How far will Iran go?The Ayatollah is running out of road

“We’re living in a state of war now,” said a friend in the desert city of Kashan. She had been woken in the early hours of Friday by Israel’s aerial attack on the nearby uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Around the same time, in desirable north Tehran, the penthouse home of Ali Shamkhani, a key aide of the supreme leader, was neatly dissected by an Israeli missile. Shamkhani was killed and subsequent social media posts showed debris strewn across a hideous ballroom that bore the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic’s Empire style and fully deserved a precision missile. At around 10pm, Tehran time, a message landed from another friend in the capital: “Just now [the Israelis] hit a target close by, sending us up to the ceiling and down again.”