BREAKING: The cardboard spoke.

Fourteen days after the strike that killed his father, his mother Mansoureh, his wife Zahra, and one of his sons. Six days after an Assembly of Experts that Reuters reports the IRGC pressured into appointing him unanimously. After zero appearances and one life-size cardboard cutout held upright by a handler at his own allegiance rally. After the New York Times confirmed his legs were injured in the same blast, CNN reported a fractured foot, bruising around his left eye, and lacerations across his face. After Iran’s ambassador to Cyprus told the Guardian: “I think he is in the hospital.”

State television called him janbaz. Wounded warrior. Then a news anchor read his first words to the nation. He did not appear.

The statement, cross-verified verbatim across the Financial Times, AP, Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera, and the full seven-section text posted by Iranian channels, contains no negotiation. No de-escalation. No ceasefire clause. Every section orders continuation or acceleration.

The lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be used. All American bases in the region must be immediately closed, or they will be attacked. Iran will not give up on avenging the attack on the Shajarat Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab, where 168 people were killed, 110 of them children. Studies have been made of opening other fronts. Those fronts will be activated if the war persists. Iran thanks the fighters of the Resistance Axis: Hezbollah, Yemen, Iraq. Iran believes in friendship with its neighbours but will continue targeting bases.

Those are the first words of the man who holds the only constitutional key to ending this war. And every one of them turns the key the wrong way.

For fourteen days, the hope priced into oil markets that fell from $119.50 to $92 on Trump’s “war is very complete” rhetoric was that the new Supreme Leader would surface and order a halt. That the 31 autonomous IRGC commands firing without central direction would receive the one instruction that could stop them.

He gave them the opposite instruction. The off switch is an amplifier.

Every action the 31 commands took independently for fourteen days has been retroactively authorised. The tanker strikes. The Salalah port attack. The DXB drones. The Stryker cyberattack. The SafeSea Vishnu burning off Basra. Every operation the Mosaic Doctrine sustained without a functioning commander was just blessed by the commander himself, from a hospital bed, through an anchor’s mouth, without showing his face.

He ordered the Strait to stay closed. The seven P&I clubs that cancelled war-risk insurance needed a cessation of hostilities to begin the 12-to-24-month reinstatement process. The Supreme Leader just declared hostilities will not cease. He ordered new fronts opened. The Hezbollah rockets hitting Israel, the militia drones striking the US facility near Baghdad airport, the Houthi operations in the Red Sea, are no longer autonomous proxy actions. They are declared policy. He ordered continued attacks on American bases. He demanded vengeance for 110 dead children.

The Understanding War project reports two-thirds of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles are now combat ineffective. The IEA and United States have released 572 million barrels of strategic reserves. The war has cost America $11.3 billion in its first six days. And the man whose foot is fractured, whose eye is bruised, whose family is dead, whose face is taped to cardboard at his own rallies, who may be issuing orders from a hospital bed in a location nobody outside the IRGC can confirm, just told the 31 commands and every militia from Beirut to Sana’a: do not stop. Do more. Close the Strait. Attack the bases. Open new fronts. Avenge the children.

A wounded man who cannot stand issued orders for a war he cannot stop, through a voice that is not his, from a room he cannot leave. And the 31 commands that received those orders needed no encouragement. They were already firing.