Iran threatens to ‘rain fire’ on US troops as possible ground war looms
Iran threatens to ‘rain fire’ on US troops as possible ground war looms
Analysis by CNN's Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Matthew Chance, CNNSun, March 29, 2026 at 8:12 PM UTC
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An Iranian woman speaks on the phone as emergency workers sift through rubble of a residential building that was hit in an airstrike in the early hours of March 27, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. - Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
In a message marking 30 days since the start of the Iran war, a senior Iranian official is spelling out what many ordinary people across the tense Gulf, and beyond, privately fear will be Washington’s next move.
“The enemy signals negotiation in public, while in secret it plots a ground attack,” reads the statement from Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
He may be right.
Washington still insists negotiations with Iran are progressing, while deploying thousands of troops to the region, some of which – including 3,500 that arrived from Asia this weekend – have now started to assemble.
Much speculation has been focused on US forces potentially seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal in the Persian Gulf. Taking it would cut off a key economic lifeline to the Islamic Republic, in the hope of starving its Revolutionary Guards of essential funding from oil exports.
A satellite image shows an oil terminal at Kharg Island, Iran, February 25, 2026. 2026 - 2026 Planet Labs PBC/Handout/Reuters/File
No plans have been made public, but US troops could also be ordered to seize coastal positions to try and reopen the narrow Strait of Hormuz, a strategic energy choke-point that Iran has effectively blocked since the start of US and Israeli strikes at the end of February, provoking an acute oil and gas supply shock that is reverberating through global markets.
There’s also talk of US forces raiding nuclear sites deep inside Iran to retrieve worrisome nuclear material, amid heightened fears that it could be used by an angry and desperate Iranian regime to manufacture nuclear weapons.
But, as has been widely discussed, putting US boots on the ground would carry enormous risks, not least because possible ground operations have been telegraphed by Washington for weeks, while apparently unprepared US forces scattered across the world have been slowly amassed.
In his message, Ghalibaf warned that Iranian forces are already “waiting for American soldiers to enter on the ground so they can rain fire upon them”. Without the element of surprise, a US ground operation, even with vastly superior firepower, could quickly turn into a bloodbath.
And then there’s the significant risk to the neighborhood: the energy-rich Gulf Arab states already nursing billions of dollars of losses and a mass exodus as a direct result of this Iran war are rightly concerned about what comes next.
Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaks at a media conference in Tehran, Iran, on December 2, 2025. - Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images/File
Tehran, which has already been launching punitive missiles and drones at its Persian Gulf neighbors – which all host US military installations – has vowed to step up attacks and “punish their regional partners forever,” in the words of Ghalibaf, if the war in Iran escalates.
It is well understood in the region that could mean things like broad targeting of sensitive and highly vulnerable energy installations, something Iran has already threatened, essential for the regional and global economies, as well as hard to quickly repair and rebuild.
In mid-March, for instance, two Iranian ballistic missiles struck the Ras Laffan gas production facility in Qatar, the largest in the world, causing limited damage but sending shockwaves through the international energy markets. More strikes like that across the region would likely inflict severe and long-lasting economic pain.
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Desalination plants, on which the arid Gulf Arab states almost entirely depend for fresh water supplies, could also find themselves in the firing line, although Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has denied having such inhumane battle plans, at least for now.
“The lying, terrorist and child killing president of the US has claimed that the IRGC intends to target the region’s desalination plants and cause hardship for the people of the region,” it said in a post on Telegram last week.
“The IRGC has not done such a thing so far,” the IRGC statement added ominously.
No doubt, the Iran war could get much worse before it gets any better, unless negotiations can, somehow, find some compromise.
Smoke rises following a strike on the Bapco Oil Refinery, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, on Sitra Island Bahrain, March 9, 2026. - Stringer/Reuters/File
But even leaving aside the question as to whether US negotiations with Iran are actually taking place, which Iran denies, the current negotiating positions of both sides seem miles apart.
Washington’s 15-point plan reads more like an unconditional surrender than a blueprint for talks, demanding an end to Iranian nuclear activities and support for regional proxies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as imposing strict limits on Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities – demands that have long been unacceptable to the Islamic Republic.
“With a 15-point list, the US is setting out its wishes and pursuing what it failed to achieve in the war,” Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliamentary speaker, commented in his recent message, adding that Iran would not accept “humiliation”.
But Iran’s own 5-point plan for ending the war seems equally unrealistic, calling for, among other things, war reparations to be paid to Tehran, control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the removal of US bases in the region.
Some kind of deal could possibly be done, given that both sides have a growing interest in ending a deeply damaging war. But there is no sign of compromise yet, just more and more escalation.
Iran is being battered in this war: its leadership decimated, its military degraded by withering US and Israeli attacks, albeit with a high cost, in terms of lives lost, on the beleaguered civilian population.
But the Islamic Republic has proved resilient and adept at complicating what the Trump administration cast as a straightforward military operation to decapitate the Iranian leadership and collapse the regime.
Instead, Tehran’s stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz and its threat to regional and global economies has made it anything but.
The recent intervention of Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen – to fire missiles at Israel and possibly to block a narrow strategic choke point on the Red Sea, another key shipping lane – is yet another complication. It all makes Washington’s hopes of quickly winning its war of choice, already into its second month, seem distant, at best.
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