The World Is on Fire and Someone Made Lego Videos About It

The only thing ringing in my head right now is the Iranian Lego videos.

A group calling itself Explosive News, known in Persian as Akhbar Enfejari, describes itself as an Iranian Lego animation team. A note on language: Farsi is simply the Persian word for the Persian language, the way Deutsch is the German word for German. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature maintains that Persian is the appropriate designation in English.¹

From the first day of the US-Israel war on Iran, Explosive News flooded global social media with AI-generated animations targeting American and Israeli audiences. One video opens with Lego versions of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu flanked by the devil, examining an album labelled the “Epstein file,” before Trump hits a red button launching a missile. Another features an Iranian military commander rapping over footage of Lego caskets draped in American flags, ending with falling blocks forming the letters L-O-S-E-R. The GB News TikTok post of one clip pulled 1.2 million likes.

Iran’s state broadcaster, Channel 3, aired a separate Lego-style animation on June 24, 2025, recapping the earlier Twelve-Day War, depicting missile strikes, downed aircraft, and crowds in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestinian territories celebrating. The Revayat-e Fath Institute was linked to several productions. The group denied state ties, describing themselves to the Associated Press as students producing content independently, though analysts told Fortune the bandwidth needed to generate and upload this content from inside Iran’s blacked-out internet indicated unofficial or official government cooperation.

Say what you want about the messaging. The communication strategy was genius. And yes, Jesus still loves us.

What Made Iran’s Content Work

The Explosive News team did not make random content. They studied the American psyche for weeks or used their own knowledge source before producing those videos. They knew the Epstein files were an open wound. They knew Lego felt safe. They knew rap was the global language of resistance.

Three things made it travel. The format disarmed the audience. The cultural references required no explanation. The content required no agreement to share. You did not need to support Iran to forward the video.

Snopes verified the videos as authentic Iranian propaganda. Radio Free Europe noted the United States was focusing its memes on domestic audiences while Iran was engineering content for global reach. The US and Iran were not fighting the same information war.

That is the communication lesson. Not the politics. The craft.

The War: Both Sides

It is essential to state what this conflict involved on both sides. It is equally essential to note that independent verification from inside Iran was severely constrained throughout. Iranian authorities first cut internet access on January 8, 2026, to suppress coverage of nationwide protests, and connectivity dropped to roughly 4% of normal levels following the February 28 attacks. US and Israeli cyber operations also contributed, targeting government news sites and IRGC communications infrastructure.

What the US and Israel did:

The United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, during what Iranian officials described as active nuclear negotiations. The operation, codenamed Epic Fury by the US, killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day, confirmed by both Iranian state media IRNA and Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz. Additional officials killed in the opening strikes included Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Iranian Defence Council, and Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, both confirmed by IRNA.

By April 7, 2026, Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), a US-based NGO, documented 3,636 deaths in Iran from strikes, comprising 1,701 civilians, 1,221 military personnel, and 714 unclassified.² Iran’s Ministry of Health reported separately that 220 children under 18 were killed and 1,959 injured, with 18 of the dead under five years old. Iran reported damage to at least 120 historical heritage sites by late March.

On March 9, 2026, an Israeli airstrike on Tehran’s Resalat neighbourhood destroyed a Basij-affiliated building and three adjacent residential buildings, killing between 40 and 50 people. BBC analysis confirmed Israel used Mark 82 bombs. BBC Verify also confirmed a separate strike on residential buildings and a sports hall in Lamerd, killing 21 people including four children, was carried out using a US Precision Strike Missile.

