Middle East crisis live: three ships hit in strait of Hormuz as Iran calls vessels belonging to US or allies ‘legitimate targets’
Here are some images coming out of Tehran today:
At least 65 Nigerian soldiers killed in jihadist raids in country’s north-east
At least 65 Nigerian soldiers have been killed in jihadist raids across the country’s north-east in the last two weeks, as the west African state battles to contain one of the world’s deadliest terror groups. On 5 and 6 March, gunmen from Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) overran four military bases in Borno state, the epicentre of the insurgency. Nigerian daily the Punch reported that about 40 soldiers were killed in total in these attacks. In a statement on 7 March, the same day a mass funeral was held for the fallen troops, the military disputed the death toll but did not provide an alternative number. Nigerian troops “successfully defeated multiple coordinated attacks launched by Iswap terrorists on military locations in Delwa, Goniri, Kukawa and Mainok” on 8 and 9 March, the army said in another statement. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, 300 people, including women and children, were also abducted by Iswap gunmen, who used sophisticated machinery including anti-aircraft machine guns and drones during the raids. The attacks follow a pattern of coordinated raids by jihadists on military facilities in the country’s north, which is being ravaged by an almost two-decade insurgency that spiked after the extrajudicial killing of Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf in July 2009. Nigeria has been struggling to contain the conflict, which has spread to cover the Lake Chad basin area, also cutting across Cameroon, Chad and Niger. More than 2 million people have been displaced by the insurgency. Since then, the sect has broken into at least three factions, including the ruthless Iswap. In November, a general was killed by jihadists who then taunted Nigerian authorities by releasing footage about his death even as the state denied his capture. Last month, 200 US troops arrived in northern Nigeria to train their counterparts, weeks after the US president, Donald Trump, announced airstrikes on terrorist elements in the region. The Nigerian establishment, including the president, Bola Tinubu, has been heavily criticised for seemingly prioritising a mass wedding involving 10 sons and daughters of junior defence minister Bello Matawalle in Abuja last month. On Tuesday, Matawalle also drew flak for a social media post applauding the defection of the governor of Zamfara, his home state, to the ruling party in a week of multiple Iswap attacks. The minister’s last post about the military was on 15 January, Nigeria’s Armed Forces Remembrance Day. “We also remember our fallen heroes – those who paid the ultimate price so our nation may live in peace,” he posted. “Their sacrifice will never be forgotten.”
Mojtaba Khamenei was hurt in strike that killed his father, Iran’s Cyprus ambassador confirms
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was injured in the 28 February attack that killed six of his family members, including his father, Tehran’s ambassador to Cyprus has confirmed. In an interview conducted at his embassy compound in Nicosia, Alireza Salarian elaborated on the circumstances in which Khamenei, 56, was injured, saying he was lucky to survive the strike, which levelled the late ayatollah’s residence. “He was also there and he was injured in that bombardment but I haven’t seen that reflected in the foreign news,” he told the Guardian. “I have heard that he was injured in his legs and hand and arm … I think he is in the hospital because he is injured.” Explaining why the cleric had not appeared in public or made any statements since he succeeded his father on Sunday, he added: “I don’t think he is comfortable [in any condition] to give a speech.” The attack occurred on the opening day of US-led airstrikes against Iran, when the sprawling presidential complex in the heart of Tehran was targeted. It was the 10th day of the holy month of Ramadan, said the ambassador, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was at his residence with several members of his family, including Mojtaba’s wife, Zahra, and his teenage son, Mohammad Bagher, who were also killed in the attack. Iranian media reports suggested that Ali Khamenei’s wife, Mansour, died three days after the aerial strike. “The [late] supreme leader was killed with his wife, with his daughter, with his son-in-law and with his daughter’s 14-month-old baby,” said Salarian, who was in Iran when the US-led offensive began. “They were inside their house near the presidential office. Top commanders were also killed as they were also invited. The supreme leader had four sons and two daughters and actually he lived in the same place where he worked.” On Wednesday Yousef Pezeshkian, a top government adviser and the son of Iran’s president, had said Mojtaba Khamenei was wounded but stopped short of explaining how. In a post on his Telegram channel, he wrote: “I heard news that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei had been injured. I have asked some friends who had connections. They told me that, thank God, he is safe and sound.” An Iranian official on Wednesday told Reuters that Khamenei was “lightly injured” but still continuing to operate. Earlier this week Iranian state TV described the regime’s new leader as a “wounded veteran of the Ramadan war” but did not specify his injuries. The US president, Donald Trump, called Mojtaba Khamenei’s election by an 88-member committee of clerics “an unacceptable choice”, adding: “He is not going to last long.” Israel has warned it will not hesitate to assassinate the Shia cleric, thought to be as hardline as his father, who had held the post for 37 years after the Islamic revolution. Salarian told the Guardian the late ayatollah “had not wanted his son” to replace him. “High-ranking clergymen did ask him but the late supreme leader said ‘no’ because he didn’t want a dynastic system. He was elected. [After the attack] top-ranking clergymen said: ‘This is your job; you have to obey.’” Western intelligence services believe the new leader is being deliberately kept out of the public eye for fear of an assassination attempt. “I don’t know if he [the new leader] is worried or not, but we know that the US, and especially Israel, will target him,” the ambassador said.
