Return to Transcripts main page

Early Start with Rahel Solomon

Iranians Caught Between U.S.-Israel Strikes And Govt. Forces; Iran Vows Revenge For Security Chief Ali Larijani's Killing; Hormuz Closure Could Spark Global Inflation Double Whammy. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired March 18, 2026 - 04:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[04:30:00]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voiceover): And Israel from the sky. It is tightening its grip on the ground, determined to extinguish any ember of an uprising. Two months ago, it did just that, killing thousands of protesters in the bloodiest crackdown in the history of the Islamic Republic. Iranians, still reeling from the collective trauma of January 8th and 9th, now being warned, take it to the streets and it will happen again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voiceover): Our team have their fingers on the trigger.

KARADSHEH (voiceover): The chief of police threatening protesters they will be treated as the enemy and shot. The feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps promising another massacre of protesters. This time, they say it will strike harder than they did in January.

Messages we've received from Iranians inside the country describe a regime using energy, every tool in its playbook, to crush dissent.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voiceover): Every time you go outside, even just to go to the market, you see machine guns and (inaudible), heavy guns on the streets. Everyone is afraid of the checkpoints. They are basically the regime street level enforcers.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voiceover): People are randomly being checked, their phones being searched, being asked questions like, what are you doing out here? They even arrest and take them for a further investigation.

KARADSHEH (voiceover): Video trickling out only a small window into this new climate of fear. Iran is a superpower, they chant. Iranians are proud. Regime supporters roam the streets at night with a menacing. They are still here. They are still in control.

State media, like so many times before, has been airing videos of those arrested allegedly confessing to being foreign agents. Text messages like this one warn those who find a way around the imposed Internet blackout will be treated as spies. This crackdown only expected to get worse as outside forces that want to overthrow this regime add fuel to the fire.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voiceover): We are now at the decisive stage of our final struggle. Await my final call.

KARADSHEH (voiceover): The Israeli prime minister telling Iranians his forces are creating the conditions on the ground for them to rise up. As the IDF releases video like this showing what it says are attacks on regime checkpoints that have become a major instrument of suppression and killing the regime's top leadership one after the other. An uprising seems impossible right now for those who find themselves trapped into hells.

From inside their homes, they still defiantly cheer against the regime that time and time again has failed to silence a people, risking it all for freedom. Jomana Karadsheh, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ELENI GIOKOS, CNN ANCHOR: Joining me now is Maryam Alemzadeh. She's an associate professor in the history and politics of Iran at the University of Oxford. Mariam, great to have you with us. And we just heard reporting there from Jomana Karadsheh, who was talking about, you know, the Internet blackout in Iran. Average Iranians having a very difficult time.

I want to talk about the agency that Iranians have at this juncture with the ongoing strikes by the United States and Israel, but also this fear about retaliation from the regime.

MARYAM ALEMZADEH, ASSOC. PROF. IN HISTORY AND POLITICS OF IRAN, UNIV. OF OXFORD: Thank you for having me. Yes, the agency of the Iranian people on the ground is something that is being undermined both by the events happening, the attacks that have intensified the security sort of threat that a government is feeling, the repressive forces are feeling. But also in the news, in our contemplations of this war and the possible scenarios that can unfold through it.

So, thank you for focusing on this important matter. The sad truth is that war takes away agency for a major part. That's the historical fact that we all know. It's very hard to just come out of survival mode and try to do something against the government when bombs are falling. Even the direct targeting of the repressive apparatus like the checkpoints that you were mentioning, even direct targeting of those is affecting people. I got a note from a very dear friend just yesterday writing that they have to pass a checkpoint to get like ice cream for their kids and they don't know if they can risk it because checkpoints have become a --

[04:35:16]

GIOKOS: Maryam --

ALEMZADEH: -- a threat, basically.

GIOKOS: Yes, I mean, it's pretty shocking to hear these stories. And when we do get information out, you know, the experience is horrific. You know, you've also argued that the IRGC has not been significantly weakened even with the killing of a key decision maker, Ali Larijani. Can you take me through what this means for the power structure in Iran?

