving the value of the national currency, and preventing budget deficits from turning into a new inflationary wave,” Saidian told Al Jazeera.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has indicated that the cash-strapped civilian government is preparing to deal with a prolonged economic crisis caused by siege and sanctions, but has admitted that the lingering “no war, no peace” conditions will be harmful.

But the authorities have stressed that there are no prospects of economic collapse. They have also raised the prospect of “breaking the blockade” if necessary, although it remains unclear by what means.

In a budget directive on November 3, Pezeshkian’s administration set out two scenarios. One was the continuation of sanctions, the maritime blockade and present regional conditions. The other prediction was an improvement of the situation involving fewer financial and commercial restrictions, including a substantial or complete removal of the blockade.

“The government must prepare for circumstances in which oil revenue reaches zero,” Mohammad Ghasemi, deputy for coordination of planning and budget at Iran’s Plan and Budget Organization, told local media on Monday about a contingency for next year.

The US military first imposed a naval blockade of Iran’s southern ports, through which most of the country’s trade passed, on April 13. A memorandum of understanding in June lifted the blockade and allowed some oil and trade to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but the deal fell apart within weeks. The second blockade has been in place since July 14, as Iran and the US fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US military says it has redirected 147 ships and disabled five while enforcing the blockade. It also claimed to have destroyed 10 Iranian oil tankers linked to the shadow fleet of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). According to the US Treasury, the blockade has led to Iran loading no oil onto vessels since August 25.

A late October assessment by Kpler said Iran’s oil production had fallen below 2 million barrels a day in the preceding months. Iran produced 3.45 million barrels of crude per day in January and 3.59 million in the following month, but Israel and the US’s war on Iran began on February 28.

The volume of Iranian crude and condensate floating outside the blockade zone had also fallen from 88.8 million barrels on July 14 to zero in mid-October. Because Chinese buyers generally pay one to two months after discharge, Kpler anticipated crude and condensate receipts potentially drying up around mid-December. Around 43 million barrels remain stranded inside the blockade area.

The US sanctions have also limited air travel to and from Iran, while a new US task force announced this week aims at closing or disrupting most of Iran’s land borders with its seven neighbours.

The Iranian economy has already been dealing with chronic inflation, falling investments and purchasing power, as well as banking and budget imbalances for years. So removing oil revenues will undoubtedly exacerbate the situation.

The government has increasingly relied on taxes to account for a larger share of the budget, but oil still accounted for roughly one-third of planned government funding in the 2026–27 budget proposal.

Economist Saidian said if oil revenues fall sharply, the government’s next step should be to review public spending. Cutting spending on overlapping administrative structures and opaque budgetary grants, while suspending low-return public investment projects, could ease some of the fiscal pressure on the state, he said.

Reforming tax exemptions and tackling tax evasion, as well as carefully managed bond issuance and sale of some non-essential government assets, are other options. But he cautioned that any abrupt drops in salaries, pensions, or social support budgets would only deepen poverty.

The government has signalled that it will likely have to resort to reducing fuel and other energy subsidies again, which will increase prices, but the process will be gradual to lessen the impact on inflation.

“Expanding non-oil exports and facilitating trade with neighbouring countries are also essential,” Saidian said. “Even so, these exports cannot be expected to replace oil revenue in the short term, especially while restrictions on banking, insurance and transport remain in place.”

Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said on Tuesday that next year’s budget would prioritise inflation control through fiscal discipline, household support and tighter oversight of banks. The administration will continue handing out electronic food coupons, although it has been struggling to preserve their value due to runaway prices.

Year-on-year inflation was at nearly 89 percent in the Iranian calendar month ending October 22, according to the Statistical Center of Iran.

Saidian pointed out that no amount of austerity measures or budget reforms can fully replace sustainable access to foreign trade, investment and foreign currency incomes, so exiting inflationary stagnation for a prolonged period would require reduced tensions.

“The historical significance of the 2027-28 budget lies in what it can reveal about how prepared Iran’s government is to move beyond an oil-dependent economy and toward transparent, accountable fiscal governance. The budget should not merely be a plan to manage the government in a difficult year, but a plan to prevent passing on today’s crisis to future generations and to start structural reforms in Iran’s economy,” he said.

“The greatest danger is not that the government might run short of funds for a few months. The real danger is that it could stay afloat on paper while passing the cost of doing so on to the public, leaving society poorer, eroding the middle class, widening poverty and weakening the country’s productive capacity.”

