It’s about eight o’clock at night in northeast Syria when I go live.

Outside, the darkness is thick and the cold has teeth. Inside, the concrete walls hold the day’s chill like a grudge. I stay indoors—not for comfort, but because this is what nights in conflict zones tend to do: they sharpen everything. Sounds carry. Thoughts linger. And you learn to pay attention.

Before I talk about Iran, Syria, or the wars that may or may not start in the coming days, I stop and ask people to pray.

Because none of this matters if we forget the human cost.

There’s a nine-year-old girl named Leah. She has cystic fibrosis. Many of you helped raise money so she could receive stem cell therapy—hope, in a syringe. But tonight she’s in a hospital bed instead, fighting a lung infection, hooked to high-dose oxygen. If she can’t stabilize, she may lose her chance at treatment altogether.

So we pray. For healing. For wisdom for the doctors. For strength for her family. For a miracle.

A Regime That Looks Strong—Until You Look Closer

Iran is on the edge of something big.

From where I’m sitting, it looks less like a sudden crisis and more like a long-delayed reckoning. The United States is clearly positioning itself for a major military operation, and Israel would almost certainly be involved. Regional players—Jordan, the UAE—are lining up. Western European aircraft are moving. Carrier strike groups are already in theater, with more on the way.

On paper, Iran is preparing for war. In reality, the regime is barely holding itself together. Its economy is in freefall. Inflation is crushing ordinary people. Savings are evaporating. Paychecks don’t stretch far enough to cover food, transportation, or schooling. Water insecurity—unpredictable schedules, low pressure, rationing—adds another layer of daily anxiety.

People are in the streets not because they want chaos, but because the math of survival no longer works. And instead of fixing any of this, the regime keeps doing what it has always done: funding proxies, posturing against Israel, and murdering its own people when they dare to protest. From the outside, authoritarian states often look solid. Fear does that. Propaganda does that. But when people keep marching even after you try to kill them, that’s not strength anymore. That’s desperation.

Water Teaches You Things in the Middle East

Here in Syria, water doesn’t come from a faucet you trust. You don’t build a house and assume the city will provide. You build a cistern—usually on the roof—and make it as large as you can afford. When electricity flickers on, you pump water upward. When the city supply isn’t enough, you pay a truck to bring water from somewhere else, no questions asked, at a price that hurts. That’s normal here. It’s becoming normal in parts of Iran too. And every workaround—every truck delivery, every rationing schedule—is another quiet stressor that erodes patience and trust. Revolutions don’t always start with slogans. Sometimes they start with empty buckets.

Oil, China, and a Narrow Lifeline

Iran still exports oil. That fact gets repeated a lot, usually as proof that sanctions “don’t work.” But context matters. Those exports are increasingly concentrated. Most of that oil goes to one customer: China. And China buys it cheap, because Iran has no leverage. That relationship keeps the regime afloat—but it also makes it fragile. People keep saying that if war breaks out, Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz. It sounds dramatic. It makes headlines. But it ignores a basic reality: China’s oil supply depends on that route. Shut it down, and Iran strangles its best customer. And in a real shooting war, Iran’s navy—while capable of harassment—would not survive long against what the U.S. can bring to bear. Threats are easy. Sustained control is another matter entirely.

I was sitting in Erbil—northern Iraqi Kurdistan—trying to go live with Ibrahim beside me, and for a few minutes the only thing I could think about was the Starlink. The signal kept stuttering, freezing, coming back, dropping again. If you’ve ever done live reporting from the Middle East, you know how that goes. But this time it felt different, because the connection problems weren’t just “welcome to the region.” It sounded like Iran’s shutdown was starting to ripple outward—like the whole neighborhood was feeling the strain.

And that’s the mood here right now: strain. Everybody senses we’re close to the edge of something.

The conversation we keep circling back to is Iran—what’s likely to happen tonight or tomorrow night, and what the regime is doing to its own people in the meantime. The numbers coming out of Iran are hard to verify, but they’re also too consistent across too many channels to shrug off. I’m hearing claims that the regime has killed tens of thousands—some reports pushing as high as 80,000 dead. Two weeks ago the number being floated was 20,000. Now people are saying it has multiplied. I can’t independently corroborate that figure, and neither can anyone else right now, because the regime has every reason to hide the truth and the internet inside Iran is being choked down. But even if those reports are exaggerated, the direction of the story is unmistakable: the regime is using mass violence to keep control, and it’s doing it at a pace that suggests fear inside the leadership.

