Is Iran's War Spreading? Three Incidents, One Dangerous Pattern

[00:00:00] Is Iran choosing to escalate the war with the United States and Israel by launching a new campaign of global terror that we're seeing kick off this past week? Well, of course, the devil's in the details and the truth is much harder to discover than the hype, but let's get into it. Good morning and welcome to the At the Water's Edge podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics. It's the 2nd of October, 2026. Let's get started.

[00:00:26] All right. So three main events happened this week that coincides with two shifting timelines. We had an attack outside of a British airbase in the United Kingdom. Well, an incident. We can't say attack yet. We had a drone strike on a power plant in Medina that actually powers one of the most holy sites in Islam. And then we had a fly Dubai incident where a co-pilot apparently tried to crash the plane, killing everyone on board. And all these things happened in the same week that we're seeing two other timelines coincide.

[00:00:56] One is that Iran had given the United States 45 days to end of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. And if we didn't do it, they said that they reserve the right to escalate the conflict further. What did that mean? We don't know yet. But that timeline did just expire with October 1st coming. So we're now in a window where Iran has already previously said that they would consider escalating the conflict. Additionally, we just saw Iran make, you know, overture at the UN General Assembly.

[00:01:26] You know, seven-day planned at the conflict. The U.S. rejected outright. So that may have been their last hurrah before getting to this point. We'll see. And then the U.S. has announced that they're sending a third aircraft carrier strike group into the Persian Gulf. So at the end of November, Iran's looking at having three aircraft carriers parked within striking distance. They may or may not want to do something about the conflict before we get to that point. Now, it's interesting, these incidents.

[00:01:55] We've seen Iran escalate the conflict territorially through missile strikes, you know, reaching out all the way to Diego Garcia, thousands of miles away. But striking all the way in the mainland U.K. is quite the escalation. That's 4,500 kilometers from Tehran inside a Western NATO country. This would be a tremendous escalation for them. But some people have hypothesized because Iran does have a robust proxy network.

[00:02:23] It's not a reasonable thing that they would extend that network into new territories. Now, bottom line up front with these three incidents, the Fairford one, moderate chance that Iran was actually behind or involved with this. We'll get to why in a second. The Fly Dubai one, based on what we know right now, it's certainly possible Iran was involved. But there's some competing explanations out there. So right now, it's a low confidence that Iran was directly involved behind that particular incident.

[00:02:52] And the Medina strike, moderate confidence as well. The Houthis may have done it unilaterally. Iran may have done it and let the Houthis take the blame. But when you take these three incidents together, what emerges is less of a picture of Iran launching an opening saddle for a new campaign of escalation. And more, if you accept the premise that Iran was involved, Iran testing different courses of action for future use. All right.

[00:03:21] So let's get to incident number one, the Royal Airfield in Fairford. So if you never heard of it, Fairford is a Royal Air Force station that the U.S. stationed long range strategic bombers out of, you know, B-1s, B-52s. And it's played a central role in strikes on Iran earlier this year when we kicked off this whole war. Now, Iran has publicly stated that any base that houses U.S. air assets that are used to strike Iran, they consider to be legitimate targets.

[00:03:45] We haven't seen them go all the way to Europe yet, but it wouldn't be a contradiction for them to push the conflict that far. So when masked men show up outside the flight line at night in weird trucks stealing petrol, you gotta ask what the heck is going on. All right. So what we actually know happened that night. Late on Saturday, the 26th, a local farmer saw some people doing some strange stuff that she didn't recognize and called the police and reported them.

[00:04:16] Police showed up and arrested five folks operating three fans outside the air base. Now, the person actually called that in, the local farmer, said she saw at least eight to ten people that night. So not sure where the rest went or if she misrecollected or whatnot. But she's saying that there was more people there than just the five that they were arrested. Supposedly, one of the people involved who was arrested called the police on themselves before all this went down. Interesting.