ALEMZADEH: Of course. The IRGC has been weakened in terms of its extraterritorial reach with the ballistic missile launchers and maybe the depots being hit. Nobody has the exact count, really, but it's domestic security, apparently. And my assessment is that is quite intact because it consists of hundreds of thousands of loyal members with just weapons as simple as rifles that are very hard to target through aerial strikes, if not impossible. The assassination of Larijani, I don't think will affect that structure.

Significantly, yes, it will weaken the Iranian, like government apparatus at large, like little by little, such assassinations, I mean. But the IRGCs, like, on the ground, the boots on the ground that it has are not dependent on top leadership. And Larijani was not a very like, dearly loved leader within the IRGC circle to begin with because of his hardliner, yet more pragmatic approach to foreign policy. So, I don't see this weakening the IRGC's repressive apparatus.

GIOKOS: Yes, I mean, there's talk of regime change. There's talk of just, you know, degrading Iran's military capabilities, Iran's leadership structure. And here's a question that I'm kind of top of mind. Does this embolden Iran at this point in the regime? Because they're in, you know, mode of just trying to survive. And we're bearing the brunt of it here in the Gulf in many ways because a lot of the retaliation has aimed at Gulf neighboring states.

ALEMZADEH: Yes, of course. It's definitely emboldening it. It's a war for survival for them now. And survival for them is acceptable at any cost.

They don't care about their own people. They don't care about, like, having different relationship with the neighbors, at least in the short term. Like they might try to repair relations if and when they survive this war. And they don't even care, in my opinion, about their larger causes that they have propagated for 47 years such as the Palestinian cause.

In my opinion, it's always been a, like an issue of self-interest to just like maintain this animosity towards Israel to be able to expand their influence in the region in a way any conventional state would.

GIOKOS: All right, Maryam Alemzadeh, great to have you with us. Thank you so much.

Well, the Strait of Hormuz shut down. Consumers already feeling the pain at the gas pump due to rising oil prices and it's only going to get more expensive and soaring energy costs make their ripple effect throughout the global economy. CNN's Ivan Watson reporting from Hong Kong for us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We're getting a

close up look at the kinds of ships that are being impacted by this war around Iran. This is an LPG tanker. It's 159 meters long, that's longer than a football field, worth tens of millions of dollars. And this very ship was in the Gulf last month and transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war broke out. And it's shipping like this that Iran has targeted since the joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign of Iran began.

And this is what has been driving up fuel prices around the world because 20 percent of the world's oil is in the Gulf and has to go out on tanker ships through this narrow channel, the Strait of Hormuz. If you look at the statements coming out of the Iranian government, they're basically saying that shipping can all be targeted. The speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf writing on X. The Strait of Hormuz situation won't return to its prewar status. Iran has claimed responsibility for using underwater vehicles to hit tanker ships off the coast of Iraq.

[04:40:01]

Since the start of the war, there was a tanker ship anchored off the coast of Fujairah in the UAE that was hit on Monday. There's a cargo ship from Thailand that was trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz last week that was hit. And three of its Thai crew members are still missing. And we don't know what's happened to them. So, it's dangerous. And as you can see from a vessel of this size, they are big and they are running missiles and drones as well as sea mines.

Now, the Trump administration has demanded to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and has called on countries like China, Japan, South Korea, NATO member countries to help. No one has volunteered. In the interim, some countries have been working out side deals. India and Pakistan have gotten tanker ships out safely over the course of the last week. But it is a trickle of the amount of traffic that we've seen prior to the eruption of the war.

So as long as ships like this are coming under attack, we're likely to see energy prices continue to stay high. Meaning you're paying a lot at the gas pump for your car. Meaning things like plane tickets are going to cost a lot, too.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GIOKOS: My chain reaction there on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the ramifications super important at this point. In the meantime, the Ukraine president is once again visiting European allies. This time, instead of asking for help, he's offering Ukrainian expertise on defending against drone attacks. Those details just ahead. And I'll be back at the top of the hour with more news on from the Middle East. Stay with CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:46:29] RAHEL SOLOMON, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is traveling through Europe, meeting with allies to try to make sure that isn't forgotten during the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. In the coming hours, Zelensky will meet with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. This comes after he stopped in London to meet with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

While in London, Zelensky also met with King Charles at Buckingham Palace. During Zelensky's time in London, he made the case that Ukraine can offer its drone expertise in the US Israeli war with Iran. CNN's Clare Sebastian has more.