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving so effective that a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

His remarks are the latest in an often-evolving series of messages from US President Donald Trump’s administration on the conflict with Iran. They also come after a crushing midterm defeat for Trump’s Republican Party, which the president acknowledged was likely partly driven by public opposition to the war.

So how do Rubio’s latest remarks compare with the positions of other administration officials, and what do they say about the state of the conflict?

What have Trump, Rubio and Vance said about the conflict?

Rubio made his latest comments on Tuesday after meeting with foreign ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) forum in Paris.

He said he told G7 allies that “the economic campaign [against Iran] is so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations”.

“We don’t need to conduct military strikes if we’re achieving the same objective through economic means and economic pressure. That’s not stalemate,” Rubio said.

“The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse,” he added.

Rubio also pushed G7 allies to help “protect shipping” around the embattled Strait of Hormuz, where he said US forces would stay.

The secretary of state’s remarks were largely in line with Trump’s comments on Monday, when the president said further strikes against Iran were “quite unlikely”.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the US’s Gulf allies preferred a continuation of the “status quo”, referring to the US’s blockade of Iranian ports. Trump added that there appears to be “positive momentum” towards ending the conflict, but that the US remains “locked and loaded” should circumstances change.

Vice President JD Vance, who has been more critical of the war and recently wrote a lengthy social media post blaming the Republican Party’s midterm defeat on the conflict, favours a deal with Iran, which Trump does not believe is possible right now, the Reuters news agency cited an informed source as saying.

Between sanctions and diplomacy: What are the divisions on Iran war strategy?

Negotiations to end the US-Iran conflict have been largely stalled for months, as Iran continues to target vessels it claims are violating its conditions for transit through the Strait of Hormuz and the US ramps up sanctions against Iran and continues to blockade Iranian ports, with plans to block Iran’s land-based supply routes as well.

Back in September, Iran proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks. Tehran has since said that timeline could be brought down to two days. Tehran’s demands for the US include lifting sanctions Washington imposed after the collapse of a June memorandum of understanding (MoU), reducing the US military presence in the region, reinstating oil waivers and releasing frozen Iranian funds.

Trump, torn between restarting an unpopular war or pushing harder for a deal with Tehran, has for now settled on a middle ground: doubling down on the pressure campaign against Iran while avoiding a return to full-scale military action, according to officials quoted by Axios.

That strategy is backed by several key administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Axios cited US officials as saying.

However, several US allies in the region, including Pakistan, Iraq and Turkiye, are concerned that a drawn-out US pressure campaign against Iran could hurt their own business interests, said one official cited by the news outlet.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that a long-term US policy of intensive sanctions and a blockade against Iran would only prolong an “unstable status quo” that would eventually escalate into more military confrontation.

However, he said one “walk-away” option for Trump could be to quietly relax the sanctions and blockade while maintaining them “on paper”.

In this case, “Trump walks away and claims to retain the blockade and sanctions infrastructure, but in reality, allows it to imperceptibly wither away,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. “The blockade begins to loosen, sanctions enforcement begins to decay, and slowly but surely, Asian and Middle Eastern countries begin trading with and investing in Iran.”

“A new equilibrium emerges in which sanctions enforcement is strong enough for the US to claim the restrictions are still in place, yet weak enough to prevent Tehran from challenging the new status quo,” Parsi said.

Have the midterm election results impacted Trump’s strategy?

Yes, according to analysts.

Negar Mortazavi, senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC, said the Republicans’ resounding election defeat “dramatically raised the political cost of more escalation” and gave the Democrats a stronger mandate to challenge the war.

“If Democrats unite and use their new power aggressively, they can make it increasingly difficult for Trump to continue the war, pressuring him to end it,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.

“A diplomatic breakthrough is not guaranteed, but the political and strategic costs of escalation keep growing, making another round of war less likely,” she added.

Both Trump and Vance have acknowledged that the Iran war was partly to blame for the Republicans’ loss, with Trump saying voters were not ready for petrol prices to rise.

According to a poll by Reuters/Ipsos completed on Monday, 71 percent of Americans – including 93 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans –  favour congressional legislation that would halt the Iran war.

What is Iran saying?

Iranian officials have upped their rhetoric even as Washington appears to be moving away from military escalation.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Tuesday said the war will “not end either through military means or by increasing sanctions”, but only through “using the language of respect”.

