2025 – Present
ONGOINGIn June 2025 the United States struck Iran's nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — Operation Midnight Hammer, the most direct US military action against Iran in decades — in a twelve-day war that ended in a ceasefire on June 24. That ceasefire held, uneasily, for eight months. On February 28, 2026, after the collapse of nuclear negotiations and the largest American military buildup in the region since 2003, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury: some 500 targets struck in the first day, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed in the opening wave, ending thirty-seven years of his rule and forcing the Assembly of Experts to install his son Mojtaba in the middle of an air campaign. Iran answered with Operation True Promise IV against Israel, widened the war to the Gulf states hosting American forces, and on March 4 closed the Strait of Hormuz — sending Brent crude from $72 to nearly $120 a barrel in the largest disruption in the history of the oil market. A June 17 memorandum signed in Islamabad lifted the mutual blockades and opened a sixty-day negotiating window; it collapsed on July 8. The war is ongoing, and after a decade of building deterrence through proxies — Hezbollah, the Syrian corridor, the militias — Iran has lost nearly all of it and has yet to answer the question the war has posed to it.
Deep Root
The 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup that ousted Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh set Iran on a path toward the 1979 Islamic Revolution and decades of anti-American hostility. Nearly every US-Iran confrontation since — hostage crisis, proxy wars, sanctions, nuclear standoff — flows from that intervention.
Pattern of Intervention
Operation Countenance (1941) saw Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invade and occupy Iran to secure oil supply lines and prevent any tilt toward Nazi Germany. It established a pattern of major-power military action on Iranian soil for strategic resource reasons that Iran has never forgotten.
Regional Context
The Gulf War cemented a permanent US military presence across the Middle East. The post-1991 network of US bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait defined Iran's encirclement anxiety and its conviction that a nuclear deterrent was the only guarantee of regime survival.
Chapter-by-chapter narrative with maps, primary sources, and key events.
Explore battles on a live map with a timeline slider and territory overlays.
Deep-dive into every major engagement — commanders, casualties, significance.
Biographical flip cards with real portraits, facts, and full biography pages.
Trace each figure's full life journey — birth, education, battles, and death — on a live map.
Scroll-driven visualization of casualties — each dot a thousand lives.
Weapons, war machines, and the military innovations that defined how this conflict was fought.
Cause-and-effect chains tracing the war's long shadow on history.
War crimes, massacres, and the darkest chapters of this conflict — documented for history.
In June 2025 the United States struck Iran's nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — Operation Midnight Hammer, the most direct US military action against Iran in decades — in a twelve-day war that ended in a ceasefire on June 24. That ceasefire held, uneasily, for eight months. On February 28, 2026, after the collapse of nuclear negotiations and the largest American military buildup in the region since 2003, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury: some 500 targets struck in the first day, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed in the opening wave, ending thirty-seven years of his rule and forcing the Assembly of Experts to install his son Mojtaba in the middle of an air campaign. Iran answered with Operation True Promise IV against Israel, widened the war to the Gulf states hosting American forces, and on March 4 closed the Strait of Hormuz — sending Brent crude from $72 to nearly $120 a barrel in the largest disruption in the history of the oil market. A June 17 memorandum signed in Islamabad lifted the mutual blockades and opened a sixty-day negotiating window; it collapsed on July 8. The war is ongoing, and after a decade of building deterrence through proxies — Hezbollah, the Syrian corridor, the militias — Iran has lost nearly all of it and has yet to answer the question the war has posed to it.
US–Iran Conflict was fought from 2025 to the present day.
US–Iran Conflict was fought between United States & Israel and Iran & Allied Militias.
An estimated 5,198 people died in US–Iran Conflict, including roughly 4,100 military and 1,098 civilian deaths. Figures are scholarly estimates and vary by source.
Major engagements included Operation Epic Fury, The Lebanon Front, Collapse of the Ceasefire, and Strike on Natanz Nuclear Complex.