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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Hands Off Iran’: Chicago Teachers Union Sponsors Anti-US, Anti-Israel Protest
“Hands Off Lebanon & Iran” Protest, March 8, 2026, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Screenshot
Teachers employed by the Chicago Public Schools system, which serves over 300,000 students, participated last weekend in a protest against the US-Israeli war in Iran, apparently siding with the Iranian regime and its Lebanese terrorist proxy Hezbollah in the ongoing conflict.
The “Hands Off Iran & Lebanon” protest, held in Chicago on March 7, received a generous sponsorship from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), along with several socialist and Islamist groups. At least one of the organizers, the Palestinian Youth Movement, is known to hold ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an internationally designated terrorist group that has been involved in armed hijackings of airplanes, suicide bombings, shootings, and assassinations. For decades, the group has attacked Israeli and other Western targets.
“Hey Siri, play: Boom, Boom Tel Aviv,” said one of the signs held up by a protester on Saturday, referencing the song “Boom, Boom, Tel Aviv.” The song, which calls for the killing of Jews and Israelis, includes lyrics such as “Iranian missiles have your entire sky lit” and “How does it feel to have bombs dropping on your civilians?”
Another sign read, “Hands off Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. Stop the US Israeli war machine.”
At one point, a CTU member addressed the throng of protesters wearing a keffiyeh — a symbol of Palestinian jihad popularized by the late terrorist and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
“The Chicago Teachers Union has made it very clear it wants to put ‘political education’ above actual education. CTU’s priority is radical activism, and it is willing to sacrifice its teachers, its students, and their families to the cause,” Mika Hackner, director of research at the North American Values Institute (NAVI), told The Algemeiner on Friday.
K-12 students have seen a surge in antisemitic incidents in their schools, but teachers have experienced extreme anti-Zionism and bigotry as well, according to preliminary results of a survey conducted by the research arm of the StandWithUs advocacy group shared in January.
The data shows that Jewish K-12 teachers in the US face widespread antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying in both public and non-Jewish private schools. Approved by the leading US scientific ethics committee, the survey found that 61.6 percent of the 584-person sample have been both targets and witnesses of antisemitic conduct in a professional setting. Meanwhile, nearly half suffered antisemitism perpetrated by their teachers unions, purportedly their advocates and representatives in collective bargaining.
School districts, obligated to comply with civil rights laws which proscribe discrimination, fail at prevention, according to the data. Of the 65 percent of respondents who said they are required to take anti-bias trainings, only 10 percent said those trainings address antisemitism.
Other research has argued that public sector education unions turned K-12 classrooms into theaters of anti-Zionist agitation, thereby alienating Jewish teachers and students. According to a report by the Defense of Freedom Institute, several major teachers unions escalated their anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish activity following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — a series of actions which included attempting to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), staging protests in which teachers led chants of “Death to Israel,” and teaching students that Israel constitutes an “settler-colonial” state which perpetrates ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.
In New York City, report author Paul Zimmerman writes, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has advanced from fostering popular support for anti-Zionism among students to seeking cover from government by placing one or more of its fellow travelers in high office. The UFT endorsed the New York City mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in July, calling the avowed socialist and Hamas sympathizer a potential “partner.”
“The historical record shows that, whatever their shortcomings, previous generations of teacher-union leaders stood up to antisemitism in K-12 schools on behalf of their Jewish members and promoted strong US support for Israel in the face of existential attacks on that country,” the report states. “Now, antisemitic activists grossly dishonor that legacy by weaponizing teacher unions to spread antisemitism, intimidate Jewish teachers, and recast the classroom as a battlefield against the West.”
Zimmerman outlines three concepts for reforming union conduct, reserving a significant role for the US Congress, which holds the power to investigate the union bosses and subpoena them before its relevant committees. He also calls on teachers to register their opposition by withholding compulsory union dues which ply union leadership with both resources and legitimacy.
The problem of educators promoting anti-Zionism is present in higher education too. Following the announcement of US-Israeli strikes on Iran late last month, anti-Zionist faculty on college campuses cajoled students to support Islamism, jihad, and terrorism by recruiting them to participate in demonstrations for Iran, a regime which is responsible for killing American soldiers through proxy groups across the Middle East.
The Algemeiner reviewed over a dozen examples of faculty, specifically the Faculty for Justice in Palestine organization, proclaiming solidarity with Iran’s Islamist, authoritarian regime and lambasting the US and Israel for their joint operation.
