Why conflict in the Middle East is far from over
The full effects of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities won’t be known for a long time – if ever – but some things are starting to become clear.
Two weeks after the US air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, assessing damage to the sites and to Iran’s nuclear program more broadly remains contested and politicised. The broader impacts, however – inside Iran and across the Middle East – are becoming clearer.
It will be a long time, if ever, before we know the full effect on the key targets, which included Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment sites at Fordow and Natanz and its nuclear technology centre near Isfahan.
US President Donald Trump claimed, only hours after the attack, that Iran’s nuclear capability had been “completely obliterated”, but military officers were more cautious. US intelligence agencies issued differing assessments before and after the strikes, as did Israel and the UN.
Though frustrating, this is perfectly normal in battle damage assessment, which – even in an age of ubiquitous technical surveillance – remains more art than science.
Battle damage assessment draws on numerous sources and collection methods, from satellite imagery and reconnaissance overflights to signals intelligence and human sources on the ground or online. Analysts then fuse several inputs into an overall assessment that is updated as new information comes in. For nuclear targets, measurement and signature intelligence, or MASINT – the use of specialised sensors and remote-detection tools to spot telltale radioactivity or chemical indicators – also plays a role.
MASINT is a highly technical field with several subdisciplines, one of which is nuclear intelligence. It is used for battle damage assessment and to validate arms-limitation agreements as part of a broader set of capabilities known as national technical means.
National technical means have been built into international arms treaties since the 1970s, to verify compliance with nuclear test bans or limits on nuclear-capable platforms. The difficulty is such that from the early 1990s the US, Russia and 32 other countries signed the Open Skies Treaty, allowing agreed overt surveillance overflights of their nuclear facilities (among other things) to facilitate verification. That treaty is still in effect, though the US and Russia withdrew from it in 2020 and 2021 respectively, and neither Israel nor Iran has ever been a signatory.
Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) but repeatedly has been found in breach of its obligations and this week announced the suspension of all co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN body that, among other things, monitors compliance with the treaty. Iranian leaders are considering leaving the NPT altogether.
For now, the country is suspending co-operation until it receives guarantees for the safety of nuclear sites and scientists, several of whom were killed during the air campaign and in previous targeted assassinations. With the IAEA excluded and Iran considering withdrawal from the NPT, UN inspectors cannot check on the sites that were hit and thus are blind to the outcome of the strikes.
Without ground inspections, remote-observation tools still can support some degree of evaluation.
For example, if airborne sensors detected a radiation leak from one or more sites, this might indicate that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile – estimated by the IAEA at more than 440kg – had been hit, or a containment vessel or centrifuge at one of the uranium enrichment sites had been breached. No leak has been reported and satellite images show a convoy of trucks moving into the underground Fordow site immediately before the attack, suggesting the stockpile may have been dispersed. Until the uranium is accounted for, any battle damage assessment must remain tentative.
But battle damage assessment is in any case an educated guess. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, pressed to explain why he was claiming complete obliteration even as the whereabouts of the stockpile remained unknown, told CNN: “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran, so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
Listening to Hegseth, I was reminded of the 2003 Dora Farms strike outside Baghdad, in which the US Air Force used bunker-buster bombs and Tomahawk missiles to try to kill Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons in the opening moments of the war.
Like the Iran strike on June 22, Dora was a complex and dangerous operation that was bravely and flawlessly executed: stealth aircraft made it to the target undetected, returning unscathed through some of the world’s most heavily defended airspace. Bombs and missiles hit their aimpoints and exploded as intended.
Yet the strike, for all its tactical brilliance, was still a strategic failure: Saddam and his sons were not at Dora. None of them had visited the place since 1995 and the entire underground bunker complex in which they were believed to be hiding turned out not to even exist. We discovered this fact only two months later, when ground troops finally reached the site.
In effect, technical precision of the kind displayed in the June 22 strikes lets modern militaries put bombs on to any spot they choose, but figuring out what is on that spot and what effect those bombs or missiles may have is a different matter. Without boots on the ground it is often difficult to verify the effectiveness of airstrikes.
In today’s polarised environment, politicisation of battle damage assessment also is inevitable, unfortunately. This is particularly so since, right until the eve of the strike, US intelligence was assessing that Iran had suspended its nuclear program in 2003 and not reauthorised it. US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to that effect in March when releasing the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community. Media on both sides of politics tried to inflame this into a personal dispute between Trump and Gabbard, but Gabbard was simply quoting a consensus document that reflected the views of all agencies, which have been consistent for a decade under presidents of both parties.
Trump’s dismissiveness suggests he was unaware of his own intelligence community’s views or influenced by Israeli assessments, which have claimed for years that Iran is months or weeks away from creating an atomic bomb.
The same partisan divide dominated discussion of a leaked US Defence Intelligence Agency document, which suggested the strikes had not destroyed the core elements of Iran’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months. An appropriate response might have been to ask whether this was the same program that US intelligence agencies were assessing as “suspended and not reauthorised” only weeks earlier.
This would be unfair, of course: after the Iraq WMD fiasco of 2002-03, the intelligence community has a credibility issue when it comes to weapons of mass destruction in Middle Eastern countries, so it’s understandable that analysts would be extremely cautious on this question.
The bigger issue – particularly for people in Trump’s MAGA movement, many of whom oppose further foreign “forever wars” and are suspicious of outside influence within the US government – was whether the President was listening more to the intelligence service of a foreign country (one with a clear motivation to pull the US into its war with Iran) than to his own spy agencies. Perhaps, also, Trump cared less about intelligence assessments than about an opportunity to seize control of the conflict and end it, as he sought to do within hours of the attack.
