Foreign policy analyst and think-tank executive Trita Parsi shared a photo Sunday of what he claimed were messages U.S. service members wrote in the dust on an aircraft wing in the Persian Gulf – messages that viciously mocked President Donald Trump and his deeply unpopular war against Iran.
Parsi claimed that the unverified photo was “sent to me from the field,” and appears to show the flap of an aircraft with countless messages scribbled into a thick layer of dust. Among them are several criticizing the U.S.-Iran conflict.
“Peace Deal #64 Incoming…. ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” one message reads, an apparent reference to Trump's failed peace talks with Iran, as well as to growing claims that Israel "pulled" the president into the war, claims so persistent that Trump felt compelled to publicly refute them.
Another message dubbed Operation Epic Fury – the codename for the United States’ initial strikes on Iran in late February – as “Operation Epstein Fury,” an apparent reference to the growing sentiment that Trump launched the U.S. war against Iran to “distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” a belief that a majority of Americans hold according to a poll conducted in March.
Outside of Parsi’s claim, the authenticity of the photo has not been verified. Conservative podcaster and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Leigh Wolf called the image a “total fraud,” believing it to be of a KC-130 in Arizona “being stripped for parts,” and alleging the messages were likely written by “some random civilian in the U.S.”
James Griffin, however, a military and geopolitical writer who writes under the name Analytica Camillus, argued the image was likely authentic, writing that it “clearly” depicted “a real KC-135 deployed [at] a desert airbase (we just can’t say for certain what country it’s in),” and suspected it to be in either Qatar or Israel.
The photo's viral spread comes amid mounting reports of low morale among deployed U.S. service members. According to two U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News, military leaders have privately raised concerns inside the Pentagon and the White House about low morale and widespread fatigue among American service members deployed for months to support the war, and family members have echoed those concerns.