[00:04:43] And then along with the three vans that were confiscated, they were found to have no real weapons that have been reported, but a large amount of petrol that they had apparently stolen. Diesel fuel. Now, they were then bailed out Monday morning, which if they were being held on terrorism charges, very strange thing to bail them out immediately after the fact.

[00:05:07] And then later on this week on Thursday, yesterday, October 1st, the UK has detained a dual national, an Iranian dual national, who they are alluding or they suspect of having recruited the people that were outside the airfield. Now, the prime minister of Britain is saying that they have strong indications Iran played a part. There's more interesting about that statement and what's not said than what was said.

[00:05:35] But, okay, let's look at what this could possibly mean. A couple different ways to read this. One, it was that it was a gray zone operation. Now, we had a whole conversation with F. David Diaz on the podcast about that. Link in show notes. Go check it out. But gray zone operations are when states try to mess with another state without having it attributed to them.

[00:06:00] And so a way to do it is actually to go recruit local nationals, local criminal elements, and pay them to go do criminal activity, which also coincides with causing damage to local infrastructure. Sure. Okay. Could be. The other thing is, is that this could have been very early on in the cycle of building up a network that's capable of conducting different types of non-attributable attacks.

[00:06:24] So instead of being an actual attempt to conduct and act against the air base, you know, damage a plane, do something weird to the petrol so planes don't fly right, like mess with them in some way. This could have actually been a confidence target. You know, if you had an Iranian agent who's been tasked with finding ways to disrupt the use of this airfield for operations against Iran, you know, one of the things they might do rather than flying in their own agents and trying to infiltrate the country and all this other nonsense is you just go hire local criminal elements to,

[00:06:54] to do work for you and what you want to do is vet those. So this might not have actually been the goal to do something that night, but this could have been an initial tasking like, hey, go to this airfield, steal some petrol, and you're just trying to find out, one, are these people reliable? If you've tasked them to go do something, will they actually go do it? And two, you know, can they just drive around the airfield at night and not get caught? Clearly, they couldn't.

[00:07:20] So this could have been a confidence target as part of a network development plan or could have been something completely different. It could have just been some local folks trying to steal diesel because it's expensive as hell right now. And this attribution to a run after the fact by the government is just the government trying to create a story for their own purposes. Governments do that all the time. Right now, we don't know. All right. And that brings us to the fly Dubai incident where a co-pilot tried to crash an airplane, killing everyone on board.

[00:07:48] So what we know so far, a lot of this comes from reporting from Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister. So take that for what it's worth. But we're tracking that this flight is flying towards Israel about two hours in. You know, the co-pilot gets a case of the stabby stabs, grabs a knife and starts stabbing the main pilot. And the plane immediately starts crashing like 16,000 foot drop in a minute. Okay.

[00:08:14] Some speculation of whether or not he brought a knife or he used a cockpit axe. I'm sure we'll know someday. But the door is locked because, you know, pilots' doors are locked these days to prevent 9-11 type incidents again. And then, yeah, the pilot eventually manages to get the door open. Passengers, including a couple off-duty pilots, rush in. So do the co-pilot who then immediately asks that he gets killed before they do the emergency landing. Like, what's going on here?

[00:08:43] So a couple interesting indicators there. One is that the guy asked to be killed immediately. Other one is that he waited almost two hours into the flight. Like, they took off from Dubai and they flew a really long time for this guy decides to go, oh, my God, let's kill everyone. And, yeah, the flight altitude, you can see just a massive drop-off. Crew reports, you know, the code for unlodged interference.

[00:09:11] And you just see this thing drop 16,000 to 17,000 feet in a minute. I don't know if any of you have been in an aircraft doing, like, a really, really tight descent. But it's unnerving when it happens on purpose. When it's by accident, oh, my God, you should go watch the videos from this thing. I'm not going to show it here. But it is terrifying what folks are recording inside the plane. Now, there's a couple different hypotheses here of what might be going on. One is that this was actually an Iran-directed attack.

