Pentagon Vows No Letup as Iran War Enters Fifth Day — and Sleeper Cell Fears Come Home to Canada
WASHINGTON — Five days into the most consequential American military operation since the Iraq War, a campaign that some analysts cast as the opening of a potential global war scenario touching Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine and China’s potential invasion of Taiwan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday and delivered a blunt assessment: the United States is winning in the Middle East, the bombardment is accelerating, and there will be no letup.
“We are only four days into this and the results have been incredible,” Hegseth said, adding that within days the U.S. and Israel will have complete control of Iranian airspace.
He confirmed at Wednesday’s briefing that the campaign — dubbed Operation Epic Fury — would shift from missile strikes to massed bomb drops, with 500-, 1,000- and 2,000-pound precision-guided gravity bombs to be deployed against Iranian targets. “More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today,” he said, describing the intent to have American and Israeli air power visible over Tehran “every minute of every day, until we decide it’s over.”
The scale of the campaign, which American war planners prefer to call an “operation,” is already historic.
U.S. and Israeli forces have struck more than 2,000 Iranian targets and sunk 20 Iranian warships. Hegseth confirmed at Wednesday’s briefing that a U.S. submarine used a single torpedo to sink an Iranian warship named after Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. Caine called it the first time since 1945 that a U.S. Navy submarine had “sunk an enemy combatant ship using a single Mark 48 torpedo to achieve immediate effect, sending the warship to the bottom of the sea.”
The precision targeting extended beyond military hardware. Two Israeli sources briefed on the matter told ABC News on Wednesday that Israel had killed Rahman Mokadam, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ special operations division. Israeli journalist Amit Segal, broke the news on X, writing that Mokadam was “the man behind the assassination attempt on Trump on the eve of the 2024 presidential election” and that “Trump was informed of this in the past few hours by Israel.”
Even as Hegseth declared American dominance, the war spread further on Wednesday, with NATO shooting down a ballistic missile fired from Iran and headed toward Turkish airspace — the first time the alliance had been drawn into defending a member state from a projectile launched by Tehran since the conflict began. Turkey’s Defense Ministry said the missile had been tracked crossing Iraqi and Syrian airspace before being intercepted and destroyed near Hatay province, with no casualties reported.
Iran-launched ballistic missiles are down 86 percent from the first day of fighting, with a 23 percent decrease in just the last 24 hours, Caine said — but barrages continue across the region. Massive explosions were heard across multiple parts of Tehran on Wednesday, and Iranian state television showed rubble in central Tehran.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it has launched attacks on 27 American bases across the Middle East, as well as Israeli military facilities. Six American service members have been killed in the conflict. Israel’s air force says it has dropped more than 1,200 munitions across 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces in a single day.
The human cost in Iran is rising sharply, according to Iranian accounts which have not been confirmed by Washington. The death toll from U.S.-Israeli strikes stood at 1,045 as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Tasnim news agency.
Hegseth dismissed questions about Chinese and Russian objections to the operation. “I don’t have a message for them, and they’re not a factor here,” he said. The stated U.S. military objectives are to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capability, degrade its navy, and prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Hegseth’s dismissal of Chinese and Russian concerns as irrelevant to Operation Epic Fury may be tactically appropriate — but strategically, the bombing of Iran carries a message that neither Beijing nor Moscow will ignore.
Iran is a load-bearing pillar of the CRINK axis — the informal alignment of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that has functioned as a parallel security architecture to the Western alliance system. Iran’s oil has flowed to China in defiance of Western sanctions; North Korean artillery shells have restocked Russian forces in Ukraine; Chinese dual-use technology has continued to reach Iranian weapons programs through third-country networks. The destruction of Iran’s military capacity and the killing of Khamenei does not dissolve that architecture, but it degrades one of its key nodes.
What has gone largely unexamined in Western mainstream coverage is the compounding strategic cost of that concentration of force. Washington’s need to project sustained air and naval power into the Middle East — to defend assets and allies from Iran — draws directly from the military resources and attention required for the pivot to counter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That tension is increasingly surfacing.