When a government starts killing like that, it’s not because it feels secure. It’s because it doesn’t.

At the same time, you’ve got this other thing happening—something you can measure without rumors or emotion. You can look at maps, ship movements, aircraft staging, and refueling capacity and see a pattern that doesn’t show up unless a real operation is being built.

The U.S. posture around Iran right now is massive. People throw that word around, but I mean it literally: we’re talking about nearly 500 aircraft in a full-spectrum posture, nonstop surveillance on Iranian airspace and defenses, and the kind of tanker support that exists for one reason—so jets can stay on station, keep flying sorties, and keep coming back. The fuel offload capacity number being discussed is over five million pounds. That’s the kind of logistical “tell” that matters more than speeches, because fuel and tankers are what make sustained air campaigns possible.

There are places in the world where the air feels different—not because of altitude or humidity, but because history is leaning forward, listening for the next sound, and everybody can feel it in their bones.

Tonight, I’m coming to you from Erbil, up here in northern Iraqi Kurdistan, not far from the Iranian border, and I’m sitting alongside one of my favorite people on planet Earth, my friend Ibrahim—one of the greatest Kurds you’ll ever meet, the kind of guy who has seen enough betrayal to make most men bitter, and yet somehow still has the courage to look you in the eye and talk about hope like it’s a real thing.

We were fighting the Starlink connection when we went live, and if the signal froze, if the audio hiccuped, if the feed stuttered and jumped, it wasn’t because we were being dramatic—it’s because the internet across this region is in bad shape right now, and I suspect it’s connected to what’s happening next door in Iran, where the regime has been trying to silence the country by shutting down the digital oxygen that keeps people connected to the outside world, because tyrants always do the same thing when they start losing control: they cut the wires, they darken the streets, and they hope the world will look away.

But the world isn’t looking away, not tonight.

And neither are we.

The Rumors Out of Iran Are Horrifying—and the Regime Is Acting Like a Dying Animal

The word coming out of Iran right now is brutal, and I’m going to be careful here because some of the numbers are hard to corroborate in real time, especially when the regime is jamming communications and the fog of fear is thick, but what we are hearing—what people are whispering, what sources are repeating, what the Iranian people themselves are trying to scream through the cracks—is that the regime has been massacring civilians in staggering numbers, to the point where some claims are approaching tens of thousands and even more, and whether those figures are precise or inflated in the chaos, the direction of the story is unmistakable: the killing is accelerating, not slowing down.

And it feels, from the outside looking in, like the Islamic Republic has reached that stage where it’s no longer trying to govern—it’s trying to survive, and it’s doing it the only way it knows how, by lashing out, by killing its way out of the problem, like a cornered animal that can’t imagine surrender because surrender would mean accountability, and accountability would mean the end.

That’s the atmosphere right now.

That’s the temperature of this moment.

And into that moment, President Trump has made statements—big statements—about help being on the way, statements he has reiterated, and meanwhile the people of Iran are begging him to intervene, not because they suddenly trust America or love the West, but because they have reached that level of desperation where they’ll grab onto any lifeline, even one that might cut their hands.

But here’s the thing: for all the talk, it has looked like the United States was not prepared to strike when those words were first spoken.

That gap—between “help is on the way” and the reality of “nothing has happened yet”—is where hope turns into rage, and where people start dying in the dark while the world debates.

This Is Not Political Posturing: Look at the Fuel

Now, I want you to understand something, because there’s a lot of noise online and it’s easy to get cynical and say, “Oh, this is just chest-thumping,” or “This is just another round of saber-rattling,” or “This is a bluff.”

But when you’re looking at military posture, one of the biggest telltale signs isn’t the speeches, and it isn’t even the ships—it’s fuel.

Right now, the United States has amassed more than 5.37 million pounds of fuel offload capacity in the region, and that should make your eyebrows go up, because you don’t stage that kind of refueling capability unless you’re preparing for sustained operations, the kind of operations where aircraft aren’t just launching once, dropping a payload, and going home, but where they are cycling, returning, refueling, and going right back in again until the mission is complete.