![\"US-Israel](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-128951099,imgsize-91876,width-400,resizemode-4\/trump-netanyahu.jpg\" "\\"President")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThere\u2019s a phenomenon, popular among OSINT enthusiasts on Twitter, called monitoring the situation. For those lucky enough to lead real lives, monitoring the situation is the Olympics of toxic masculinity, referring to the act of following conflicts on social media. It is a multi-disciplinary pursuit that can include checking airplanes and closed airspaces, comparing different weapon systems, checking the delivery volume of pizza outlets in Washington, finding obscure facts about obit writers, digging up old \u2018pookie\u2019 tweets of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, noticing that Reza Pahlavi has an exceptionally large nose, or wondering why Donald Trump exhibits all the attributes of an Ottoman emperor (PS: All references tweets are at the bottom). In the last three days, social media users exhibited unprecedented levels of monitoring the situation, since the US and Israel launched operations that have decapitated the so-called Axis of Resistance. But what is the Axis of Resistance? Don\u2019t worry, because even if you haven\u2019t monitored the situation, here\u2019s a small breakdown of what has happened in the Middle East<\/a> so far.<\/p>\n There are pivotal moments in history that end up changing the course of the world.An Italian confusing the Caribbean for India. An East India Company agent turning up in the court of a Mughal ruler. An Archduke getting murdered. An Austrian getting rejected from art school. A Swiss patent clerk getting bored at his job. Japanese pilots deciding to fly a little more than usual. A plane flying into a building. A virus escaping from a lab. A former president mocking a real-estate developer at a White House dinner. And with the benefit of hindsight, a few Hamas terrorists paragliding into a music festival in Israel. Now, as historians are wont to point out, the fissures in the Middle East certainly did not start on October 7, 2023, but its events certainly accelerated the events that we see today.<\/p>\n If you have ever been on social media, you must have seen the memes: Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, often used to depict Iran as some sort of secular utopia where John Lennon\u2019s Imagine met Rick Blaine\u2019s Casablanca. And then there was the Islamic Revolution, which brought to power the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its external operations arm, the Quds Force. The new Iranian state had one doctrine: do anything feasible to cock a snook at the Big Satan (US) and the Little Satan (Israel). This meant building what came to be known as the Axis of Resistance, named in rhetorical defiance of the \u201cAxis of Evil,\u201d the term used by George W. Bush in 2002 to describe Iran, North Korea and Iraq.Soon the axis took shape. Hezbollah was born from the wreckage of Israel\u2019s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, trained by Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard. The Houthis, an insurgency in Yemen, found in Tehran a benefactor that could strike Saudi oil fields and rattle shipping lanes in the Red Sea. Syria \u2014 under Hafez and later Bashar al-Assad \u2014 became an indispensable corridor, a land bridge that allowed Iranian weapons and other things to make their way to Lebanon. Meanwhile, after the 2003 US invasion dismantled Saddam Hussein<\/a>\u2019s regime over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Shia militias with Iranian backing became a pain for American forces. And finally, Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian movement, found common ground with Tehran, whose hostility towards Israel overlooked any other religious qualms.And of course, at the top of the pyramid of the Axis was the Iranian regime led by the Supreme Commander Ayatollah Khamenei.<\/p>\n After the attack, in a chilling statement, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that all attackers were \u2018dead men walking\u2019. Very rarely have politicians kept their word to this effect. Much of the things that Western civilisation holds dear \u2014 from atom bombs to literature \u2014 were designed by Jews. So there\u2019s no surprise they have also perfected revenge to an art form. To quoteFor years, whispers have told us about the depths Israel has gone to infiltrate its enemies (so much so the joke is that the only people alive in Iran\u2019s high command are three Mossad agents who don\u2019t know each other\u2019s identities). Netanyahu and Co ran slipshod in Gaza, killing Hamas commanders with precision operations that didn\u2019t care how many civilians it accidentally killed. From exploding pagers to missiles to bombs, Israel dismantled each branch of the axis and then went after the head.For years, Israel had built its networks in Iran, carrying out audacious attacks and building a war machine Bob Dylan could have sung about. And its success showed, as the final attack took only sixty seconds, which saw multiple attacks on various sites inside a heavily guarded compound. As Oded Ailam, a former head of Mossad\u2019s counter-terrorism division, told The Guardian: \u201cSixty seconds. That\u2019s all it took for this operation, but it is the product of years in the making. The modern battlefield is no longer defined only by tanks and aircraft. It is defined by data, access, trust and timing. One minute can change a region.\u201dThe Axis of Resistance was built over decades. Israel, with help from Uncle Sam, destroyed it in a little more than two years.As operations go, it was so successful that it appeared to have wiped out all potential successors. As Donald Trump candidly told a reporter: \u201cThe attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It\u2019s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.\u201d<\/p>\nA Pivotal Moment in History
<\/h3>\n<\/p>\nWhat was the Axis of Resistance?
<\/h3>\n<\/p>\nHow did Israel respond?
<\/h3>\n<\/p>\nThe Trump Salvo
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