The thunder that rolled over Tehran Saturday morning was not merely the sound of modern munitions. It was the echo of a coup in 1953, the wail of a passenger jet falling from the sky in 1988, and the collective gasp of 52 hostages held for 444 days.
When President Donald Trump ordered joint U.S.-Israeli strikes that leveled the compound of Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he wasn’t just attacking a man; he was detonating a century of accumulated dynamite.
The operation, which the Pentagon has named “Operation Epic Fury,” saw more than 125 American aircraft drop 75 precision bombs on what the administration claims were nuclear facilities and the Tehran compound where the aging cleric was meeting with his inner circle.
Khamenei was killed, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, alongside top military brass and members of the cleric’s family.
To understand how events reached this point, one must look back to 1901, when Britain secured Persia’s oil through a concession obtained by bribing officials, promising Iran 16 percent of net profits.
By 1950, the British government collected more in taxes from the company than Iran received in royalties, leading Iran to nationalize its own oil in 1951.
The British government of Clement Attlee labeled the sales of Iran’s nationalized oil as theft. Britain had first considered military action but settled on a coup.
President Harry Truman resisted the plan; President Dwight Eisenhower approved it, authorizing one of the CIA’s earliest covert operations to topple a foreign government.
In August 1953, when the CIA, working with British intelligence, helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
In 2013, the CIA formally acknowledged its role in the coup. U.S. and British operatives undermined Mosaddegh through bribery, propaganda, and orchestrated unrest.
Agents posing as communists threatened clerics, and the U.S. ambassador misled the prime minister about alleged attacks on Americans.
Street clashes in Tehran left about 300 people dead. Mosaddegh was arrested, sentenced to three years in prison, and then confined to house arrest for life.
The coup restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power and extinguished Iran’s first experiment with democratic rule. Backed by U.S. money and weapons, the shah governed as an autocrat for more than two decades.
The resentment hardened, then erupted in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile, the U.S. Embassy was seized, and 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days. Diplomatic relations were severed and never repaired.
In the years that followed, grievances accumulated on both sides, each crisis layered atop the last, until history itself became part of the argument.
The U.S. backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the eight-year war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, a conflict in which the Iraqi dictator used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers.
In 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for an attacking fighter and shot it down over the Gulf, killing all 290 civilians aboard.
The U.S. paid compensation but never formally apologized.
Successive American administrations designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, while Iran funded proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. President George W. Bush labeled Iran part of an “Axis of Evil.”
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated by the administration of President Barack Obama and international partners, limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions.
The 2015 nuclear deal, trading sanctions relief for a freeze on Iran’s weapons program, required Iran to reduce its uranium stockpile by 98%, cut centrifuges, and accept 24/7 IAEA monitoring, aiming to block all pathways to a nuclear weapon.
President Trump withdrew from it unilaterally in 2018.
That withdrawal set the stage for escalation. There was the 2020 drone strike that killed top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, a move that brought the region to the brink.
There were years of failed diplomacy, secret talks in Oman, and public threats. Just last month, in one of his final public utterances, Khamenei mocked Trump’s overtures for negotiation, dismissing the American president as a “clown.”
Now the world waits to see what comes next. In Paris, President Emmanuel Macron condemned the “unilateral military action” and called an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. The European Union expressed “grave concern.”
In Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went further, warning that the strikes contribute “to a more uncertain and hostile international order.”
But in Tehran, a video verified by AFP showed something unexpected.
In the streets of the capital, where just months ago riot police clubbed protesters demanding freedom, there was music. There was dancing. There were cheers.
The full weight of that history, from the 1953 coup to the 2026 strike, now rests on a knife’s edge. The old man is gone, but the fire he tended for so long is just beginning to burn.