From London: As Australians woke on Sunday morning, the Middle East had already been remade. The overnight joint US-Israeli military operation against Iran, codenamed Epic Fury by the Pentagon and Roaring Lion by the Israel Defence Forces, had done what no adversary had managed in 36 years of trying: it had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, at his compound in the heart of Tehran.
The strikes on 28 February 2026 did not arrive without warning. They arrived with a great deal of history. To understand why two aircraft carrier groups were sitting in the Persian Gulf and why the most powerful military alliance since the Cold War chose this moment to act, you need to go back, as 9News reports, almost three-quarters of a century.
A wound that never closed
The story begins in 1953, when British intelligence and the CIA engineered the removal of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, primarily to protect British oil interests. The coup restored the Shah's authority and deepened anti-Western sentiment that would simmer for a generation. When the Shah was himself overthrown in 1979, the Islamic Revolution that replaced him was in part a reckoning with that earlier humiliation. The clerical republic that emerged under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was not simply anti-American by accident; it had been given cause.
Ali Khamenei, who became Iran's president in 1981 and supreme leader after Khomeini's death in 1989, inherited that founding grievance and institutionalised it. Under his leadership, Iran also quietly initiated what Iran Watch describes as a covert nuclear weapons research programme known as the AMAD Project, which according to later IAEA findings aimed to design an arsenal of five nuclear warheads by the mid-2000s. The programme was shelved in 2003, but Iran's enrichment capacity continued to grow, and Western intelligence agencies never fully trusted the civilian-use explanations offered by Tehran.
The deal that fell apart
The one serious attempt to resolve the nuclear question diplomatically came in 2015, when President Barack Obama's administration concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany. The JCPOA, as it was known, constrained Iran's enrichment programme and imposed intrusive IAEA inspections in exchange for sanctions relief. It was, for all its critics, the only framework that gave the world real-time visibility into Iran's nuclear activities.
Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, describing it as a "horrible one-sided deal." The consequences were predictable. Freed from the deal's constraints, Iran accelerated its enrichment. By May 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran held over 408 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity, just below weapons-grade, enough for multiple nuclear devices if further processed. The agency noted Iran was the only non-nuclear-weapon state producing material at that level.
The protests that changed the calculus
Beginning in late December 2025, Iran was convulsed by nationwide anti-government protests triggered by the collapse of the rial and runaway inflation, according to 9News. The demonstrations spread to more than 100 cities and became the largest civil uprising since the 1979 revolution itself. The regime responded with mass killings; the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency estimated the death toll at 7,000, while other figures cited by Trump put it as high as 32,000. The precise toll remains unknown, but the brutality of the crackdown removed any remaining diplomatic cover for engagement with the Khamenei government.
Through February 2026, the United States and Iran had been holding indirect nuclear talks mediated by Oman. On 27 February, just one day before the strikes, Oman's Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi announced what he described as a breakthrough: Iran had reportedly agreed to halt uranium stockpiling and accept full IAEA verification. He said peace was "within reach." Within 24 hours, Tehran was in flames.
The strike and its aftermath
The operation was described by multiple intelligence sources as having been brought forward based on a specific target of opportunity: Khamenei and senior Iranian leadership meeting together at a compound in Tehran. A senior US defence official told Fox News that Khamenei was killed alongside five to ten other top Iranian leaders. Iranian state media later confirmed his death, announcing 40 days of national mourning, and Al Jazeera reported that Iran declared 40 days of mourning while launching retaliatory attacks across the region. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian vowed revenge, declaring Khamenei a martyr.
The retaliation was substantial. Iran launched missile and drone strikes against Israel and US military bases throughout the Middle East. Several Gulf states, including the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, reported Iranian strikes on their territory. Three US soldiers were killed and five seriously wounded, according to US Central Command. In Israel, one woman was killed and more than 120 people were injured in Iranian strikes. The closure of Middle Eastern airspace stranded hundreds of thousands of travellers worldwide.
Canberra's awkward alignment
For Canberra, the implications are considerable. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement saying Australia "stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression" and expressed support for the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But when pressed on whether Australian facilities, including the Pine Gap joint intelligence base in the Northern Territory, played any role in the strikes, Albanese repeatedly described the action as "unilateral action taken by the United States." Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities and emphasised that Australia "does not want escalation and a full-scale war."
The government's position drew sharp criticism from Australian legal experts. Professor Ben Saul of the University of Sydney, a UN special rapporteur, stated that the attacks represent a clear breach of the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force. Professor Donald Rothwell of the Australian National University concurred, noting that publicly available information provides no clear legal basis under the UN Charter for the strikes. The Greens' foreign affairs spokesperson David Shoebridge accused the Labor government of outsourcing Australian foreign policy to Washington. Wong's response, when pressed on the legal basis, was to refer questioners to Washington and Jerusalem.
There is a genuine tension here that reasonable people cannot easily resolve. The case for the strikes rests on the accumulated evidence of Iranian nuclear ambition, the failure of 20 years of diplomacy, the regime's massacre of its own citizens, and its long support for armed proxies from Hamas to Hezbollah. The case against rests on the UN Charter's foundational prohibition on the use of force, the apparent diplomatic progress just hours before the strikes, and the real risk that decapitating a regime without a credible transition plan can produce outcomes far worse than what preceded them.
What's often lost in the Australian coverage of Iran is the sheer complexity of Iranian society. The scenes of Iranians celebrating Khamenei's death in the streets of Karaj, Shiraz, Kermanshah, and Isfahan sit alongside footage of others mourning and of security forces opening fire on celebrants. The Islamic Republic is a failed state for millions of its own citizens, but what replaces it, and how, will determine whether 28 February 2026 was a turning point or merely an escalation. On that question, neither Washington, Jerusalem, nor Canberra has offered a convincing answer.