Letter to Makhmalbaf
by Maryam Tafakory

The following letter, addressed to the celebrated Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is written by the Jarman Award-winning filmmaker Maryam Tafakory. Over a decade ago, Tafakory studied with Makhmalbaf. In her letter, she strains to understand how a former mentor – who had served in the Shah’s prisons as a young activist and who in in January 2026 had written a missive addressed to the Shah’s son, critical of monarchy and foreign intervention in general – could do an abrupt about face: four days after his letter to Pahlavi, Makhmalbaf joined six other signatories in calling upon President Donald Trump to act against the Islamic Republic.

In his letter to Reza Pahlavi, Makhmalbaf wrote of the institution of monarchy: “Do not persist in defending what was forced upon the people by a coup and shown over 50 years to be ineffective in establishing democracy and human rights.” He continued: “Mr. Pahlavi, please clarify: because your father was king, do you believe you possess a superior gene to others? The future cannot be built on ambiguity. Speak clearly.”

Dear Mohsen Makhmalbaf,

Over 10 years have passed since we last met. I don’t know if you remember me, but I write to you not as a former student but as a fellow compatriot. I read your thoughtful letter to Reza Pahlavi and wanted to translate and publish it somewhere. At a time when many Iranian artists and celebrities hide their support for Pahlavi behind the mask of ‘grief’, while appropriating the voice of the suffering to justify war and foreign intervention, your letter gave me hope.

But later, when I read the joint letter you signed addressed to the US president, I was confused. I find it difficult to understand how the author of that first letter could sign the second. I raise this not out of judgement, but a sense of shared responsibility. At a time when every word and every signature can be used to justify foreign military intervention, the ethical responsibility of what we say and sign is heavier than ever.

In your letter to Reza Pahlavi, you wrote: “Do not forget that your father’s and grandfather’s monarchy was the result of foreign-backed coups, not the choice of the people”. I wonder how one can condemn US intervention in Iran’s political history and yet appeal to the very same power in favour of foreign intervention?

I don’t know if you truly stand by the letter you signed, especially since you weren't the one who wrote it. Could it be that you were driven to sign it by the pressure from those around you? A pressure you mentioned in your own letter – one that we see everywhere now, which is often abusive and intimidating.

If there is one thing I have learnt from the history of our country, it is that even if fascism enjoys majority support, we can’t afford to fear challenging it. That said, no one today can confidently claim that most people in Iran welcome foreign intervention. And even if that were the case, I still would not hesitate to speak against it, just as critics in the past – before and after the Iranian revolution – loudly said “no” to the Islamic Republic, despite the overwhelming support for it.

My father, like you, was arrested and interrogated by SAVAK. Unlike you, he was not tortured in SAVAK prisons, but he was tortured in the Islamic Republic’s prisons. My uncle was executed in Ahvaz prison in the 80s. I myself was repeatedly arrested and mistreated by this same regime. I say these things so you know that, just as you said you do not view Pahlavi through the lens of hatred and old wounds, my hatred for the Islamic Republic hasn’t blinded me either.

I deny neither the crimes of the former regime nor those of the current one. I stand against every form of fascism, wherever it comes from and whatever promises it makes, even if it promises to destroy the torturers of our families. And in this, no power stands outside criticism and accountability, and that includes the US and Israel.

You are well aware of the crimes and genocides these world powers have committed throughout history. But we don’t need to look too far back. In just the past two-and-a-half years, there are few people left in this world who are not aware of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I’m not talking to those who deliberately ignored this engineered tragedy out of apathy, anti-Arab racism, self-interest, and so forth. My question is for the rest of us: how can one ask the perpetrators and enablers of such atrocities for “help”? History has repeatedly shown that, for the US, human lives are not a matter of empathy but leverage in geopolitical calculations.

How can one condemn the US-backed coup in Iran and at the same time ask that very power to intervene in one’s own homeland again? How can one sign a letter calling for bombs to fall on our families, our friends, our people, asking for assistance from the same power whose ‘assistance’ in June of 2025 killed over a thousand civilians? I don’t know. These days, the questions are many, and the answers are few. But one thing is clear to me: nothing can justify the bombing of our people.