Police investigating Swiss bus fire that killed six say no evidence of terrorist motive
Police investigating a bus fire that killed at least six people in western Switzerland have said they suspect a deliberate act by a person onboard but so far have not found any evidence of a terrorist motive. The vehicle, operated by a service that transports passengers and mail, went up in flames on Tuesday evening in Kerzers, a town of about 5,000 people about 12 miles (20km) west of the capital, Berne, in the canton of Fribourg. Frédéric Papaux, a spokesperson for Fribourg police, said investigators were following up on reports someone on the bus had doused themselves in fuel and set themselves on fire. “At this stage, we have evidence suggesting a deliberate act by a person who was inside the bus,” said Papaux. Public prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation. As well as the six deaths, five people were injured in the blaze, Papaux said. Police were unable to say how many passengers were on the bus at the time. Fribourg police’s communications chief, Martial Pugin, said two of the victims were in a serious condition while a third was able to return home overnight. Authorities said it would take several days to identify the six people who died. It was not immediately clear if the suspected arsonist was among the dead. Pugin told the national broadcaster RTS that while an intentional act was the most likely scenario, “at present” there was no evidence of a terrorist attack. The Swiss president, Guy Parmelin, whose country was struck by a devastating fire on New Year’s Eve in the ski resort of Crans-Montana, expressed his condolences to the victims’ families. “I am shocked and saddened that people in Switzerland have once again lost their lives in a serious fire,” he said. In the early hours of 1 January, a basement bar in Crans-Montana was engulfed in flames as people celebrated the new year. Forty-one people died, with another 115 injured. Images from Kerzers posted on social media showed tall flames shooting from the windows of the bus and a plume of black smoke rising into the sky. Emergency services staff worked late into the night at the scene. Video after the fire was extinguished showed the charred remains of the yellow vehicle. It was removed from the road during the night. The media outlet Blick quoted a witness as saying that a man on the bus had poured petrol out and set himself on fire. “Everything happened so quickly – and then within moments everything was in flames,” another person told Blick. “The heat even caused the tyres to explode and fly up to 200 metres away.” Witnesses told the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper that the flames spread quickly, with injured people screaming and writhing in pain on the street. “It was awful,” said Hans-Jürg Stocker, who lives near the scene. Two women who work in a building close to the site of the fire reported hearing a loud bang and people throwing objects at the bus. “Apparently they wanted to break open the windows to free people,” one of the women told the Tages-Anzeiger. Nirosan Vickneswaran, 37, was waiting anxiously for news of his cousin, who was on the bus when it went up in flames. “We don’t know if he’s injured or worse,” he told Reuters. Police had taken DNA samples from the family and indicated it could take up to 48 hours to find out, he said. Mina Gendre was about to close up the shop where she works when she saw the bus, which had stopped unexpectedly across the road, had a small fire inside. She said that within half a minute or so, it had burst into flames. “It was so shocking. I saw someone come running out of the bus on fire,” she said. With smoke billowing out of the bus, Gendre shut the door of the shop to protect it as bystanders helped put out the fire on a person with a jacket. Romain Collaud, a member of the Fribourg state council, said the bus involved was not an electric vehicle. Although the cause of the blaze has yet to be determined, the theory that an electric motor caught fire can be ruled out. “It was a bus with a combustion engine,” he told broadcaster RTS. The vehicle involved was a PostBus, a fixture of rural life in the Alpine country. The distinctive yellow buses serve people in more remote areas, connecting them with towns and carrying letters and parcels. They are used by about half a million people every day, including schoolchildren. Stefan Regli, the chief executive of PostBus, said in a statement: “It is a terrible tragedy that occurred yesterday. Like me, all the employees of PostBus and Swiss Post are shocked.” Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report
