Al Jazeera’s @thereelrubyz has been to the first women-only mosque in the Middle East, in the Qatari capital Doha, to explore what the space means to women, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Since filming, many activities have been limited because of the US-Israel war on Iran.
Kyiv, Ukraine – The Russia-Ukraine war’s harshest winter has brought ceaseless pressure from Moscow along the front line and significant aerial attacks that have left millions of Ukrainians without power and heat.
Even though Russia keeps pushing towards Ukrainian strongholds in the southeastern region of Donetsk and plans a spring-summer offensive, for the first time in almost three years, Kyiv began regaining some territory.
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The gains amounted to 460sq km (117.6sq miles), or about 10 percent of what Kyiv lost to Moscow in 2025, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Moscow’s inability to replenish its front-line losses is the main factor, he said.
“Russia is losing a lot of people, up to 35,000 a month,” he told Corriere Della Sera, an Italian daily, on March 3.
Because of the losses inflicted by Ukraine, Russia’s army “stopped growing. Losses equal the number of newly mobilised soldiers. They are close to a crisis,” he was quoted as saying.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think tank, said the gains were more modest – 257sq km (100sq miles) – but admitted that the porous front line and multiple grey areas complicate a better calculation.
Ukrainian counterattacks were especially successful in the eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, where the presence of Russian troops had been insignificant and is now reduced to only three towns.
“Almost the entire territory of Dnipropetrovsk has been liberated,” Major General Oleksandr Komarenko, Ukraine’s chief strategist, said in televised remarks.
In the neighbouring Zaporizhia region, where Moscow had occupied almost three-quarters of the total area and advanced towards the eponymous administrative capital, Ukrainian forces have regained nine towns since January.
“These counterattacks are generating tactical, operational and strategic effects that may disrupt Russia’s Spring-Summer 2026 offensive campaign plan,” the ISW said.
According to Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military’s General Staff, the gains are “tactical but very meaningful”.
But he told Al Jazeera that while Ukraine “amassed some reserves” to advance in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia, Russians keep pushing forward in key areas in Donetsk towards the towns of Sloviansk, Liman, Siversk and Kostiantynivka.
To Romanenko, lower recruitment numbers throughout Russia are key to Moscow’s losses.
“For three months, they’ve had nothing to create their reserves with,” he said.
In 2025, Moscow’s aggressive recruitment fuelled by a persuasive campaign and hefty signing bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars replenished the losses, and the monthly number of newly mobilised servicemen sometimes approached 60,000, he said.
But this year, Russia’s recruitment spree seems to be hobbled by financial problems caused by Western sanctions as the people needed to feed the front line seem exhausted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appears wary of a public outcry that would stem from a full-scale mobilisation.
“Putin is afraid of conducting a full mobilisation. He’s looking for other ways,” Romanenko said.
One of them is the forced enlistment of university students, especially ones with low grades, as drone operators.
Several Russian universities from St Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city and Putin’s hometown, to Khabarovsk near the Chinese border, force male students to undergo drone flying training, the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, a Moscow-based rights group, said this month
Sometimes, the universities offer payments of 100,000 rubles ($1,260) a month on top of the Ministry of Defence’s salary if the newly trained operators enlist.
“They’re scaling up the process to form drone units. They pressure students into becoming drone operators,” Romanenko said.
Kyiv’s advances have so far not turned the table on the war, but they have definitely irked Moscow.
“The Kremlin is utterly displeased from the morale standpoint because their conception, their confidence that they are pushing along the entire front line is falling apart,” Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Washington’s and Israel’s strikes on Iran have postponed the resumption of United States-brokered peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow.
Other observers are sceptical about the significance of Kyiv’s territorial gains.
They “can hardly be called significant even considering the Russian army’s very modest success”, Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
By using amassed reserves in vulnerable front-line spots, Ukraine “manages in some cases to get back some territory”, he said.
The spots are mostly “politically sensitive” areas in the northern region of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk that Russia declared annexed after “referendums” held in 2022, he said.
The liberation of Dnipropetrovsk was part of a larger counteroffensive that also unfolded on the border with Zaporizhia, but it failed, he said.
Another less-publicised development is taking place in the Black Sea.
In February, Ukraine began a “systemic expulsion” of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from its main harbour, the southern port of Novorossiysk, Mitrokhin said.
On March 1, drone strikes damaged five Russian warships, including one capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles.
The fleet was evacuated to Novorossiysk from the port of Sevastopol in annexed Crimea in 2023 after Ukrainian aerial and sea drones and missiles destroyed its largest ships.