The school in Minab:

The most contested event of the war was the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab on February 28, 2026. IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported 168 children and 14 teachers killed. UNESCO and UNICEF both issued statements of alarm. Two sources briefed on preliminary US military investigation findings told CNN the strike was deemed accidental, likely due to outdated targeting information about a nearby naval base. The Washington Post reported the school had been on a US target list. Israel denied involvement. No independent agency reached the site during active hostilities.³

Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization condemned a separate US-Israeli strike on the Shahid Rezayee Nejad yellowcake production facility in Ardakan, Yazd Province, calling it a “clear violation of the immunity of peaceful nuclear facilities.” Tasnim News Agency, affiliated with the IRGC, reported that a strike on Sharif University of Technology in Tehran destroyed its computing centre and GPU facility. Iran subsequently threatened to strike the OpenAI-Oracle-NVIDIA Stargate AI centre in Abu Dhabi in response.

What Iran did:

Iran launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and at US military bases across Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. A drone struck Britain’s Akrotiri military base on Cyprus. The UAE intercepted 26 drones but nine fell inside its territory. Drones struck Oman’s Salalah port fuel tanks. The US Embassy in Kuwait was hit and closed indefinitely.

Inside Israel, the largest single death toll from an Iranian strike was in a residential neighbourhood in Beit Shemesh, where nine civilians were killed on March 1. A missile hit Haifa on April 5, killing at least two. Cluster bomb warheads struck Ramat Gan, killing two elderly residents outside their safe room. Debris from an Iranian missile fell on the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The US military confirmed 13 service member deaths from Iranian attacks across the region, with 140 wounded by day 12. Six US aircrew died when a refuelling aircraft crashed in western Iraq.

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil prices above $170 per barrel and triggering European market selloffs. A 2 weeks ceasefire took effect April 8, 2026, brokered through Pakistan, after 40 days of conflict.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the operation at an emergency Security Council session, saying it had “squandered a chance for diplomacy.” UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul described the strikes as “not lawful self-defence.”

Both sides caused civilian harm. Both sides contested each other’s narratives. Independent verification from inside Iran was severely limited throughout.

The AI War Layer

The Real Blocks Being Broken: The Parallel AI War

Underneath the bright colors, the actual war was grey, cold, and devastatingly efficient. This was the world’s first true “AI War,” where algorithms moved faster than diplomats.

The United States deployed the Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and powered by Anthropic’s Claude model, to provide real-time targeting and weapon recommendations.⁴ In parallel, Israel used AI systems known as The Gospel and Lavender, developed by Unit 8200. These systems, first scaled during the Gaza conflict—where they were reportedly programmed to accept up to 100 civilian casualties per strike on a single combatant⁶ were now fully active in Iran and Lebanon. In the first 12 hours of the offensive, nearly 900 targets were struck; over 2,000 in the first week.⁴

But the world was shocked not just by the technology but by Iran’s structural resilience. When Operation “Epic Fury” killed the Supreme Leader and dozens of top officials on the first day, Western analysts expected a total collapse. Instead, Iran’s “Mosaic Defense” doctrine kicked in. The military had been restructured into 31 independent provincial commands. This decentralized, devolved system meant that when the “head” was removed, the “tentacles” kept striking. Each command acted as its own mini-state with independent authority to launch drones and missiles.

Iran fought the information layer with equal technological sophistication. Groups like MuddyWater and CyberAv3ngers deployed AI-assisted polymorphic malware. They used Large Language Models (LLMs) to rapidly iterate on code, creating Rust-based backdoors like CHAR and GhostBackDoor that evaded traditional security by constantly changing their signatures. They weren’t just guessing passwords; they used AI to generate sophisticated Shodan and Google Dork queries at scale, scanning for internet-exposed industrial control systems (ICS). This leverage enabled the compromise of public surveillance networks and critical infrastructure, turning the very “eyes” of their adversaries against them in real-time.

Furthermore, Iran integrated Chinese radar systems and satellite data (via the BeiDou constellation) to track stealth aircraft, assisted by engineers from CETC institutes. Even more surprising was the use of TikTok for real-time intelligence. While the public saw Lego videos, the IRGC used recommendation algorithms to crowdsource battle damage assessments and track troop movements through “accidental” civilian uploads. It was a war where the “eyes” were everywhere.