US weighs moving Persian Gulf operations to Israel after Iran strikes – WSJ

South Korea will move to field a long-range suicide drone system modeled on Iran’s Shahed-136, as militaries race to build cheaper, mass-produced weapons after drones reshaped wars from Ukraine to Iran, Yonhap reported.

Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back said Seoul would accelerate deployment of the Korean-style long-range loitering munition, known as K-Lucas, as part of a wider drone and counter-drone strategy. He said low-cost drones were now being deployed in large numbers and had “fundamentally” changed the nature of warfare.

The K-Lucas system is reverse-engineered from Iran’s Shahed-136, a long-range one-way attack drone designed to strike fixed targets and destroy itself on impact. The Shahed has become one of Iran’s most influential military exports and a symbol of the shift toward “affordable mass”: using large numbers of relatively cheap drones to exhaust air defenses and reduce reliance on expensive missiles.

The same logic has already shaped other militaries: Russia has used Iranian-designed Shahed drones extensively in Ukraine, while the United States has developed its own LUCAS one-way attack drone based on the Shahed design.

South Korea’s plan comes as Seoul faces growing concern over North Korea’s unmanned capabilities. Ahn said Pyongyang continues to advance a range of drone systems, creating new threats to South Korea’s military, critical infrastructure and civilian facilities.

Under the plan, South Korea aims to acquire more than 20,000 low-cost drones by 2030, including short-range reconnaissance drones and small loitering munitions. It also plans to develop next-generation systems such as AI-powered drone swarms.

The Defense Ministry will also reorganize its Drone Operations Command into a new National Defense Drone Headquarters. The current command has faced scrutiny over its alleged role in a drone incursion into North Korea in October 2024, an operation believed to have been linked to former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed martial law attempt later that year.

Ahn also reaffirmed plans to train 500,000 “drone warriors,” with the goal of making drone operation a basic skill across the armed forces.

David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security and a longtime analyst of Iran’s nuclear program, rejected the argument that Tehran emerged stronger from the war, saying US and Israeli strikes had severely damaged Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“You’d have to be delirious to think that’s the case,” Albright told the Washington Post when asked whether Iran was stronger after the war. He said that, from a technical nuclear perspective, the military campaign was “very successful” in setting back Tehran’s weapons capability.

Albright said Iran’s enrichment program, gas centrifuge network and parts of what he described as its secret weaponization effort had been badly damaged. “The centrifuge program as it was no longer exists,” he said, adding that what remains is dangerous but reduced to “remnants.”

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  IAEA chief says inspectors will visit Iran enrichment sites under US-Iran MoU

Before the US launched Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, Albright said Iran had about 22,000 centrifuges, many of them operating and enriching uranium up to 60 percent. He said Iran is now “not enriching at all” and that most of those centrifuges have been destroyed.

He said roughly 10 nuclear-weapons-related sites were destroyed, including storage, conversion, research and development facilities, as well as sites Israel said were linked to weaponization work. Many scientists and engineers were also killed, he said.

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  US says Iran deal will end enrichment, destroy uranium stocks, cap missiles

Albright said Iran could previously have built a nuclear weapon within months and several weapons within six months to a year. After the strikes, he estimated it would take Tehran at least a year to try, with much less certainty that the effort would succeed.

He warned, however, that unresolved risks remain, including buried enriched uranium at Natanz and Isfahan and the underground Pickaxe Mountain site near Natanz, which was not struck and must be addressed in negotiations.

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  US and Israeli strikes hit Iran sites tied to nuclear weapon work, think tank says

Albright said the key test in any nuclear deal is whether Iran admits it had a nuclear weapons program and fully discloses where that work took place. He warned Tehran may try to stall the process, but said the military campaign had achieved “pretty significant” results on the nuclear front.

Saudi Aramco resumed loading oil at its Ras Tanura terminal in the Persian Gulf on Friday, according to LSEG shipping data, marking the first exports from the facility in nearly four months after the war on Iran disrupted shipping.

Shipping data showed two Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), each capable of carrying around 2 million barrels of crude, loading at the terminal while a third waited offshore.

The company's last cargo from Ras Tanura departed for China on March 8, according to the data.

The index, produced for Iran in collaboration with Impact Iran, said torture remained deeply embedded in the country’s law, policy and practice, and warned that US and Israeli strikes on Iran during the June 2025 military escalation had further increased the risk of torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary detention.

The report said Iran scored at the most severe level on six of the index’s seven pillars: political commitment, police and institutional violence, impunity, victims’ rights, the right to defend human rights, and protection for all. It rated Iran as high-risk on conditions in detention.

It said Iran had not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, did not criminalize torture as a distinct offense, and continued to allow punishments such as flogging and amputation.

The report also cited the use of confessions in convictions, saying this created incentives for torture and ill-treatment to extract statements, including confessions later broadcast by state media.

It said at least 1,639 executions were recorded in Iran in 2025, including executions of people who were under 18 at the time of their alleged offenses.

The index also pointed to what it called near-total impunity, saying no independent body investigates torture allegations or deaths in custody, while overcrowded detention facilities operate with little or no outside oversight.

Women and girls, ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers face heightened risks of torture, arbitrary detention and other abuse, the report said.

“In Iran, torture is not a failure of the system – it is the system: written into law, rewarded by the courts, and concealed behind prison walls,” said Rose Richter, Impact Iran’s executive director.

Richter said security forces fired on civilians even inside hospitals during the crackdown of December 2025 and January 2026, when more than 50,000 people were arrested and more than 7,000 killed.

Other rights groups and monitoring organizations have previously reported higher figures for the crackdown, pointing out the difficulty of verifying casualties and arrests amid restrictions on access, intimidation of families and limited independent reporting inside Iran.

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  Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

“Behind each of those numbers is a person whose suffering was deliberate, and a family still waiting for the truth,” Richter said.

Gerald Staberock, secretary general of OMCT, said the index was intended to turn “scattered warnings into evidence that cannot be ignored.”

“The Global Torture Index should be read by development agencies, but also by security actors and businesses seeking to engage or invest in the countries covered,” Staberock said.

OMCT urged Iran to halt executions and judicial corporal punishment, ratify the UN Convention against Torture, criminalize torture, end the use of coerced confessions and give the UN Fact-Finding Mission unhindered access.

US Representative Jason Crow has renewed calls for answers over the strike on a school in the Iranian city of Minab early in the war, saying it "could be the single largest civilian casualty incident in US military history."

Speaking to CBS, the Colorado Democrat said Congress had yet to receive a full accounting of the incident.

"This could be the single largest civilian casualty incident in US military history. We need facts. We need to make sure that we own up to it, that we take accountability, that we make it right," Crow said.

"We need answers to this. And they're clearly slow rolling us."

In a separate post on X, Crow said it had been four months since the "horrific school bombing" in Iran and criticized President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth for failing to produce answers.