[00:09:39] Now, for that to be the case, it would mean Iran has somehow gotten to the pilot, recruited the pilot, and then gotten somebody inside the airlines who can ensure the pilot was assigned to this particular flight. And then this pilot got on board, kept his cool for two hours, and then decided to act towards the end of the flight. And execute this operation. Possible. Especially ties with the idea that Iran has agents in the U.K. trying to recruit assets. There's some overlap there. Other options, that it was just a man in crisis.

[00:10:08] Guy was having a mental break. Went crazy. And we're all reading motive into this that we haven't quite been able to attribute yet. And then second option, or third option, which is a bit of a combination of those two, inspired lone actor. This could be somebody who had a strong political motivation. Who was very upset by the war with Iran or other issues. The Palestinian cause could be any number of things in the Middle East.

[00:10:35] And decided to, on his own, use this opportunity to make a political statement by killing everyone on board. But was not directly tied to Iran. That is very critical. Because if he's not directly tied to Iran and it's just a lone wolf actor, it speaks to a couple things. One, it limits the amount of institutional capacity that Iran has. Two, it points to the fact that these things can escalate out of control without any of the major actors being at the steering wheel.

[00:11:05] You know, Robert Pape talks about the escalation trap. These conflicts get so big so fast. Things just start happening that nobody can actually control or predict. Nobody's in the driver's seat. Yikes. Or in the cockpit. Ah, sorry. Terrible joke. Now let's look at the idea that this was just a man in a mental health crisis who decided to take down the plane and everything with him. So, it's happened before in airline history. There's two incidents that get cited a lot in airline safety.

[00:11:32] One's the Germanwings flight 9525 on March 24th, 2015. And the other one's the LAM Mozambique Airlines flight 470 from November 29th, 2013. Both of those incidents involved airline pilots deliberately crashing the planes that they were flying. But in both of those two incidents, we saw the same pattern.

[00:11:53] The pilot or co-pilot who induced the crash waited for the other pilot to leave the cockpit, lock the door behind them, then crash the airplane. People have looked at the incident and say, well, you know, it's because mental health crisis, despair. Despair is a private thing. So, you get your private moment with the airline door locked. And then in your private catastrophe, take everyone down with you.

[00:12:19] This flight, the flight Dubai one, the co-pilot didn't wait for the pilot to leave. Co-pilot was in the cockpit with the pilot, with this colleague, and then initiated a physical confrontation, tried to dispatch the pilot to take control of the aircraft, and then ostensibly, we assume that he wanted to crash it after that. That's a very different pattern of behavior.

[00:12:45] Other indicator here that would point another direction is the fact that if the goal was just to kill everyone on board, including himself, why did he wait until he was so close to the flight's destination? Why did it take two hours? Did it take him two hours to work up the courage to do this? Or was this going to be an attempt to seize control of the cockpit and then fly this airplane into a politically motivated target?

[00:13:10] Of course, if that was the goal, then why not wait for the pilot to leave, then lock the door, and then do the same thing? So, we're not sure what's going on again, but the behavioral indicators of the pilot in this incident do differ in significant ways from the two other incidents that we would compare this to if this was just, you know, pilot suicide. Now, it is important to know, though, that sometimes people just do wild and crazy shit. The one incident I always like to think back to is that during the global war on terror,

[00:13:38] we had Gary Brooks Faulkner from Colorado, who's a construction worker, no military training, no nothing, gets arrested walking around Pakistan with a sword and a pistol trying to hunt down and kill bin Laden before Siltim 6 got the chance to. I would admire the guy's chutzpah, but like, what the hell are you doing, bro? Sometimes people do just get crazy ideas in their head and go off and try to do wild, crazy shit. So, with a very small sample size historically we have to compare this to,

[00:14:08] very hard to rule out possibilities based off the information that we have, there might always be a random guy from Colorado walking around the mountainside with a sword trying to find the world's most wanted terrorist leader. Baby, this is the airline version of that. We don't know. Now, one additional thread worth mentioning is that earlier in the week, the UAE, Oman, and Iraq all barred Iranian flights from landing and using their airports under pressure

[00:14:34] from the United States continuation of the U.S. economic pressure campaign, you know, barring Iranian flights or more level of isolation. Now, Iran's Security Council, in response to that, ruled out a military operation. There was some rhetoric about, like, if our planes can't fly, nobody's planes can fly. It's like, oh, we're going to do about that. That doesn't bode well for folks. That sounds ominous. But their Security Council then came out and ruled out military strikes. They said they had non-military options.