“These u.s.-backed attacks are designed to spark a regional war, sacrificing the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and beyond to further amerikkkan and zionist domination [sic],” said a post liked by the University of California Ethnic Studies Council, a body of professors who proposed an ethnic studies high school requirement for UC admissions. Critics have noted that the proposal pushed anti-Zionism in the classroom.
“Every drop of their blood spilled ignites our rage, our grief, and our duty,” the post continued. “We must continue to organize in solidarity with the Palestinian people, until the end of zionism [sic] and the liberation of Palestine.”
In Bronxville, New York, Sarah Lawrence College’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter posted a volley of messages which called for “de-platforming Zionists” and ending military operations in Iran. The group also shared false claims that the US opened fire on Pakistani civilians.
Just miles away, the Saint John’s University FJP group shared agitprop alleging that the US intentionally targeted an Iranian school with an airstrike and has “always … sacrificed” children. The group also called for sabotaging the war effort by refusing to file taxes or to file by paper to delay the government’s receiving revenue. Meanwhile, the post suggested that agents in the government are prepared to participate in the conspiracy.
“The absolute bare minimum those of us in the imperial core should be doing is NOT FUNDING THIS SH—T,” said the post. “For example even just filing your taxes via paper slows down the IRS and makes it easier for other tax resisters to make an impact with their actions as well.”
Bowdoin College, New York University, Bryn Mawr College, and Haverford College all have Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups sharing similar social media content.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Amid revolt against ‘Israel lobby,’ J Street seeks elusive middle ground in primaries
A website and social media posts from “Track AIPAC,” associated with a group called Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, is targeting members of Congress it hopes to unseat in the upcoming primary season with large dollar figures alongside their photos, declaring them captive of the “pro-Israel lobby.”
Such posts give the impression that the candidates have received significant financial support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest group working to elect candidates who support Israel uncritically — which has made clear this election year that it will not provide support to candidates who even mention conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.
But the Track AIPAC dollar figures in many cases also include contributions from other fundraising committees whose aims are at odds with AIPAC’s, such as J Street, a progressive group that is trying to push Israel to change direction as it carries out a new war alongside the U.S.
It’s just one attempt to lump together all campaign funding groups that recognize Israel’s right to exist and the candidates they support as targets for defeat in this year’s primary elections, no matter how critical they have been of the Israeli government. The tactic is aimed at voters in a party where support for Israel has collapsed, and risks obscuring where candidates stand on crucial questions as voters head to the polls.
Against that backdrop, J Street is holding its line while focusing on its lane in 2026: Endorse only candidates committed to Israel as a Jewish state, but who also advocate changes for the direction of Israel’s government.
“The minimum is the recognition that there must be, and there is an Israel that is the national homeland of the Jewish people,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, said in a recent interview. “If you don’t want to say that out loud publicly, you won’t be on our list.”
Ben-Ami himself has shifted his position on Israel in recent years. Last August, Ben-Ami wrote that he was “persuaded” by the claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, after rejecting the term throughout most of the nearly two-year military campaign. Earlier in the war, he had described the military’s conduct as a “moral stain on the state of Israel.”
J Street also supported the pair of resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont Independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel, to block weapons transfers to Israel. A record 27 Senate Democrats — a majority of the caucus — voted in favor. And even before that, J Street urged oversight of U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Where J Street fits in
Founded in 2007, the organization describes itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy group that supports a two-state solution and diplomacy to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its federal political action committee, launched in 2009, has gradually expanded its list of endorsees as it seeks to position itself as a bridge between pro-Israel voices and the party’s progressive wing.
This cycle, J Street PAC is backing 133 House and Senate incumbents as well as Democratic challengers running against Republican incumbents. The group has also approved several candidates competing in open Democratic primaries, allowing its donor network to support their campaigns. In one New York race, J Street endorsed the incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, and also “approved” his challenger, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.
Even the minimal recognition of Israel and support for U.S. defense aid to the Jewish state have increasingly become a political flashpoint in Democratic primaries.
In some competitive races, progressive candidates critical of the U.S.–Israel alliance have gained traction, benefiting from crowded fields or backlash to heavy outside spending. That dynamic has been visible in contests such as the New Jersey special election for a House seat, where progressive candidate Analilia Mejia prevailed after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, a J Street–approved candidate.
Ahead of next Tuesday’s Illinois primary, another super PAC aligned with AIPAC, Elect Chicago Women, has targeted the frontrunner, Daniel Biss, contributing to the rise in polling of a younger Palestinian-American candidate, Kat Abughazaleh. J Street is backing Biss.
