How the US Is Really Losing Its War Against Iran

Eman Mohammed

The sound of a volleyball hitting a gym floor is specific. The slap of leather on wood, the echo in an empty room, the way it carries when the windows are open and practice runs late. I spent two years during the pandemic following Muslim female athletes in the US, trying to get editors to care about that sound, about the women who made it. Basketball players, runners, wrestlers, footballers who trained in makeshift gyms while the world was locked down. Their complaints were ordinary: underfunding, lack of media coverage, federations that treated them like billboard faces instead of serious competitors, the gap between Olympic rhetoric about women’s empowerment and the reality of training without proper facilities or pay.

Western editors were not interested in that. They wanted the “barrier-breaking” angle, the Nike hijab story, the question about how it felt to be a Muslim woman in sports, as if that were the story instead of the fact that she could not get funding for a coach or that her federation refused to pay for her travel to international competitions. Meanwhile, France was banning hijabi basketball players from competing, the same France that hosts international tournaments and lectures the world about liberty, and the editors who passed on my pitches did not see the contradiction. Barriers are only interesting when you can sell them as inspiration, not when you have to name who built them.

On February 28, 2026, the US killed twenty female volleyball players in an airstrike on their gym in Lamerd, Iran. Children were inside the building when it was hit. The strike was part of Operation Epic Fury, the illegal joint US-Israeli military operation that began that day. The International Volleyball Federation issued a statement. They were “shocked and deeply concerned,” they expressed “deepest condolences to the victims’ families.” Iranian state media reported the athletes were part of a youth volleyball team. I cannot find their names, because no one reported them. That is also the story.

The same day, over 165 people, mostly elementary age girls, were killed when a US airstrike hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. School was in session. Satellite images show most of the school reduced to rubble, a crescent punched into its roof, the tight pattern of damage consistent with a targeted airstrike. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a Pentagon briefing: “We, of course, never target civilian targets. But we’re taking a look.” Earlier that week, Hegseth said the US was unleashing “the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. All on our own terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement.” A US official told the Associated Press the strike on the school was “likely” US responsibility. The UN Human Rights Office spokesperson said: “The families of the little girls who were killed are entitled to the truth of how this happened.” The United States calls this precision.

The US military budget for fiscal year 2025 is $895 billion. Iran’s is $24.6 billion. The US has been firing $2 million Tomahawk missiles at decoys. F-35 jets that cost $80 million each circle overhead unable to distinguish real targets from inflatables. Iran pulls tricks from Cold War manuals, radar jamming, balloon aircraft, decoy runways painted on dirt, and watches the most expensive military in human history waste billions chasing shadows. They are hitting gyms full of athletes, schools full of children, residential blocks where families were eating dinner. The US is not losing because it lacks firepower. It is losing because murdering volleyball players is not a military strategy. It is just murder, dressed up in the language of national security and sold to a public that stopped asking questions years ago.

Empires do not surrender. They hemorrhage. Public opinion is collapsing and the global south is done pretending. BRICS is expanding, and countries that used to line up behind US leadership are now watching the US kill athletes at practice and calling it strategy.

Soft power is gone because the “freedom and democracy” narrative does not work when you are bombing schools and gyms. Western media will write endless features about Muslim women “breaking barriers” in sports, but when twenty Muslim female athletes are killed in an airstrike, the story does not even make it past the wire services.

Since April 20, 2024, when Congress passed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, the US has spent an estimated $36 billion on military operations tied to the Iran conflict, climbing at roughly $200 million per day since Operation Epic Fury began. That is $240 per US taxpayer and counting. That is $240 you did not vote for, funding a war you did not declare, killing athletes whose names you will never know. Every missile fired at a painted decoy is a bridge that does not get built, a hospital that closes, a school that loses funding. The war is hollowing out the country from the inside.

Iran does not need to win. It just needs the US to keep losing. And the US is very, very good at that.

You are funding this. But that also means you have power, and they are terrified of you realizing it. Boeing manufactures the bombs and missiles. Raytheon builds the precision-guided munitions and missile defense systems. Lockheed Martin produces the F-35s, the surveillance tech, the targeting systems. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud host military AI and targeting infrastructure. Caterpillar provides the bulldozers that demolish homes in occupied territories, the machinery that clears the ground after the airstrikes.

BDS campaigns have already cost billions. The blueprint exists. Boycott these companies. Divest your institutions from their stock. Organize your union, your campus, your city council to cut contracts. Disrupt their earnings calls, their shareholder meetings, their polished PR. Every dollar you withhold is a crack in the machine.

I still think about that sound. The slap of leather on wood. Twenty women who trained together, who knew each other’s rhythms, who could read a set before the ball left their teammate’s hands. The US killed them on February 28, 2026, and called it strategy. But strategy does not murder athletes and expect the world to call it strength. Strategy does not spend billions chasing inflatable planes while losing public opinion, soft power, economic stability, and diplomatic legitimacy. The empire is losing. It is hemorrhaging. It is fragile in ways it cannot admit.

Every time you refuse to fund it, every boycott, every protest, every disruption, you cost them more than a painted decoy ever could. You are joining the side that is already winning. The empire is bleeding billions. They cannot sustain this. The math is on your side. The only question is whether you will act like you know it.

The sound of refusal is quieter than a ball hitting a gym floor, but it carries further. And it is the only sound they cannot bomb into silence.