In comments carried by Iran’s IRNA news agency, he urged the US “to act on Iran’s demands and conditions”, adding that Trump “should have realised much earlier that he has not achieved, and will not achieve, any of his goals in the war with Iran”.

Iran’s top security chief Mohsen Rezaei, in a social media post on Monday, said the US government had been “wrecked” by the war and that it was time for it to “surrender” to Iran’s demands.

Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, noted that Iran’s language has become “more confident than ever before”.

“They’re trying to convey to the public, internally, and also to the Americans, that there is no way this war can be declared over without responding to those conditions presented by Iran during the negotiations,” said Vall.

What is the current status of diplomacy?

There are mixed messages.

The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday said that Doha is “working tirelessly” in its ongoing mediation efforts, and has received positive reactions from both sides.

Trump, the day before, after hosting Qatar’s prime minister at the White House, also spoke of “momentum towards the end of this conflict”, adding that “Iran is talking to us, and they’re talking very politely”.

Rubio, for his part, said the US remains “open to diplomacy”, but called Iran’s current demands “totally unrealistic”.

“We expect that could change – and if it does, we’re prepared for diplomacy,” he said.

Iranian officials, meanwhile, have appeared more sceptical of the latest reports of mediation, insisting that the US must accept their demands.

Rezaei on Tuesday said there ⁠were no negotiations taking place between Tehran and Washington and that Iran would retaliate against any new US attack by targeting US bases “far away”. He also said Iran would not let any of its enriched nuclear material leave the country, ruling out a concession the US has sought in potential nuclear talks.

In a social media post, Rezaei went on to accuse the US of “manufacturing FAKE NEWS about imaginary talks”.

As the Russian-Ukrainian war, which long ago entered a phase of attrition, grinds on, Russia, Ukraine and the United States began a new round of US-brokered trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on November 10. The talks are scheduled to continue on November 11.

The talks follow a successful humanitarian operation in Oleshky, a southern Ukrainian town that has been occupied by Russian forces since 2022.

Starting in December 2025, Oleshky experienced a food crisis that worsened dramatically in the summer of this year. Over the years under Russian occupation, its population declined from 25,000 to 2,000 people, and the food crisis threatened the survival of those who remained. In the summer, however, Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services agreed to work on a local ceasefire in order to evacuate Oleshky’s inhabitants – if they wanted to leave – either to Ukraine or to Russia.

The humanitarian mission went surprisingly smoothly. Both sides stood by the ceasefire agreement, hundreds of people were successfully evacuated (mostly to Ukraine) from the long-suffering town, and it was extraordinary to see the Ukrainian and Russian human rights representatives, Dmytro Lubinets and Yana Lantratova, coordinating the humanitarian mission peacefully and with mutual respect.

Can this successful mission lay the groundwork for – or at least contribute to – progress in the Abu Dhabi peace negotiations brokered by the US between Russia and Ukraine? Several factors suggest that this is unlikely.

One immediate indicator is that the success of the mission in Oleshky was driven not by Moscow’s desire for peace but by its willingness to pander to Donald Trump’s vanity against the background of his animosity towards Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It has long been known that Trump wanted to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. However, despite his claims that he has ended countless wars around the world, Trump is unlikely to receive this prestigious award. Today, it seems that the Trump family’s plan is to try to secure the Nobel Peace Prize for Melania Trump.

The Oleshky humanitarian mission seems to be a case in point. A few days before the ceasefire, the White House announced that it was Melania Trump – in “her formal role as Exclusive Intermediary” – who had initiated discussions on the ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, thus dismissing not only the Vatican’s efforts to secure the Oleshky ceasefire, but also the fact that Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services had already begun discussing the temporary armistice in the summer. Moscow, however, readily backed Washington’s version of Melania Trump’s critical role in the agreement, and Kyiv had to align with that version, too.

Both Russia and Ukraine are seeking to win Donald Trump over to their side, but while both countries eventually agreed to play along with the White House’s promotion of the US first lady as a “peacemaker”, Moscow presumably considered that the success of the Oleshky humanitarian mission would benefit it more than Kyiv. Putin’s apparent reasoning here is that Moscow’s apparent willingness to cooperate may deepen Trump’s disaffection with Zelenskyy and strengthen his delusion that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is blocking the path to the end of the war. For Putin, winning Trump over would be a way to continue the aggression against Ukraine under more favourable circumstances – not a way to come to peace with Ukraine.

