IRANIAN CITIES BURN AMID REBELLION

[Dr Strangelove]

This is the night of long knives MAGA edition.

[Dr Strangelove]

Major aluminum producers in the Gulf countries halt production due to Iranian attacks – Bloomberg

Production at the Emirates Global Aluminium plant in Abu Dhabi has stopped.

The plant lost power after the strikes, causing the metal to harden inside the smelting chains, resulting in "significant damage to the production process."

Strikes also targeted the Aluminium Bahrain plant in Bahrain.

Both plants are among the largest in the world, each producing over 1.6 million tons of aluminum in 2025.

Earlier, Iran had promised retaliatory strikes after U.S. and Israeli attacks on the country's aluminum plants.

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

BREAKING: Iranian drones struck Kuwait’s Mina al-Ahmadi oil refinery early this morning. Fires erupted in multiple operating units. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation confirmed the attack. Firefighters contained the blazes. No injuries reported. Partial shutdowns are underway. This is the second strike on the same facility in fifteen days. The March 19 attack caused temporary shutdowns. Today’s attack confirms the first was not a warning. It was a range-finding exercise.

Mina al-Ahmadi is one of the largest refining complexes in the Gulf, processing up to 346,000 barrels per day. It sits south of Kuwait City, near Camp Arifjan, the forward headquarters of US Army Central Command. Ali Al Salem Air Base, the theatre’s primary airlift hub, has sustained damage to over a dozen structures from Iranian strikes since February 28. Six Camp Arifjan radomes have been destroyed. Six US Army Reserve soldiers were killed on March 1 by a drone near Shuaiba Port. Kuwait has intercepted hundreds of drones and missiles since the war began. And now the targeting has expanded from the bases to the refinery.

That expansion is the story. For five weeks, Iran struck military targets in Kuwait: American runways, radomes, command posts. Military-to-military exchanges within the logic of war. Hitting Mina al-Ahmadi is a different category. It is economic warfare against a country’s industrial infrastructure, the same escalation that turned Iran’s Karaj B1 Bridge from a highway into a target, the same shift from military degradation to civilian punishment that Trump himself has promised when he threatened to hit “each and every one of their electric generating plants.” Iran watched the bridge in Karaj fall. Iran learned the new rules. Iran applied them to Kuwait.

War-risk insurance premiums for Gulf shipping have surged 300 percent since February 28. Each contained fire at Mina al-Ahmadi adds another data point to the actuarial model that determines whether a tanker captain will load crude at a port that has been bombed twice in fifteen days. The IRGC does not need to destroy the refinery. It needs to hit it often enough that the economics of loading there become untenable. The fire goes out. The premium does not.

Kuwait’s refineries produce sulfur as a byproduct. The Gulf carries 45 to 50 percent of global seaborne sulfur trade. Sulfur feeds the acid that leaches the copper that wires every weapon in the $1.5 trillion defence budget. The chain runs from the burning unit at Mina al-Ahmadi to an acid plant in Zambia to a cathode in Congo to a circuit board in Texas. The fire was contained in hours. The supply chain disruption compounds in weeks.

And the Sheikh Jaber Bridge, 36 kilometres long, Kuwait’s primary northern artery, the fourth-longest road bridge on earth, sits on the IRGC’s eight-bridge target list published yesterday. First the bases. Then the refinery. The bridge is next on the published schedule. Kuwait hosts 13,500 American troops, the largest US concentration in the Middle East. It did not strike Iran. It hosted the forces that did. And hosting turned out to be enough.

The molecule does not read alliance agreements. It does not distinguish between combatants and hosts. It reads fire reports. And this morning’s fire report came from Mina al-Ahmadi, where the refinery that was supposed to survive by being silent just learned that silence and distance are not the same thing.

open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]