AIPAC has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. That opposition deepened during the Gaza war as Democratic voters became more polarized over U.S. policy on Israel. Many congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. The group has also drawn attacks from white nationalists and some leaders of the MAGA movement.
The test: A future for Israel
Amid the larger conflict, J Street is trying to define a middle ground.
Ben-Ami outlined the organization’s red lines for endorsements during J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, saying the group looks for candidates who acknowledge Israel’s legitimate security needs while avoiding unconditional support for its government. “If you’re in favor of a complete arms embargo against Israel, and you don’t recognize that Israel should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, you won’t come anywhere near our list,” Ben-Ami said.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in progressive politics, where Israel policy and Palestinian rights — once a marginal issue in most congressional races — have become a litmus test for progressive candidates seeking to define themselves against establishment Democrats. Recent polls showed the wider tensions within the Democratic Party, which loomed large in the 2024 presidential election in the wake of the Gaza war — and now opposition to the war in Iran — are likely to shape the midterm elections.
Gallup, which has tracked Americans’ views of Israel for more than two decades, found that sympathy for Palestinians in the decadeslong Middle East conflict has jumped 22 percentage points over the past two years. Only 17% of Democrats now sympathize more with Israel.
J Street’s leaders reject that characterization. Ben-Ami said polling on Israel shouldn’t be a zero-sum choice. He faulted some established pro-Israel organizations for pushing a binary framework that pressures people to pick one side or the other, which he sees as a “self-defeating approach” that has backfired politically. J Street, he said, tries to create space for candidates who acknowledge both the trauma of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel and the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza. Ben-Ami added that many voters hold both views at once and are looking for leaders with clarity on the issue.
For some progressive activists, however, the distinction is: any organization that defends Israel as a Jewish state is increasingly treated as part of the same establishment.
Massively outspent
Also looming over J Street as it tries to reach voters is AIPAC’s vastly bigger bank account.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $28 million in high-stakes Democratic primaries in 2024. The group has already invested more than $7.3 million of the $78 million it raised in the 2026 election cycle, and its affiliated Illinois group, Elect Chicago Women, has to date spent an additional $5.7 million to defeat Biss in the March 17 primary for the open seat in Illinois’ 9th District.
J Street hasn’t been able to match that scale, even as it framed its efforts as a counterweight to AIPAC spending. J Street raised $3 million for the J Street Action Fund super PAC for spending in competitive House and Senate races.
Ben-Ami said J Street plans to be “very targeted” in deploying its resources to influence key races, particularly contests that could determine control of Congress or where candidates aligned with its positions are facing attacks backed by AIPAC spending.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a progressive research group, said it plans to spend $2 million in ads this cycle, targeting Republicans over their support for Israel and backing Democrats in favor of blocking weapons to Israel.
Democratic Majority for Israel, a mainstream Democratic-affiliated political action committee, said its budget for the midterms exceeds “seven figures.” Brian Romick, DMFI’s president, said in an interview that his group’s “number one goal” will be to help Democrats take back the House “with a pro-Israel majority.” Its primary spending, he said, will support candidates who’d increase the odds of a Democrat winning the seat.
The post Amid revolt against ‘Israel lobby,’ J Street seeks elusive middle ground in primaries appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s Shi’ite Allies Step Up Strikes Despite Weakened Hand
The sky is illuminated as an Iranian missile lands in Israel, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, as seen from Tel Aviv, Israel, March 12, 2026. PhotoL REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
Shi’ite Muslim armed groups in Lebanon and Iraq are stepping up their role in the war with the US and Israel, showing the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” can still wage attacks despite damage inflicted on the alliance during the Gaza conflict.
Groups that have long been armed and financed by Iran and loyal to its Shi’ite Islamist rulers are now helping Tehran intensify the war around the region, strikes in recent days show.
Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday launched their first-ever simultaneous rocket barrage on Israel, with the Lebanese terrorist group firing 200 missiles. Israel reported that only two of these hit its territory.
Iraqi Shi’ite militants have also picked up the pace of drone and missile attacks on US interests in Iraq in the last 3-4 days, according to three Iraqi security sources and two sources close to the groups.
One group yet to enter the fray are Tehran’s Houthi allies in Yemen, heavily armed and capable of disrupting maritime navigation around the Arabian peninsula, as shown during the Gaza war when they fired at Red Sea shipping and Israel. Houthi attacks could further disrupt oil markets because Saudi Arabia diverted exports to the Red Sea after Iran shut the Hormuz straits.