Another factor suggesting that the Abu Dhabi talks are unlikely to result in progress towards lasting peace is that Moscow appointed Vladimir Medinsky, Putin’s aide, as the head of the Russian delegation for the talks in the UAE. Medinsky headed the Russian delegations for the negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul in 2022 and 2025, and his reappointment as the delegation’s leader for Abu Dhabi suggests that the Russian position on Ukraine has not changed since the Istanbul negotiations. The only acceptable outcome of the war for Russia remains Ukraine’s surrender, and surrender was unacceptable to Ukraine in 2022 and 2025, and remains so today.

However, Putin appears to believe that Russia is in a stronger negotiating position than Ukraine, and his belief is grounded in both erroneous and realistic assumptions.

On the one hand, it is a mistake on Putin’s part to assume that the constant Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, including energy and water supplies, can undermine Ukrainians’ resilience to the point where they will demand that the authorities surrender to Russia or rebel against the government. Ukraine is fighting an existential war, in which surrender means death, torture and ethnic cleansing – practices characteristic of Russian rule in the currently occupied Ukrainian territories. Ukrainians simply have no choice other than to resist the Russian aggression.

On the other hand, Moscow is correctly assessing developments across the West, where continuing support for Ukraine is being challenged on several fronts. While European nations keep financing weapons supplies for Ukraine’s defence, a large share of the weapons the country needs comes from the US. The joint US-Israeli war against Iran depleted some US stockpiles, and US capacity to restock them is limited, which creates a significant gap in Ukraine’s offensive and defensive efforts, especially when it comes to air defence. The Democratic Party’s victory in the US midterm elections will hardly change the situation, even though the party has been more favourable to Ukraine than the Republicans: the shortage of weapons that the US can sell to Ukraine via its allies is a material rather than a political issue.

Moreover, the continued military and economic support that Ukraine receives from its European and other allies depends not only on the political consensus among those allies about the need for such support, but also on the individual positions of those allies. France will hold a presidential election in the first half of 2027, potentially followed by snap parliamentary elections, and the right-wing nationalist party National Rally has a good chance of securing both the presidency and the premiership of the French Republic. Its informal leader, Marine Le Pen, who has announced that she will stand for the presidency in the spring of next year, has already said that France can no longer provide financial assistance to Ukraine, implying that she would stop that financial aid if elected president. Despite the fact that France is the second-largest economy in the EU, it is only the fifth-largest bilateral EU donor to Ukraine; but France is an influential European country, and if it stops financial support for Ukraine, this may produce a domino effect among some other EU countries and create more economic and internal political pressure on those EU governments that continue to aid Ukraine.

Marine Le Pen, whose party received financial support from Russia in 2014 and who met Putin personally in Moscow in 2017, is most likely Russia’s best bet for 2027 with regard to weakening Ukraine’s defence. But this is not the only bet. In Germany, the right-wing nationalist party Alternative for Germany is surging in the polls, and it is the largest openly pro-Putin and pro-Trump party in the EU. And Trump himself, despite his Republican Party’s losses in the 2026 US midterm elections, remains one of Russia’s important bets in the context of the Russian war.

The fact that Russia participated in the trilateral negotiations in Abu Dhabi is not a sign that it is ready for peace with Ukraine. It is not – Russia hopes that Western support for Ukraine will wither away, and believes it has the resources to wait for that hypothetical moment.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Despite bipartisan opposition to the war, efforts to impeach Hegseth were squashed as Iran denies US, Tehran talks

Abi Adi, Tigray, Ethiopia – Classrooms that once echoed with the voices of students have become homes for families displaced by the war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.

At a former high school in Abi Adi, families who fled Western Tigray have spent years waiting to return home. Mattresses, cooking utensils and personal belongings have replaced school furniture as families share rooms originally designed for students.

What was supposed to be temporary shelter is now where children are growing up far from home.

“We thought we would stay here for a few months before returning home. It has been years now. Our children are growing up in this school, and we still don’t know when we will be able to go back,” said Tewolde, who was displaced from Setit Humera in Western Tigray.

His hopes of returning have been further undermined by renewed fighting, four years after Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed an agreement to end their devastating war.

The Pretoria agreement, signed in November 2022, ended two years of war that left an estimated 500,000 people dead, including from violence, famine and the collapse of healthcare, and displaced millions. But it left major political and territorial disputes unresolved, particularly over Western Tigray, where Amhara forces took control during the war.