‘Severe water stress’: why desalination plants are the Gulf’s greatest weakness
In 1983, the CIA determined that the most crucial commodity in the Gulf was its desalinated potable water. Although the loss of a single plant could be handled, “successful attacks on several plants in the most dependent countries could generate a national crisis that could lead to panic flights from the country and civil unrest”. And the greatest threat to the region’s water supply? “Iran.” That’s why, four decades later, the world held its breath on Saturday when Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, accused the US of “a blatant and desperate crime” by attacking a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, in the strait of Hormuz. “The US set this precedent, not Iran,” he said. The US denied responsibility for the attack. But the next day, on the other side of the Gulf, Bahrain announced one of its own desalination plants had been hit. The alleged culprit: “Iranian aggression.” It looked like the region, its cities and its industries, was poised to unravel in a frenzy of tit-for-tat assaults on critical water infrastructure. But then the attacks on desalination plants stopped. Why? Potable water has always been a scarce commodity in the Gulf. Rainfall in the Middle East is low and highly variable, and most countries lack large permanent rivers to fulfil their water needs. Historically, the region had simply coped, drawing from what limited groundwater supplies they had. But with the growth of the oil industry from the 1950s onwards, demand soon outstripped supply, aquifers were spoiled, and the region’s fast developing countries were forced to turn to desalination – turning seawater into drinking water – for their water needs. According to the latest data, 70% of Saudi Arabia’s drinking water comes from desalination plants; in Oman the figure is 86%; the United Arab Emirates, 42%; and in Kuwait, 90%. Even Israel, which has access to the Jordan river, relies on five large coastal desalination plants for half its potable water. Collectively, the Middle East accounts for roughly 40% of global desalinated water production, providing a combined desalination capacity of 28.96m cubic metres of water, every single day. “In several Persian Gulf states, modern cities would simply not function without it,” said Nima Shokri, the director of the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology. In 2026, just as in 1983, observers have pointed out that this crucial structural weak point can be used against its Arab neighbours. “Targeting desalination plants could quickly create water shortages in several Persian Gulf states,” Shokri said. “Many cities depend on a small number of large coastal plants, meaning a successful strike could disrupt drinking water supplies within days. Unlike oil facilities, these plants cannot easily be replaced or repaired quickly. In extreme cases, governments could be forced to ration water for entire urban populations.” Damage to desalination plants would also have environmental consequences. The Conflict and Environment Observatory noted that attacks could lead to the release of chemicals including sodium hypochlorite, ferric chloride and sulfuric acid. But since Sunday’s drone strike in Bahrain, no more desalination plants have been attacked. Shokri suggested the decision could be “strategic restraint”. “Desalination plants are critical civilian infrastructure and attacking them risks severe humanitarian consequences,” he said. “Escalating strikes on water systems could trigger international condemnation and potentially widen the conflict.” Although less reliant on desalination, Iran, too, has its problems with water. For years, Iran has been struggling with a drought that, experts agree, has been made far more severe by human-caused climate breakdown. “Iran already faces severe water stress from drought, over-extraction of groundwater, and declining river flows,” Shokri said. Retaliatory attacks on its own water infrastructure could worsen its difficulties. “Damage to reservoirs, pumping stations or treatment plants could compound existing shortages.” In 1983, the CIA noted that Tehran had promised its Arab neighbours it would not attack their desalination plants. Whether that promise will continue to hold four decades later is uncertain. On Tuesday, after the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, threatened the “most intense day of strikes” of the war so far, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said Iran would adopt an “eye for an eye” approach to warfare. “If they initiate war on infrastructure, we will undoubtedly target their infrastructure,” he said.