[00:15:02] But, I mean, what exactly does that mean? Is a pilot that you've coerced or recruited into crashing an airplane, a non-military option, if it's killing everyone on board, which is a kinetic activity, which is the use of lethal force, which is generally falls under the preview of military operations? It gets weird quick. It's hard to interpret. It tends to cross different committees and foreign languages and different interpretations of international law.

[00:15:29] So, but this would point to a very different type of escalation path than the operation in the U.K. would. Operation in the U.K., ostensibly, local criminal actors being recruited by an Iranian to eventually get to the point where they could conduct a military operation that directly targets American military assets that are being used to hit Iran.

[00:15:56] That is a very different escalation pathway versus hijacking a civilian airliner, crashing and killing everyone on board. Those are two different escalation paths. Now, is Iran above doing number two versus number one? No, absolutely not. Brutal, terrible, horrific regime. No question about that. The question is, like, would they receive any type of advantage by conducting that type of operation at this point?

[00:16:26] Unclear what the advantage that would be, especially when they have other options. Speaking of other options, let's go to the third incidence this week, which I've included in this deck, because it points to a different escalation path that Iran might be pursuing. And that is the grid strike. So, on Tuesday, we saw a drone attack the transfer station that actually powers the Mosque of the Prophet, one of the holiest sites of Islam, inside of Saudi Arabia.

[00:16:56] Now, the Saudi-led coalition that's currently conducting a war against the Houthis in Yemen has claimed that this was a drone strike by Yemeni's militants. Yemeni's militants, the Houthis, have conducted other strikes against infrastructure as this war between the two of them has continued to escalate. So, it wouldn't be, you know, the striking of the transfer station that powers the second most or one of the holiest sites in Islam is very provocative,

[00:17:22] but it wouldn't be out of character for the Houthis to try something like this. Now, why would they do this? Well, it's not going to have any military effect on the conflict with Saudi Arabia, though it is very embarrassing for something like this to happen to the Saudi government. And, of course, they showed a pretty good amount of precision here if it was the Houthis, because they hit the transceiver, not the mosque. You can imagine the type of blowback that they would receive if they hit the mosque.

[00:17:53] Speaks to a lot of capability on the part of the Houthis. Again, Saudi Arabia's claiming it's the Houthis. I don't think we've gotten confirmation of that yet. It certainly seems plausible if it's a pattern, so let's go with that as a working assumption. But if we are in this window as well where we're past the 45-day timeline that Iran had set for the U.S. to end the blockade of the trade of Hormuz, and they're now considering different escalation paths,

[00:18:18] one of the escalation paths they can pursue is attacking things like power stations, the asalination plants, other infrastructure in the Gulf region, which would be massively catastrophic. But having someone like the Houthis, who are one of their proxy forces, conduct one of these operations or test run, what one of the operations would look like early on, is a way to test capability, signal capacity,

[00:18:42] and put pressure on other states in the region without being able to be blamed directly, which is an important diplomatic tool. If everyone does get blamed, it's the Houthis. But the problem with blaming the Houthis is that we've been bombing the crap out of them for years, and it hasn't done anything. So what is anyone going to do to the Houthis that they haven't already done? And what do the Houthis have left to lose by trying this stuff? Not much.