The attacks on Novorossiysk followed last year’s destruction of air defence systems in Crimea and of Russian aircraft that monitored sea drones, he said.
“Ukraine has enough drones, keeps producing new ones, but Russia has about two-thirds of its warships on the Black Sea,” Mitrokhin said. “Most importantly, they have nothing to flee to.”
The smaller vessels could be evacuated up the Volga-Don Canal but not to the Caspian Sea, where Ukrainian drones can easily reach them, but towards the upper Volga or the Moskva Rivers, where Moscow’s air defence systems can protect them.
Motorists around the globe are already feeling the impact of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran, with fuel prices sharply rising since the war began.
In the US, a gallon of regular petrol that averaged $2.94 in February now costs $3.58, marking a 20 percent increase, according to data from AAA Fuel Prices, a retail fuel price tracker from the American Automobile Association (AAA).
While each US state sets its own petrol prices, several states have surpassed $4 per gallon, with California exceeding $5 per gallon, the highest level it has been in more than two years.
According to data analysed from Global Petrol Prices, a data platform that tracks and publishes retail energy prices across approximately 150 countries, at least 85 countries have reported increases in petrol prices following the initial attacks on Iran by the US and Israel on February 28. Some nations announce price changes only at the end of each month, so higher prices are expected for many others in April.
Vietnam recorded the highest petrol price increase of nearly 50 percent, rising from $0.75 per litre of 95-octane on February 23 to $1.13 on March 9. Laos follows with a 33 percent increase, then Cambodia at 19 percent, Australia at 18 percent, and the US at 17 percent.
The table below shows the countries that have increased petrol prices at the pumps.
Asia is disproportionately dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for the delivery of its oil and gas, which has been effectively closed since the start of the war. The strait joins the Gulf – also referred to as the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Gulf – to the Gulf of Oman and is the only passage for the region’s oil producers to the open ocean.
Japan and South Korea are among the most vulnerable, importing 95 percent and 70 percent of their oil from the Gulf, respectively.
Both East Asian nations have enacted emergency measures to stabilise their energy markets. On March 8, Japan instructed its oil reserve sites to prepare for a potential release of strategic reserves. The next day, South Korea introduced a maximum price cap on petrol and diesel for the first time in 30 years.
In South Asia, the impact of the war is more severe than in East Asia because countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh have much thinner financial buffers and smaller strategic reserves.
In an attempt to conserve energy, Bangladesh‘s government has ordered all public and private universities to close immediately. In Pakistan, government offices will now operate a four-day workweek, while schools have closed, and a 50 percent work-from-home policy has been enacted to save fuel.
In Europe, the Group of Seven finance ministers convened an emergency meeting to discuss rising prices, with French President Emmanuel Macron raising the possibility of releasing 20-30 percent of emergency strategic reserves to ease the pressure on consumers.
Oil prices and food prices move in lockstep, with energy prices affecting every stage of the food supply chain, from the fertilisers used in the fields to the trucks that carry food from field to supermarket shelf.
Rising oil prices also directly affect shipping and the cost of transport.
“The lifeblood of the global economy is transport,” economist David McWilliams told Al Jazeera. “It’s getting stuff from A to B – it’s a logistics problem, a supply chain problem, and ultimately transportation is the energy of the global economy.”
Fears of stagflation – increasing inflation and rising unemployment, which major oil shocks have historically summoned – are rising. Economists point to the crises of 1973, 1978 and 2008 as evidence that every significant spike in oil prices has been followed, in some form, by global recession.
In lower-income countries, where populations spend a far greater share of their income on food and import large quantities of grain and fertiliser, rising oil prices could rapidly translate into food shortages.
Oil and gas are used for far more than just fuel. They are raw materials for thousands of everyday products.
Plastics, including water bottles, food packaging, phone casings and medical syringes, are all derived from crude oil.
Crude oil is also the hidden ingredient in synthetic fabrics such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, which are used to make everything from sportswear to carpets. It also underpins the cosmetics industry, as it is used to make products such as petroleum jelly (Vaseline), lipsticks and concealers.
Household items also rely on oil-based ingredients, with laundry detergents, dishwashing liquids, and paints all derived from petroleum products.
The global food supply is essentially built on natural gas in the form of fertilisers, used to enhance crop yields and ensure that food production can meet demand.
Any Iranians planning to protest against the government as the US and Israel continue their attacks will be treated as an “enemy”, according to Iran’s security chief. The statement was made after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged the Iranian people to “seize the moment.”