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: With concerns rising that Ukraine has fallen far down the U.S. priority list, President Zelensky used his moment in the spotlight Tuesday addressing the British Parliament to deliver a hard hitting argument complete with visual evidence that supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia translates into real world expertise that its partners now need in the war with Iran. Ukraine has already sent, he said, more than 200 people to the Middle east and Gulf region with more ready to deploy. But for a president who has long warned that if Russia wasn't stopped in Ukraine, the risk would spread. And who warned President Trump in that now infamous Oval Office meeting last February that the U.S. would, quote, "Feel it in the future." This was also, to an extent, "a thinly veiled I told you so."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, UKRANIAN PRESIDENT: What is happening around Iran today is not a faraway war for us because of the cooperation between Russia and Iran. And we do not believe we have the right to be indifferent, even if we are separated from human suffering or shared danger by an ocean. And ocean, however big and beautiful, or by anything else. Ballistic missiles can strike at thousands of kilometers. Drones can do the same. But if evil wins, the evolution of war will cross any distance on earth.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SEBASTIAN: Well, not so subtle dig at President Trump there, but this is a clear evolution for Zelensky. He's gone from directly appealing for support to pitching Ukraine as an indispensable partner in security. The UK And Ukraine agreed Tuesday to deepen their defense partnership, including with the UK funding a new AI center of excellence in Kiev. And the urgency of this moment for Ukraine is clear.

The longer the war with Iran goes on, the more Russia stands to profit. Clare Sebastian, CNN, London.

SOLOMON: The UN Assistance mission in Afghanistan is calling for immediate de-escalation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tensions have been rising in recent days after the Afghan government says that more than 400 people were killed in an airstrike from Pakistan on a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul. It is the deadliest incident since fighting between the two neighbors erupted in October last year. More than 260 others were wounded.

Now Pakistan says that the statements from the Taliban government are false and misleading. And it claims that it targeted military installations and terrorist support facilities. A spokesperson for Pakistan's prime minister says that the military operations will continue for as long as it takes to eliminate, quote, "terrorists and their infrastructure."

We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:54:14]

SOLOMON: Today, a rare early heat wave is baking the U.S. West Coast. From California to Texas and up to Montana, there will be summer like temperatures 20 to 40 degrees above normal. For some places these would be all time records for the month of April and obviously it's still only March.

And on the east coast, strong winds from this week's severe storms caused significant damage in New Jersey. Take a look as that tree fell directly onto a house, utility poles were knocked down and power was cut off for thousands of customers.

Well, NASA confirms that a bright fireball that crossed over several U.S. states was a meteor. Video captured this extremely rare shooting star crossing the daylight sky in the eastern U.S. Now the American Meteor Society says that daytime fireball sightings are really unusual since they have to be brighter than those at night. NASA says that they burn as bright or brighter than Venus.

[04:55:08]

Fireball was observed from Virginia all the way to Ohio and it triggered a sonic boom heard in the Cleveland area when the fast- moving meteor broke through the sound barrier. Incredible. And cities around the world celebrated Irish culture on Tuesday. Here's how Dublin marks St Patrick's Day.

Parade organizers say that about 500,000 people came out for the holiday. March 17 observes the death of the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick. And the day has evolved into a celebration with music, dancing and drinking.

Here in New York, the city held its 265th St. Patrick's Day parade on the streets of Manhattan. The parade featured marching bands, bagpipes and other musicians. It was a chilly St. Patrick's Day this year. Thanks for watching.

I'm Rahel Solomon live in New York. Soon in the newsroom continues after this quick break with Eleni Giokos in Dubai. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:00:00]