How Iran's 'Axis of Resistance' reshaped war in the Middle East
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It's consider this where every day we go deep on one big news story. Iranian leaders have issued a series of demands to reopen the key waterway to shipping, demands the US appears unlikely to meet. President Trump told Axias on Sunday that he was quote low-keying it when it came to negotiations. For sailors aboard shipping vessels in the strait, things are still dangerous.
We are still having vessels being targeted by drones and by missiles, and the number of tankers transiting through the strait is is massively reduced compared to what it was pre conflict.
Tim Wilkins is managing director of a tanker ship industry group Intertanko. He says just ten percent of the tankers that used to transit the strait on a given day are making it through.
We had uh quite a severe situation last week where we had a gas tanker which was hit and did unfortunately had to be evacuated, uh a fire did break out. So, you know, even with the US facilitated there are still at risks uh and it doesn't eliminate that risk of an attack.
Meanwhile, Yemen's Houthis said they attacked an oil facility Sunday in southwestern Saudi Arabia, the latest attack by the Iranian-backed rebels. Consider this: Iran and its allied groups have so far withstood American attacks and increasing economic pressure, they've prolonged the war, and they've disrupted American and Israeli strategy. From NPR, I'm Rob Schmidz.
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It's consider this from NPR. Part of what has made Iran so effective in the war with the US is its vast network of allies in the region. Hezbollah and Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran-backed Iraqi militias. They're often referred to as the axis of resistance. Peter Salisbury wrote about them in a foreign affairs magazine article this month. Salisbury teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and I called him up to ask him to explain this access of resistance and how it's shaping the war.
The Axis of Resistance is a network of non state armed groups that Iran has been investing in for the last twenty to forty years and has really built up the capacity of to the extent that groups in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq are all now launching drones, missiles at various adversaries, and in particular the Houthis and the Iraqi groups are able to launch cross border missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia and on commerce in the Red Sea in a way that has proved very difficult for the United States.
Is this a top down structure, like with Tehran at the top, or how do power dynamics work within this?
It probably started something like that, but increasingly these groups, while they're still very closely tied to her Tehran, still very reliant on Iran. they have their own autonomous capabilities, their own supply lines and have their own connections to one another and pool knowledge across what's less kind of a network and more an ecosystem. And that has allowed them, after a series of attacks by the United States and Israel over the past several years, to reconstitute themselves and continue to pose this kind of threat.
And describe the training of some of these groups and how involved Iran might be in in that training.
So maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago, Iran started really investing in training not just Hezbollah, who it's got this long term investment in, and not just Hamas, which it had kind of this loose connection with throughout the nineteen nineties, but really started building up a curriculum almost from basic military education up to higher education, so you can now be trained not just in basic military tactics.
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