French aid worker among three killed in drone attack in eastern DRC, M23 rebels say
At least three people, including a French humanitarian worker for the UN children’s agency, were killed in a drone attack in Goma early on Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for the M23 rebel group has said. The attack happened at about 4am in a residential neighbourhood in the city, which has been under M23 occupation since January 2025. Lawrence Kanyuka, the spokesperson of the Congo River Alliance group of rebels that includes M23, condemned the attack and accused the government of being behind it. “A drone attack is currently being carried out against the city of Goma by the terrorist regime of Kinshasa, well beyond the frontlines,” he said on X. “This act of aggression constitutes an intolerable provocation targeting a densely populated urban area and deliberately endangering thousands of innocent civilians.” The government has not commented on the attack and no one has claimed responsibility. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, confirmed on X that a French aid worker for Unicef had been killed in the strike. He urged “respect for humanitarian law and for the personnel who are on the ground and committed to saving lives”. Images on social media show responders putting out fire on the upper floor of a two-storey house with a damaged roof. Goma, the capital of North Kivu province and the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the site of deadly fighting last January when M23 rebels stormed the city in an attempt to make territorial gains in the region. Up to 2,000 people were killed. The Rwanda-backed M23 is one of more than 100 armed groups fighting Congolese forces in the mineral-rich eastern DRC. It says its objective is to safeguard the interests of the Congolese Tutsi and other minorities, including protecting them against Hutu rebel groups who escaped to the DRC after taking part in the 1994 Rwanda genocide that targeted Tutsis. M23 occupies swathes of eastern DRC and has established parallel governments in the territories it controls. Fighting has continued in the region despite a US-brokered peace agreement signed in December between the Congolese and Rwandan governments. Last week, the US imposed sanctions on the Rwandan army and four of its senior officials, accusing them of “supporting, training, and fighting” alongside M23. Wednesday’s drone attack indicates shifting dynamics in the conflict through the increasing use of drone warfare by both parties. Two weeks ago an army drone attack in Rubaya, an important M23-controlled coltan mining town, killed the group’s military spokesperson, Willy Ngoma, and several other leaders. Last week, M23 claimed responsibility for a drone attack targeting Kisangani airport in Tshopo province in the country’s east.
Peak interest: Toronto’s snow mountains that refuse to melt are a toxic hazard
Most mountains take tens of millions of years to form. Toronto’s newest mountain took just days. Towering atop the crowns of evergreens, it has no skeleton of limestone or granite. There are no spires, cornices or headwalls. It is simply piles upon piles of snow, mixed with a toxic cocktail of road salt, antifreeze, oil, coffee cups and lost keys. It is the final resting place for the forces of nature that have battered the city in recent weeks – and a daunting environmental hazard. In late January, Toronto was hit with what many experts said was the heaviest single day of snowfall in the city’s history. In some spots, nearly 23in fell, driven in part by a collision of weather systems. The city had already removed 264,000 tonnes of snow from 1,100 km (680 miles) of roads, sidewalks and bike lanes by mid-February. A similar storm hit New York City at the end of February with more than 25in of snow piling up in some regions, part of a two-day storm with hurricane-like winds. Major cities that experience the full brunt of winter have long been forced to confront a reality that snow cannot stay on streets or sidewalks. The solution is to truck the snow – sometimes for weeks on end – to storage facilities along the urban outskirts. Toronto’s six resulting snow mountains are scattered throughout the city. Most are secret, to deter illegal dumping. One site, however, in the north-western outskirts of the city, is most visible to drivers travelling along the highway. It can hold 144,000 cubic metres of snow on its two acres. Reaching nearly 100ft – the height of a 10-storey building – it resembles an Italian marble quarry, with yellow excavators moving in unison against the ashy snow. Plumes of steam rise from industry melters – contraptions roughly the size and shape of a shipping container which slowly reduce the size of the mountain over time. The site operators pull long shifts: during particularly nasty storms, the machinery works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Certainly, there’s a need to remove the snow to minimise risk on roads and sidewalks, especially from a public safety perspective,” said Donald Jackson, a professor of ecology at the University of Toronto. “But the challenge is what they’re trying to balance against: the ultimate impact to aquatic ecosystems.” Canada’s largest city has spent more than C$1 bn dollars over more than a decade to successfully re-naturalise the mouth of the Don River, restoring its natural flood mitigation capabilities and reviving a riparian ecosystem once left for dead. The city says it uses a variety of tools to prevent contaminants such as oil from cars entering water systems. But salt is a pervasive foe, passing though most storm water treatment. Toronto has so far used more than 130,000 tonnes of salt this season and local governments are grappling with a shortage – even though the world’s largest salt mine sits less than 150 miles west of the city. “We know cities are trying to reduce their usage and reliance on salt. But it works,” said Jackson. “But while we know roughly how much the city uses, we have no idea how much is being used to salt private driveways and places like grocery store parking lots.” Furthermore, the risk of legal liability prompts many private operators to overuse salt, Jackson said. The rock salt used on roads – sodium chloride – is chemically the same as table salt. But the two elements pose different risks to the environment and human heath. Chloride in high concentrations is toxic to fish in fresh water systems. In recent testing, Jackson and Lauren Lawson, a doctoral researcher, found chloride levels were high enough to be lethal to a majority of aquatic species at 30% of sites tested. Virtually all the sites they tested were in excess of federal guidelines. Meanwhile, in areas where people use wells for drinking water, sodium levels increase over time as salt is absorbed into the groundwater. In John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, the author wrote: “Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.” And what made them is not what will destroy them. A recent thaw eroded chunks of Toronto’s snow mountain, pushing vast amounts of salt into waterways. “You can have places where it’s elevated to 10, or even 100, times the background level,” he said. “But we’ve also seen locations in where the amount of salt in the water exceeds seawater concentration.” Experts warn that while the climate crisis will lead to overall warmer temperatures, it is also likely to unleash brutal storms, similar to those that choked infrastructure in Toronto and New York. Those storms will require more salt – like many things humans put into the environment – which will last a long time. “The trajectory isn’t good, based on sort of what trends have been over time. We’re looking at increasing concentrations that we see in our rivers, in our lakes. And there isn’t any reason to expect that to stop,” Jackson said. “Even if we stopped applying salt right now, it would take years to decade to flush out of all of our soils and the groundwater.”
Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea FC sale cash may be under investigation as ‘proceeds of crime’
Jersey authorities may be investigating whether cash raised by Roman Abramovich’s 2022 sale of Chelsea FC amounts to the proceeds of crime, according to documents filed at Companies House on Wednesday, potentially complicating a row with the UK government over how the money will be used. Accounts for Fordstam Ltd, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale – currently frozen and gathering interest in a Barclays Bank account – have risen to £2.4bn. The accounts also reveal that the fate of the money could be affected by a corruption and money-laundering investigation by the Jersey authorities into Abramovich’s business affairs. Abramovich has previously denied any wrongdoing. As the Guardian and media partners have revealed, Abramovich funded Chelsea via loans routed through a complex network of offshore companies, helped by a fortune made from the oilfields of Siberia. These loans included £1.4bn provided interest free by Abramovich’s Jersey-based company, Camberley International Investments Ltd. Fordstam’s accounts state that this loan “may be affected by an ongoing criminal investigation initiated by the attorney general of Jersey, into whether certain assets (potentially including the net proceeds) amount to the proceeds of crime”. They add: “It remains unclear as to what steps can lawfully be taken in relation to the loan while that investigation remains ongoing.” Jersey prosecutors are looking into the origins of the oligarch’s wealth, acquired during the chaotic rise of capitalism in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. Abramovich, through his lawyers, has previously said that any suggestion he was involved in criminal activity was false. However, disclosures in Fordstam’s accounts could add another layer of complexity to a battle between Abramovich and the UK government over the release of the proceeds of the Chelsea sale. The cash has been frozen since 2022, when sanctions were imposed by the UK and EU on Abramovich in response to the invasion of Ukraine over his closeness to Vladimir Putin. The oligarch has insisted that the money is his to allocate despite the international sanctions imposed on his assets, prompting a threat of legal action from the British state, which wants to ensure that none of the cash is used outside Ukraine. Questions have also been raised about whether the “net proceeds” of the Chelsea sale could be reduced to less than £1bn by any demand Abramovich might make for repayment of the Camberley loan. Repayment would require a licence from the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, a unit of the Treasury. Fordstam’s accounts also confirm that Chelsea FC’s current owners have a £150m buffer against any financial sanction the club might receive as a result of an investigation by the footballing authorities into whether it broke football’s financial rules under Abramovich’s ownership. This is owing to a “holdback amount”, a clause inserted into the takeover deal by BlueCo 22, the subsidiary through which the Clearlake consortium – led by the US investor Todd Boehly – bought the club. The FA has since charged the club with 74 rule breaches related to payments to agents during Abramovich’s tenure. Deals under the spotlight, highlighted in a 2023 investigation by the Guardian and international media partners, include the transfers of star players Eden Hazard, Willian and Samuel Eto’o. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of the current owners of Chelsea FC. The clause means that a portion of the total payment is withheld for five years to cover the cost of “any proceeding in relation to events which took place before the acquisition date, up to a value of £150m”. The figure is higher than the £100m buffer that had previously been reported. Fordstam confirmed a statement in the previous year’s accounts, indicating that it did not expect the money to be returned. The buffer against any financial penalty has fuelled calls for Chelsea to receive a sporting sanction, such as a points deduction, if the club’s huge success under Abramovich’s tenure is found to have been founded partly on financial rule-breaking.