Respectfully,

Maryam
February 2026

Maryam Tafakory is an artist and filmmaker whose textual and filmic collages interweave poetry, documentary, archival and found material.

Shock and Awe
by Sinan Antoon

The horrific images of the bombing of Tehran and other Iranian cities brought back memories of “shock and awe” from twenty-three years ago, when the United States began its second war against Iraq.

I was in Cairo at the time. Watching “death and destruction” rain down on one’s hometown and homeland from afar, day after day, scars one’s soul. But for others in the diaspora, it was a pleasant experience. “Those bombs are music to my ears,” Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi-American writer who championed the invasion, assured readers of The New Republic. “They are like bells tolling for liberation.” (He had previously argued that Iraqis would welcome American soldiers with “sweets and flowers”.) Makiya watched Baghdad fall on 9 April 2003, from the Oval Office with Bush and expressed his gratitude. Back then, some Iraqi Americans sang and danced in Detroit, celebrating the end of a brutal dictatorship – just as many Iranian Americans in Los Angeles and elsewhere did last week. The dancing has stopped, but, alas, the bombs and destruction have not. There is no music to be heard near the graves that are dug in Iran (and Lebanon). Just silence and tears.

Many diaspora Iraqis were against the 2003 invasion, including those who opposed the Baa’thist regime and had been victims of its oppression. Some of us warned that a neocolonial war would destroy what was left of a country already devastated by more than a decade of catastrophic sanctions – and would plunge the region into chaos. More than 1 million Iraqis were killed as a result of the occupation and its aftermath. A dictatorship was replaced by one of the world’s most corrupt oligarchies. Iraqis had to survive ISIS. Still, there was no regret. Dick Cheney said he would do it again. In 2008, Bush boasted that he had “freed millions from barbarism”

During the 1991 Gulf War, the US and its allies bombed Iraq “back to the pre-industrial age” and destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile. A decade of sanctions later, it was impossible to imagine that Iraq might still possess weapons of mass destructions. It didn’t matter. Bush waged a war to destroy something that had already been destroyed. In 2004, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he even joked about not finding any WMDs; the journalists in the audience, some of whom helped sell the war to Americans, laughed.

Less than a fortnight ago, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, the Omani foreign minister mediating indirect negotiations between the US and Iran, said there had been a breakthrough: the Islamic Regime had agreed to “never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb.” But Trump’s lust for war was more potent. The nuclear programme that he claimed to have obliterated in June 2025 needed to be obliterated once again.

Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of war, has boasted that operation “Epic Fury” was double the strength of “shock and awe”. It began with the slaughter of as many as 180 people, most of them young girls, when the US struck a school. It reminded me of the bombing of al-Amiriyya shelter in Baghdad on 13 February 1991, when two American missiles burned and killed more than 400 Iraqis, including children. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defence, accused the Iraqi government of intentionally putting civilians in military sites (sound familiar?). A decade later, there was no longer a need to dispute who was killed and how. When asked about enemy casualties in Afghanistan, General Tommy R. Franks famously replied: “we don’t do body counts”.

During the occupation of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences were notorious for obfuscation and inventive formulations like “unknown unknowns”. He sounds subtle and philosophical compared with Pete Hegseth, who is more like Rambo in a tight suit. A veteran of the Iraq invasion and an evangelical Christian Zionist – his warrior body is adorned with Christian symbols – he and his comrades make Bush’s gang look tame. “They are toast,” Hegseth said of the Iranians, and promised this would be like Iraq, “minus Paul Bremer and the Nation Building”.

Israel did not take part in the Iraq war in 2003, but American Zionists were active cheerleaders and planners since the early 1990s. Netanyahu testified before Congress about “the benefits” of waging war against Iraq. Bombing Iran is not a recent imperial desire. In 2007, Senator John McCain sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”.

The US and Israel have set a record in the number of countries they have bombed in recent years. Rome and Sparta are out to remake the region and the world. Having committed a genocide in Gaza, they are now unleashing hell in Iran and Lebanon.

Sinan Antoon is a poet and novelist. His fifth novel is Of Loss and Lavender.