The area remains disputed, and the return of displaced Tigrayans has been one of the most contentious outstanding issues.

Disagreements over the withdrawal of non-federal forces, disarmament and the region’s political administration further complicated implementation. Relations between the federal government and Tigray’s authorities deteriorated, while divisions within the region deepened.

Fighting escalated on September 22, 2026. TPLF forces launched an offensive the following day and seized Mekelle’s airport. Both sides disputed responsibility for the escalation, the most serious since the 2020–2022 war.

Federal forces and allied fighters counterattacked, retaking Mekelle on October 4 as Tigrayan fighters withdrew. Fighting continued elsewhere in the region, however, underscoring the fragility of the security situation.

The federal government subsequently established a six-month caretaker administration to govern Tigray, restore public services and prepare the region for elections. But the change in regional leadership has not ended the fighting, and the underlying political disputes have remained.

In an October 8 letter published the following day, Human Rights Watch and other organisations warned the United Nations Human Rights Council that renewed hostilities threatened to undo the Pretoria agreement. They cited reports of drone strikes, mortar fire and artillery attacks, including in populated areas and near camps for internally displaced people, and called for international scrutiny of violations by all parties.

The renewed fighting has exposed how little the agreement did to resolve the heart of the conflict.

Displacement with no end in sight

For families in Abi Adi, the unresolved status of Western Tigray has meant years of uncertainty.

Many fled their homes when the war broke out in 2020 and have struggled to rebuild their lives. At the displacement site, families say they face shortages of food, clean water and essential medicines. Overcrowding has made daily life particularly difficult for children, older people and those with chronic illnesses.

Selass, an internally displaced mother of two from Humera, said the lack of affordable medicine was a constant worry.

“Sometimes, we take our children to the clinic, but the medicines they need are not available. We are told to buy them from private pharmacies, but we have no money,” she said.

For families who have already spent years away from home, renewed fighting has brought renewed fears that their displacement could become permanent.

Hospitals struggle to treat patients

The crisis has also left Tigray’s health facilities struggling with shortages of essential medicines and medical supplies.

Doctors at Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said the facility lacked sufficient supplies of essential medicines.

Patients were increasingly being asked to buy prescribed drugs from private pharmacies, where prices were often beyond their means.

“Patients have to go outside the hospital and buy the medicines they need from private pharmacies. But not everyone can afford them, and this makes it difficult for patients to get the treatment they need,” one doctor said.

Although humanitarian organisations have continued to provide medical assistance and some hospitals have resumed operations, significant gaps in healthcare remain.

Years of conflict have damaged health infrastructure and depleted medical supplies. The recent hostilities risk further disrupting services that have yet to recover.

Former fighters seek a way out of war

While displaced families wait to return home, thousands of former fighters are beginning the process of leaving military life behind.

On November 5, Ethiopia’s National Rehabilitation Commission said about 5,500 former Tigrayan fighters were receiving rehabilitation training at a centre in Mekelle. The programme aims to help former fighters return to civilian life through education, vocational training and employment opportunities.

Alem, a 28-year-old former fighter from Mekelle, said she wanted the chance to build a future beyond the conflict.

“I want to have a future and build a life for myself. I want to get married and have children, like any other woman. I survived the last war, and I do not want to go through the same experience again. I have spent enough time living with uncertainty. I want to leave that life behind and have the chance to plan my own future,” she said.

Atsbeha, another former fighter, joined the military in 2020, abandoning his university studies. He now hopes to return to civilian life and find work.

“I left my university studies and joined the military in 2020. But now I want to leave that life behind. I want to work, earn a living and rebuild the future I put on hold. I do not want to keep fighting. I want to have a chance to live a normal life,” he said.

But renewed fighting threatens to undermine a programme that depends on security and practical support to help former fighters make a lasting transition to civilian life.

There are also concerns about whether young people in Tigray can freely choose to remain civilians. In a September 25 statement, UN human rights chief Volker Turk condemned reports of forced recruitment by the TPLF, including of children and previously demobilised fighters. He also raised concerns about arbitrary conscription by government forces.

The allegations highlight the environment in which former fighters are trying to leave military life behind – voluntary disarmament cannot succeed if people continue to face pressure to join armed groups.

For those entering the rehabilitation programme, access to education, employment and lasting security will be essential to building a life outside the military.