A New York Times investigation published last month, drawing on a previously unreported classified briefing held in a secure Silicon Valley room in July 2023, revealed that CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, and other top technology executives that China’s military buildup could position Beijing to move on Taiwan by 2027. Cook reportedly told officials afterward that he slept “with one eye open.”
For Beijing, the operational lesson — and the deterrent message — of Operation Epic Fury could not be clearer.
American B-2 stealth bombers penetrated Iranian airspace with near impunity, deploying bunker-busting munitions against hardened underground targets — a capability set designed precisely for contingencies that extend far beyond Iran. The B-21 Raider, the B-2's successor, is already entering service. The same platform now destroying Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the one that would be called upon in any conflict over Taiwan. While Hegseth declined to comment Wednesday on the broader strategic signal, Caine on Monday offered a blunt message to any foreign power watching: no military on earth can project such force so far from its own shores.
On Monday, Hegseth also told reporters that American agencies are monitoring the potential of regime retaliation on U.S. soil, without offering details.
But even as Operation Epic Fury reshapes the Middle East, a more shadowy warning is gaining credibility in intelligence circles.
David Luna, a former senior U.S. government intelligence official who spent 22 years inside the national security apparatus, warned that Hezbollah sleeper cells or other proxy terrorist affiliates could be ordered to attack American and Western interests beyond the Middle East, noting that Iran has directed proxy groups including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad to embed sleeper cells in the United States for potential activation.
It may have already occurred in Canada, according to some accounts.
On the same night that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death was announced — March 1, hours after the largest pro-Iran demonstration in Toronto’s history drew an estimated 350,000 Iranian-Canadians to Yonge Street — a boxing gym in Thornhill, Ontario, owned by Iranian-Canadian dissident and professional boxer Salar Gholami was struck by 17 rounds of gunfire, its front windows shattered, with Iranian liberation flags visible through the broken glass. York Regional Police, who confirmed the damage was “consistent with multiple rounds having been fired at the business,” said they are working with policing and intelligence partners “to assess any potential links, including the possibility of politically motivated or transnational elements.”
Gholami told Iran International: “This is the result of shaking hands with the mullahs and delaying action. When the Canadian government leaves the door open for them to enter, this will no longer be a safe place even for Canadians themselves.”
The attacks were not limited to Iranian-diaspora targets. On March 3, Rabbi Poupko posted a direct appeal to Prime Minister Mark Carney on X: “Last night military grade weapons were used against Temple Emanuel in Toronto.”
David Frum, the Canadian-American Atlantic journalist and former White House speechwriter who grew up attending the synagogue, reposted the message with his own words: “The synagogue I attended as a boy and youth, where I was bar mitzvah’d and received my primary Jewish education, now under gunfire in once-peaceable North York, Ontario.”
The pattern extended south of the border the same weekend.
In Austin, Texas, a gunman opened fire outside a bar on West Sixth Street early Sunday morning, killing two people and wounding 14 before being shot dead by police. A flag of the Islamic Republic and photographs of Iranian regime leaders were discovered inside the suspect’s apartment, according to CBS News. The suspect was wearing a shirt featuring the Iranian flag emblem and a sweatshirt reading “Property of Allah,” and a Quran was found in his vehicle. Law enforcement has not confirmed a direct link to the Iranian government.
“Iran is a load-bearing pillar of the CRINK axis…” Not only is this the place for little known events and quick incisive comments, but in a few words, sentences come with imagery, too. Is Canada then a small tree, very happy with its trunk, branches and leaves, but full of pine beetles easily identified as cartels, UF’s, $ launderers, immigration fraudsters, and elected officials who…. You know the stories. You read them here.
The power of communist style countries is what happens when all the wealth & power stay in the hands of a few & subjugate the population. The federal gvt has been for decades amassing power into Ottawa and at the same time amassing power in the hands of the PMO away from the subjugated elected members. Canada is falling under the communist rule of a supreme leader, amassing/concentrating power, into the hands of whatever prime minister is allowed to sit there for the new world order. Canada will be in trump's target, it already is and right now many cdns see him as a welcome party guest to a bad party even with his bad manners.