The Next Target
by Selim Koru

Watching Turkish TV this past week has been a strange experience. Since 28 February, pro-and-anti Erdoğan channels have largely suspended their political spin and are merely describing world events as they occur. It is as if they have been humbled into realism. What the US and Israel are doing to Iran is a reminder that the worst does happen. Your country may be vast and its civilisation may be storied, but if you are weak and your enemies see an opportunity, they can come and take everything away from you. From us.

One quote appears again and again: “Turkey is the new Iran”. Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister (who is set to run against Benjamin Netanyahu again in elections later this year), said this at a press conference in Jerusalem on 17 February. He went on: “Erdoğan is sophisticated, dangerous and he seeks to encircle Israel”.

The headline writes itself: “Is Turkey next?” It appears in newspapers, media websites and TV stations; on WhatsApp channels and on social media. There is a demeaning aspect to this. For all the Turkish government’s bluster on the world stage, the subterranean struggle between pride and insecurity is more intense than ever. As Mete Yarar, a former soldier and TV commentator, put it:

Everyone keeps saying, and you probably hear it too: “Who is next? Is it our turn?” Why, my friend? … as if we are all lined up and there is one bully coming down the line slapping everyone... When did you let yourselves be put in line, so that you are now asking if it’s your turn?

So, could Turkey be next? Not in the way most people mean. Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are not about to engage in a military conflict. But a clash is brewing.

Bennett’s statement catches the strategic mood in Israel. The unexpected formation of an Islamist government in Syria, under Turkey’s patronage, has caused great anxiety – and elicited periodic bombing sorties. Netanyahu is now talking about a “radical Sunni axis”. In early February, the Nagel Commission, a governmental body tasked with reviewing Israel’s defense budget, warned explicitly of the danger of a “Turkish-Israeli confrontation” and described the Turkish-led Sunni block as “no less serious” a threat than the Iranian axis. Israeli experts and news outlets speak of Turkey in increasingly alarmed terms. “It’s a country with imperialist ambitions” an IDF official announced recently. “The moment the Turks have the ability to reach us overland, that’s significant,” a scholar at Tel Aviv University told the media. The craze has even reached my class of policy analysts: I’ve heard that Israel-aligned think tanks in Washington DC have been hiring Turkey experts.

The Turkish side is no less active. Erdoğan and his coalition partner Devlet Bahceli (who leads the far-right Nationalist Movement Party) regularly warn citizens that an Israeli attack is approaching, and that they must come together to face it. TRT, the state broadcaster, seldom invokes Israel without adjectives like “murderer,” “terror state” or “occupier”. Whenever the Israelis flex their military muscles – rather frequently these days – there is a spike in Turkish news stories about the latest indigenously developed weapons systems, with hints of how they might counter IDF attacks. I myself see ambitious Turkish students of international relations trying to learn Hebrew and reading up on Israel’s history and statecraft.

The two countries structurally parallel each other. The more secular and moderate elites that used to govern them have receded into the political background; religiously tinged far-right movements now dominate. Both aspire to regional influence far beyond their borders. Since the fall of the Assad regime, and with the imminent collapse of Shia power, there is no buffer left between Islamist and Zionist aspirations.

Being an inferior power in terms of technology, military experience and clout with the US, Turkey is operating in a far more cautious and reserved manner. Since its Kemalist days, the country has been deeply enmeshed in Western institutions, markets and norms. The Islamists might chafe against them, but they have learned to bury themselves in their protective folds.

While Israel is ascendant, it is also deeply vulnerable. Since the 7 October attacks, the IDF has launched a remarkably sophisticated campaign to unravel the Shia regional network – killing thousands in Lebanon and committing a genocide in Gaza. Now it has directly gone after Iran, the seat of the “axis of resistance”. But Israeli aggression is based on US backing, and its conduct of late has been so brazenly immoral that it is losing support among Americans.

Both countries are building regional alliances designed to surround the other. Israel has tightened military cooperation with Greece and (Southern) Cyprus; deepened its strategic relationship with India; and recognized Somaliland, to challenge Turkey’s growing footprint in Somalia. Turkey is consolidating its position in Syria, cooperating closely with Qatar and trying to put together a Sunni block that would include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Looming over this is the question of nuclear power. Israel, of course, has a secret nuclear programme and second-strike capability. It is unclear whether Turkey will at some point feel the need to develop a nuclear deterrent of its own. Would it be an unreasonable thing to do?