While battle damage assessment remains contested, the broader implications of the strike are already becoming clearer, with each main regional player taking advantage of the situation to consolidate its control.
In Iran, a widespread crackdown on dissidents and anyone suspected of working with Israel to support its air campaign has resulted in dozens of arrests and several executions by hanging, and more arrests are imminent.
Despite the destruction of much of its command structure and the deaths of dozens of high-ranking military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, the Iranian government seems solidly in control for now, despite calls for regime change from outside the country, including from Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the former shah. Iranian security forces have also seized the opportunity to crack down on the country’s Kurdish, Arab and Baloch ethnic minorities, whose loyalty Iran has always doubted.
Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran are being forcibly returned to Afghanistan, with expulsions accelerating dramatically since the US strikes. These are Afghans loyal to the internationally recognised Republic of Afghanistan, who fled after the chaotic US withdrawal and subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021. More than 160,000 of them are former soldiers of the Afghan National Army, many of whom have a Taliban price on their heads because they worked with Americans, Australians and other allies during the long war there.
These men and their families, including women and infant children, are being expelled into the Registan region of southwestern Afghanistan – one of the most desolate and inhospitable high-desert environments on the planet – or directly across the border into the Afghan provinces of Nimruz and Herat, and straight into the hands of the Taliban, where some have been tortured and executed.
Iran has already expelled up to 400,000 Afghans and plans to expel up to two million more by the end of the year. With a fragile Afghan economy, outlying districts already turning against a fractured Taliban regime, and no capacity to support the newcomers, this is an enormous humanitarian catastrophe in the making. It is front-page news across south and central Asia, as well as in Iran, but has received next to no coverage in Western media.
Farther afield, Iran appears to be ramping up its surveillance of targets overseas, including military and political figures in the US and Europe, critical infrastructure, and Iranian dissidents.
A Danish national was arrested in Germany last week, accused of gathering information on Jewish communities and buildings; there have also been several incidents of potential sabotage, including explosions on at least one oil tanker near the Persian Gulf.
The US Department of Homeland Security raised its threat alert in the wake of the airstrikes, and the State Department issued a worldwide alert to Americans overseas warning of increased risk. Other countries have done the same.
In response to the destruction of its air defences – and the loss of several of its outdated fighter aircraft – in the Israeli air campaign, Iran allegedly is seeking to buy modern Chinese warplanes of the kind that were widely regarded as performing very well during the brief India-Pakistan conflict this year.
Iran also seems to be seeking additional air defence missile systems and rocket technology from its allies Russia and China, both of which condemned the US strike and have mutual co-operation treaties with Tehran.
For its part, Israel enjoys air superiority over Iranian airspace, and Israeli planners have proposed a campaign to continue operating over Iran to prevent the redevelopment of Iranian air defences or combat aircraft. Ongoing Israeli incursions may or may not prevent Iran from rebuilding its defences; they also seem incompatible with the ceasefire agreement both sides reluctantly accepted after Trump’s intervention. In any case, air incursions alone will struggle to stop ballistic missiles of the kind Iran has been launching into Israel, most recently inflicting severe damage on the Israeli port of Haifa and its oil refinery.
In part because of the ongoing risk of Iranian missile strikes, Israel is seeking replenishment of its air and missile defence systems (both the short-range Iron Dome and, more important, the longer-range Archer system) from US sources.
These systems were beginning to run out of interceptors after two weeks of saturation attacks by Iranian drones and missiles, and this was one reason for Israel’s urgency in pushing for the US to join the war, as it did in striking Iran’s nuclear sites.
At the same time, Israel’s vulnerability gives Trump leverage, which he appears to have used immediately in forcing a ceasefire, even as Israeli analysts claim that Iran’s nuclear capability remains partially intact and that more strikes may be needed to finish the job. Trump also used his leverage to push for Syria-Israel talks, seeking to normalise relations between Tel Aviv and Damascus. This week the US lifted sanctions on Syria, despite the new government’s acknowledged jihadist links, as part of a push for a peace deal and normalisation of relationships across the region.
Trump has also renewed his call for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and Israeli leaders are publicly supporting it ahead of a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House next week.
Hamas has yet to agree, the sticking point being that Israel and the US are seeking a 60-day pause, with the potential for a permanent peace agreement to emerge from it, whereas Hamas wants an end to the war altogether.
Ahead of that potential ceasefire, Israel this week launched its largest bombardment for months into Gaza while also expanding operations in the West Bank.
Overall, then, the specific result of the US strikes themselves is still unclear and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, but the broader regional implications are already beginning to emerge.
The Israeli and Iranian governments, despite the US-imposed ceasefire, are still jockeying for advantage over each other and could resume open conflict at any moment. American political polarisation aside, the US strikes have created leverage for Trump that he seems determined to exploit for a peace deal and to normalise relations across the region, while avoiding – in part because of vociferous opposition from his own base – any further military engagement, let alone boots on the ground.
As always, the main victims here are ordinary civilians – Iranians living under a heavy authoritarian crackdown amid the threat of renewed Israeli airstrikes; Israelis sheltering from Iranian drone and missile attacks; starving Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and unable to access humanitarian support without risk of being shot; hundreds of thousands of Afghans facing expulsion into the desert or murder by the Taliban; and Syrians struggling to recover from 15 years of war.
Amid wider uncertainty and despite the potential for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, one thing of which we can be sure is that this conflict, unfortunately, is far from over.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007. He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to US General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, then a special adviser for counter-insurgency to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of six books, including most recently The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.
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