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​​​​​​How Iran Should End the War
A Deal Tehran Could Take
M. Javad ZarifApril 3, 2026
M. JAVAD ZARIF is Associate Professor of Global Studies at the University of Tehran and Founder and President of Possibilities Architects. He previously served as Iran’s Vice President, Foreign Minister, and Permanent Representative in the United Nations in the past 30 years. The views expressed here are his own. Iran did not start its war with the United States and Israel. But more than a month in, the Islamic Republic is clearly winning it. American and Israeli forces have spent weeks incessantly bombing Iranian territory, killing thousands of people and damaging hundreds of buildings, all in hopes of toppling the country’s government. Yet Iran has held the line and successfully defended its interests. It has maintained continuity of leadership even as its top officials have been assassinated, and it has repeatedly hit back at its aggressors even as they strike at its military, civilian, and industrial facilities. The Americans and the Israelis who started the conflict with delusions of forcing capitulation thus find themselves in a quagmire without an exit strategy. The Iranians, by contrast, have pulled off a historic feat of resistance. To some Iranians, this success is reason to continue fighting until the aggressors are adequately punished rather than to search for a negotiated ending. Every night since February 28, large crowds of proud Iranians have gathered across the country to show their defiance by shouting, “No capitulation, no compromise, fight with America.” After all, the United States has proved that it cannot be trusted in talks and that it will not respect Iran’s sovereignty. By this logic, there is no reason to engage with the country now and offer it an off-ramp. Instead, Tehran should press its advantage, continuing to strike U.S. bases and blocking commerce in the Strait of Hormuz until Washington fundamentally alters its regional presence and posture. Yet although continuing to fight the United States and Israel might be psychologically satisfying, it will lead only to the further destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure. These actors, desperate after failing to achieve any of their objectives, are increasingly resorting to targeting vital pharmaceutical, energy, and industrial sites and randomly hitting innocent civilians. The violence is also slowly drawing in more countries, threatening to turn a regional conflagration into a global one. And regrettably, international organizations have been bullied by the United States into staying silent in the face of Washington’s many atrocities, including its massacre of nearly 170 schoolchildren on the first day of the war.

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As US and Israeli strikes pound Iranian military sites, Iran is lowering the enlistment age for security roles to 12 and threating civilians with death for photographing war damage, fueling international outrage.

Last week, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced a campaign recruiting children as young as 12 to serve as “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” assisting with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.

With the minimum age for war roles officially lowered to 12, human rights groups are now condemning the move, demanding that Iranian authorities immediately halt the campaign while imposing a complete ban on enlisting children under 18 in all military and paramilitary forces.

“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” Bill Van Esveld, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”

“The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability,” Van Esveld continued. “Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”

For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.

In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.

Under international law, Iran’s latest initiative flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.

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Hours after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei at the start of the war, factions from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella body of ​Iran-backed ​armed groups, vowed to drag the US into a long war of attrition that would “leave no American presence in the region generally, especially in Iraq”. The group has claimed responsibility for scores of drone and missile attacks on targets in Iraq and neighbouring countries, such the US base in Erbil and the city’s international airport, Camp Victoria near Baghdad international airport, and compounds of US oil companies in Basra and northern Iraq, forcing the country to suspend production in big oilfields.

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