In Abi Adi, displaced families are still living in classrooms. At hospitals, patients struggle to find medicines. Former fighters are trying to leave military life behind, but renewed fighting threatens to pull the region back into war.

For Selass, the years of displacement and the prospect of another war have left one wish above all others:

“We survived one war and lost almost everything. We don’t want our children to experience another one. All we want is to return home and live normally.”

A new poll shows that the majority of Americans want the Democrats in Congress this January to deliver an end to the war in Iran, reverse US President Donald Trump’s trade policies, and bring down the high cost of living.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday found that 71 percent of Americans supported Congress passing legislation to end the war with Iran, including 93 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans. About 62 percent backed repealing Trump’s import tariffs, while nine in 10 respondents said Congress should focus on the cost of living during its first 100 days.

The war with Iran and Trump’s tariffs have both contributed to economic pressures, linking voters’ concerns about living costs to the administration’s foreign and trade policies.

Americans also expect some degree of cooperation between the White House and the incoming Congress. Large majorities of respondents from both parties said it was important for Trump to work with Democrats, and for Democratic leaders to try to work with the president.

Political retaliation against the Trump administration is a lower priority. Forty-two percent said it would be bad for the country if the new Congress tried to impeach Trump, compared with 33 percent who thought it would be good.

Democrats will have between 54 and 56 Senate seats next year, depending on results from uncalled races in Mississippi and Alaska. But delivering on voter priorities could still be difficult. Most bills need 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster, and Trump can veto legislation that passes both chambers.

Repealing tariffs or reversing other administration policies would therefore require either sufficient Republican support or a willingness to confront the president politically.

Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver, said voters are motivated by opposition to the Trump administration on several fronts, including the economy, the war, corruption and immigration enforcement.

“They want to see Democrats working to fix these things. And also to some extent, to hold the Trump administration accountable,” Masket told Al Jazeera.

A fight over who leads the Democrats

The pressure to deliver on those priorities is unfolding alongside a growing dispute over who should lead the Democratic Party.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll did not measure public support for individual congressional leaders. It did, however, find that the Democratic Party itself remains unpopular, with 45 percent of respondents viewing it favourably and 51 percent unfavourably.

Hakeem Jeffries is widely expected to become speaker of the House, despite calls for an alternative. No challenger has publicly emerged, but a Change.org petition urging Democrats to reject his leadership has attracted more than one million signatures. House Democrats are due to hold leadership elections on November 18 and 19.

The Senate contest is less settled. Chuck Schumer, who has led Senate Democrats since 2017, faces calls to step aside. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen has said Schumer should not receive a “blank check” and is considering a possible challenge. Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed has backed Van Hollen.

The backlash reflects broader dissatisfaction with the party’s direction. Jeffries and Schumer have been criticised over their positions on Israel and Gaza, their relationships with corporate donors and pro-Israel lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and what voters see as a failure to confront the Trump administration forcefully.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which counts several elected officials among its members, has not backed Jeffries or Schumer for their respective leadership posts. In a statement to Al Jazeera, the DSA said Democrats must reject “half-measures” and deliver on popular policies.

“We the people must be a counterweight both to the internal politics of Congress and the corporate donors who want to keep business as usual,” DSA spokesperson Priscilla Yeverino wrote to Al Jazeera.

Political commentator Bea Neilson said some progressives see the two leaders as representing an older Democratic establishment that is out of step with the party’s base.

“They want an avatar of a fighter,” Neilson told Al Jazeera.

But Neilson argues that the role of the House speaker is not simply to dictate the party’s legislative agenda. Rather, they respond to the positions of lawmakers across the caucus, working with policy committees and other groups to identify legislation that can secure enough votes to pass.

Individual members or blocs of lawmakers can withhold their support, making the job an exercise in negotiating competing interests as much as setting political direction.

Masket agreed that the effectiveness of congressional leaders is often measured less by their public speaking than by their ability to manage their caucuses and get legislation through Congress.

“People wanting their speaker or a Senate majority leader to be a more inspiring leader, I think they’re just asking for the wrong person,” Masket said. “That’s the wrong title for that role.”

That role, he suggested, may fall more naturally to the next generation of presidential contenders, who are expected to begin emerging early next year.

The leadership elections will take place before the new Congress begins in January. The larger question for Democrats is whether their leaders can turn a sweeping electoral mandate into tangible change.