Last week, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi said the group had its “fingers on the trigger” and was ready to act militarily when developments warrant it.
The alliance that Tehran calls the Axis of Resistance suffered major blows after Hamas – one of its key members – attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting a war that decimated the Palestinian terrorist group and pummeled Hezbollah, with Israel killing the Lebanese group‘s leader Hassan Nasrallah. The ripple effects helped topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria, knocking away a pillar of the Axis.
“Iran built the Axis for a moment like this,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center think-tank, describing it as an “existential war” for Iran and Hezbollah, which joined the fight even though its military power remains well below levels seen in 2023.
“If the Iranian regime is destroyed, there would be nothing left” of the Axis, he said.
Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said the Hezbollah attack on Wednesday comprised 200 rockets and 20 drones.
“There’s no contradiction between the fact that we heavily, heavily diminished Hezbollah in the last three years, and the fact that they are still a relevant, dangerous force,” he told reporters on Thursday.
A US State Department spokesperson said Washington “unequivocally condemns Iran and Iran-backed terrorist militias’ attacks on diplomatic, military, and civilian infrastructure, in Iraq, including in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region,” and it fully supports “Israel’s right to defend itself against” Hezbollah.
HEZBOLLAH EXECUTES IRANIAN PLAN
Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei thanked “the fighters of the Resistance Front,” according to a statement issued on Thursday and read out by a state TV announcer.
“We consider the countries of the Resistance Front as our best friends,” he said in the statement, the first issued in his name since he was named as leader on Sunday.
Hezbollah, founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982, entered the Iran war on March 2, saying it aimed to avenge the killing of Mojtaba’s father, former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed on the first day of the war.
Israel has retaliated with a new offensive against the group in Lebanon, just 15 months after the last one, killing more than 600 people, forcing more than 800,000 from their homes.
Hezbollah’s rocket barrage on Wednesday night – its heaviest during this war – was launched at the same time as Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel, according to the Israeli military and two Lebanese sources familiar with Hezbollah operations.
The Lebanese sources said the coordinated strikes were part of Iran’s plan in the event of a major war, aiming to confuse Israeli air defense systems.
Despite the volleys of rockets, Hezbollah’s attacks have caused relatively little damage so far. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon.
No fatalities have been reported in Israel as a result of Hezbollah rocket attacks.
LOYALIST CORE MOBILIZES IN IRAQ
Hezbollah played a major part in Iran’s regional strategy under the leadership of Nasrallah, the secretary general killed in 2024, backing Shi’ite factions in Iraq, Hamas, and the Houthis.
In Iraq, not all the Iran‑backed armed groups appear to support attacks on US interests. Reuters reported last week that many of the fighters and militia groups the Iranians cultivated in Iraq had not entered the fight.
But analysts and officials say a core group of Tehran‑aligned factions remains active and capable of exerting pressure.
Operating under the umbrella of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, these groups said on Thursday they’d carried out 31 attacks over the past 24 hours using dozens of drones and rockets against what they described as “occupation bases” in Iraq and the region.
Security officials say the militias have also sought to extend pressure to energy projects and oilfields in southern Iraq, where several US companies and US‑linked service firms operate alongside international partners.
Among the claimed attacks, two security sources said two drones hit the southern Majnoon oilfield on Wednesday, where US-based KBR is the operator. No casualties were reported. The attack was corroborated by a field engineer who said there had been five such strikes in less than a week.
On Tuesday a US diplomatic facility near Baghdad International Airport was struck by a drone, according to the US State Department, which said there were no injuries and everyone was accounted for.
Four security sources told Reuters the same site has come under repeated attack and was also hit on Wednesday.
Separately, two drones targeted a US military base near Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan on Wednesday, three Kurdish security sources said.
In northern Iraq, a drone attack struck an oilfield operated by US firm HKN Energy in Iraq’s Kurdistan region on March 5, causing a fire and halting production, two security sources and an oilfield engineer said. The sources said the drones belonged to Iran-backed militias and came from an area they controlled.
Reuters could not independently verify who was behind the attacks.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq also claimed responsibility for downing the US military refueling aircraft on Thursday. The US Central Command said the aircraft crashed in an incident that involved another aircraft but was not the result of hostile or friendly fire.
Andreas Krieg, a lecturer at King’s College London’s security studies department, said that while the Axis of Resistance had been degraded since 2023, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shi’ite militias, and the Houthis were “very much operational.”
“They still retain capabilities, they still show very strong intent, and they remain well resourced,” he said.