Operation Roaring Lion / Epic Fury

Operation Roaring Lion (Israeli designation) and Epic Fury (US designation) is the joint US-Israeli air campaign against Iran that opened on 28 February 2026, a separate conflict from the June 2025 Twelve-Day War in which Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer had already destroyed or disabled Iran's Natanz, Esfahan and Fordow nuclear sites. By the time this campaign launched, those facilities had been non-operational for eight months, so its early strikes on nuclear-adjacent infrastructure were access-denial hits on already-ruined sites rather than fresh nuclear damage.

The campaign's actual targets have run to IRGC military leadership, air-defence networks, missile infrastructure and administrative Tehran, alongside later strikes on uranium-processing and heavy-water facilities. Its stated objective shifted without formal declaration from neutralising Iran's nuclear programme toward signalling Regime change, a goal Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has publicly conceded he cannot guarantee.

Congress has never authorised the operation under the War Powers Resolution, and repeated resolutions to force a withdrawal vote have failed on the floor. The Pentagon's later administrative renaming of the operation, and Congress's difficulty pinning down its own casualty figures, have made the operation's naming and accounting a recurring flashpoint distinct from the fighting itself.