Selim Koru is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey.

A Civilisational Threat
by Rahmane Idrissa

Since Donald Trump rediscovered the nihilistic pleasure of playing with America’s formidable military arsenal – beginning, say, with the intervention in Venezuela – international law has taken a fresh beating. The scale of the US and Israeli crimes in Iran in fact raise the question of whether international law is viable at all – or whether it is simply dying. I do not think we should rush to write its obituary, nor should we indulge the cynical claims that it never truly existed.

International law did not draw its strength from principles alone. As Thomas Hobbes famously wrote, covenants without the sword are but words. In the arena of international law, the US long claimed to be that sword. Yet it has seldom hesitated to turn the blade against the very body it was meant to defend. This “system of guarantee” was never truly a system of law at all. It was a form of international despotism – the principle of American hegemony – speaking the language of law. If much of the world accepted this hegemony for decades, that was not merely because the US played the role of “world policeman”. It was also because the political regimes in Washington were grounded in a domestic legal order that was widely perceived as stable and reliable.

International law possesses no independent force of its own, whereas the domestic law of states can summon the coercive power of the state. As such, the putative force of international law derives from the real force of the various national legal systems that create it. This is the logic behind international treaties and conventions – and behind the principle that they may take precedence over national legislation.

It follows that the quality of international law depends on the quality of the domestic legal systems that sustain it. If every state possessed a legal order as robust as Switzerland, and if states were roughly equal in power, international law would be remarkably strong. Alas, something like the opposite is true. The quality and resilience of domestic legal systems varies enormously from country to country and from region to region, and the imbalance of political power between states is immense. International law inevitably reflects these disparities – not only in content, but even more visibly in enforcement.

Within this context, the US poses a particular problem. Its colossal power intensely distorts the international legal order, producing tragedies such as the genocide in Gaza. Historically, the only meaningful counterweight to this imbalance was the strength of American domestic law. It did not prevent the US from violating international law, but it imposed certain limits – particularly through its constitutional framework.

But Trump and the architects of Project 2025 have effectively dislocated the American legal order. Given these circumstances, is it possible to believe that international law will survive the US-Israeli assaults on Iran? I do, for three reasons

First, American domestic law has not yet been entirely destroyed. It is likely to reassert itself after the midterm elections; and it is improbable that the next American president will behave exactly as Trump has. That said, the chances of Americans undertaking meaningful political reforms – such as changing the electoral system to increase and diversify political participation or suppress the sway of oligarchy – are unfortunately quite small. Such reforms would likely require either a revolution, an extraordinarily favourable political alignment or a catastrophic military defeat – like those that twice forced France to reform its political system in the twentieth century.

Second, the US is clearly no longer willing or able to play the supposed role of guarantor of international law, which entailed maintaining a network of security alliances that tied the world’s wealthier regions – Europe, the Gulf, and East Asia – to the American system. Trump has demonstrated that these alliances can be discarded at a president’s whim. Europe has been bullied and even threatened with annexation. And by attacking Iran, Trump has undercut the security architecture of the Gulf. These regions now understand that they urgently need to reconsider their relationship with the US. It is impossible to predict exactly how they will respond, but they will certainly not remain passive. Their reactions are likely to weaken American power – and thereby reduce the imbalance that American dominance imposes on international law.

Third – and perhaps most speculatively – the devastating recent blows to international law may ultimately provoke a process of reconstruction and strengthening upon new foundations. Such a transformation would require political leadership across multiple continents. At present, only a few figures appear to be moving in this direction: Lula in Brazil, Pedro Sánchez in Spain, and the leadership of South Africa. That is not nothing. But it is not yet enough – especially since they are acting separately rather than as part of a coordinated movement.

The radical challenge posed to international law by brute force calls for a radical response – similar to the one in 1945, when the United Nations was founded. Given their accumulated powers and avowed lust for domination, the constellation of Putin-Trump-Netanyahu represent a threat to civilisation of the magnitude of Nazi Germany. This calls for the kind of large-scale organised response which only could prevent history from sliding back into those dire tracks.

Rahmane Idrissa is a political scientist and historian based in the Netherlands.

1. SAVAK was the secret police of the Imperial State of Iran