In eastern Tehran, a resident named Sepehr keeps the front door of his apartment unlocked. It is a grim, calculated routine, allowing his family to sprint to an underground car park the moment the booming explosions return to shake their windows.
As thick, toxic smoke from burning oil facilities blankets the city of 10 million, the reality of a limitless conflict has set in. “The war might last weeks, so my family and I will only leave if it gets too bad,” Sepehr says. “For now, life goes on”.
For Iranians and the wider Middle East, there is a haunting sense of deja vu. Today marks the 12th day of the joint United States and Israeli military war against Iran. Exactly at this point during the June 2025 escalation, a fragile, US-brokered truce took effect, halting 12 days of intense bombardment.
Top military leaders and hundreds of civilians were killed in Iran by Israeli strikes, and 28 were killed in Israel, with Iran’s largely symbolic salvo on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which hosts US assets, marking the final curtain of that 12-day war.
Things look much more perilous for the region and the world beyond this time.
The current conflict bears little resemblance to last year’s contained warfare. A drastic strategic pivot – from degrading nuclear infrastructure to executing a “decapitation” strike against the Iranian leadership – has shattered the previous rules of engagement, dragging the region into an open-ended war of attrition with zero diplomatic off-ramps.
During the June 2025 war, Israeli and US forces largely concentrated their firepower on specific nuclear and military facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, though Tehran also came under heavy attack. While devastating, the defined scope of those targets left room for negotiations. The conflict ended on June 24 after intense mediation by Oman, which had been facilitating indirect nuclear talks in Geneva.
This time, the US and Israel adopted a fundamentally different objective. The opening salvo on February 28, 2026 assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several family members in Tehran. The strike was seemingly based on the assumption that eliminating the head of state would precipitate the instant capitulation of the government.
That has not happened. And now another Khamenei, the second son Mojtaba, has been selected as the new supreme leader, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and key leaders all pledging loyalty.
US President Donald Trump has oscillated between demanding the “unconditional surrender” of Iran, calling for a popular uprising, and offering amnesty to military commanders who switch sides. Yet, despite Washington and Israel claiming they have struck more than 5,000 targets and decimated Iran’s air force and navy, the government in Tehran has not collapsed.
Iran says US and Israeli forces have bombed nearly 10,000 civilian sites in the country and killed more than 1,300 civilians since the war began.
The gamble that Iran’s state apparatus would fracture without its supreme leader fundamentally misjudged Iranian military doctrine. Analysts note that Tehran spent two decades designing a framework to survive exactly this scenario.
Formulated by the IRGC, the concept of “decentralised mosaic defence” diffuses command and control across regional layers. Coupled with a “fourth successor” redundancy plan, it ensures that even if senior leaders are killed and central communications are severed, local combat units retain the authority and capacity to act.
Consequently, the Iranian establishment swiftly appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader, and Iran’s vast missile forces continued firing. Using a mix of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as drone swarms, Iran has turned time into a strategic weapon, aiming to deplete Israeli interceptor stockpiles and inflict continuous economic paralysis.
The absence of an off-ramp has allowed the war to metastasise across the region. In 2025, Iran’s retaliation was largely contained to Israel and specific US assets. In 2026, Tehran has widened the map, launching strikes across nine countries.
Missiles and drones have hit US military presence and civilian infrastructure in all Gulf states, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The Iranian military has also restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, driving Brent crude oil prices past $100 a barrel, with wild swings ongoing, and prompting fears of a global energy crisis.
The financial burden of this limitless war is staggering. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury cost the US approximately $3.7bn, mostly unbudgeted. Israel, already reeling from the economic strain of its prolonged wars in Gaza and Lebanon, faces mounting domestic pressure as daily sirens force millions into bunkers.
While politicians and generals debate the shifting parameters of “victory”, civilians are absorbing the catastrophic costs. At least 1,255 people have been killed in Iran, alongside 570 in Lebanon, 13 in Israel, and eight US soldiers.
Among the Iranian dead are 200 children and 11 healthcare workers. In the southern city of Minab, a strike obliterated the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school, killing 165 people, mostly young students. While the US says it’s investigating that strike, independent analysts say the presence of Tomahawk missile debris seems to point blame firmly towards Washington.
Trump recently claimed the war would be over “very soon”, but the reality on the ground suggests a prolonged tragedy.
Rising fuel prices are pushing more people to use public transport and prompting a four-day work week in Manila as the impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran is felt globally. Al Jazeera’s Jamela Alindogan reports on how the government is cutting non-essential travel to save energy costs.