[00:19:07] So it makes sense why Iran would want a proxy force like them to go ahead and take this shot and test the waters, if you will, prior to launching into a wider escalatory campaign where this is the primary strategy that they use. Now, why would all this be happening now? Well, the timeline's expired, and there's a third aircraft carrier moving into the Gulf. Even if that third carrier with the additional Marine Expeditionary Unit,

[00:19:35] you know, 5,000 Marines, is only there to replace an existing platform, that is still a more robust strike package than they currently have. So at the end of November, Iran's going to be in a worse position militarily, not a better position militarily, if the status quo holds. So you could understand why it would make sense for them at this point. To try to do something to change the status quo and escalate this conflict in a way

[00:20:01] that changes the situation prior to the U.S. having additional military capacity to seize Karg Island or do some other sort of escalatory step. And of course, this is all happening right before the U.S. midterms. And we know Iran wants to make things very, very problematic for the Trump administration in the midterms. So let's look at where this fits on Iran's escalation ladder and what they've been doing.

[00:20:26] Everything we've seen so far is really a horizontal escalation around RUNs 1 and 2. You know, deniable operations abroad. We've seen them do that already across the Middle East. Expanding that to Europe would be interesting, but it's not a step up. It's just an expansion. Product strikes engulf infrastructure. We've seen them test the waters with that before.

[00:20:50] You know, Houthis, I think it was, what, 2019, took credit for a strike on Saudi Arabia's main oil production facility. It was like 17 drones and eight cruise missiles. That analysts then assessed actually probably came from Iran, not the Houthis. Now, the Houthis took the credit and the blame for it. You know, kind of House Frey style, Red Wind and Game of Thrones-esque. But it looked like most of those munitions came from Iran or Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

[00:21:20] But it proved out the idea that Iran can conduct deniable operations against infrastructure in the region. And that was prior to this whole latest war kicking off. And then, of course, we've been watching them control the choke points for oil, the Bob Almandev Strait, and the Shred of Hormuz. Okay, so things to watch next over the next six weeks. Really interested to see if we actually get a court case coming out of the UK regarding this incident. You know, are these five people that were charged eventually arrested?

[00:21:49] Is this Iranian national who's supposedly evolved as a recruiter? It's our dual national, supposedly evolved as a recruiter, actually charged and convicted with anything. We'll see what happens. You know, it's not real until the courts process it. Also, the fly Dubai interrogation. What do we learn more about what happened in that incident? What do we find out about this pilot's history? Other connections they had in the industry? How they were assigned to this route? Is there any connection to Iran discovered?

[00:22:15] And we have to be very clear about what we listen to here because the amount of noise that's going to be generated about it versus signal is going to be massive. Both the U.S. and the Israelis have elections coming up. That really throws a lot of noise into the system. So be very, very clear about trying to find the signals that are actually based in evidence as we find out more about this. Are we going to see more Houthi hits on Saudi Arabian infrastructure, either just to take

[00:22:41] oil production offline to further stress oil markets, or we actually see them go after long-term infrastructure like power production? Now, the IRGC, are they actually going to go after U.S. ships in their region? Would be a tremendous escalation. We've seen some probing attacks already, but are they really going to make a concerted effort to sink or disable a U.S. aircraft carrier? That would be massive.

[00:23:08] It'd be massive for them even just to try because to try in a serious way would be to show their hand capability-wise. They can't walk back the attempt once they've made it. And the U.S. would not respond well, to put it mildly. This is a very interesting one for me. Steps towards non-proliferation treaty withdrawal. Is Iran actually going to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty? What's that indicate they're ready to do? Yikes.

[00:23:37] So anyway, this week, these three different incidents, if they're tied back to Iran in a significant way, all of them on their own indicate a separate escalation path that Iran might pursue. We'll see which one we get the most fidelity around and how quickly. Now, the other thing we've got to watch for is, is Iran getting to the point with all the pressure being put on them that they are, you know, ready, willing, able to use suicide

[00:24:02] terrorism deliberately as a deliberate technique of the state to impose consequences upon the U.S., Israel, and the states that they see as aligned with the U.S. in Israel. We're going to talk about that a bit more, what suicide terrorism looks like, the profile of folks who actually become, you know, suicide terrorists and what it means for a state to employ them in the members-only video in the briefing room, which you can sign up for on YouTube, which will be out later today.

[00:24:31] We will see you there. Thanks, y'all. Oh, and be sure to like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend, all that good stuff.