Last month, on June 13, the state of Israel launched a strike against Iran, striking around 100 targets including missile factories and nuclear facilities. That set off an exchange of firepower between the two nations that has thankfully, at least as of this writing, stopped.
According to The New York Post, the June 13 strike killed around 30 top Iranian military officials, including the three most senior generals. That may be why the operation, according to The Times of Israel, was code-named "Red Wedding."
On the TV show Game of Thrones, the Red Wedding is the name given to an event that goes down at the Twins, a castle in the Riverlands. Robb Stark and his army arrive at the castle hoping to cement a military alliance with Lord Walder Frey by marrying Robb's uncle Edmure to one of Lord Walder's daughters. Things seem to be going well...until Lord Walder, offended that Robb himself had backed out of a similar arrangement some time before, orders his men to slaughter Robb, his mother, his wife and his army, all while they have their defenses down during the festivities.
The Red Wedding has become pretty widely known in popular culture, although it's strange to hear an actual deadly military operation named after it. I understand why they chose the name, since it took out so many officials at once. I'm less clear on why the Israeli government named a parallel mission "Operation Narnia," after C.W. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia books. Operation Narnia went down at the same time as Operation Red Wedding and took out nine of Iran's top nuclear scientists.
If nothing else, stories like this tell us that high-ranking military officials around the world read fantasy books and binge TV shows just like the rest of us. Hopefully things stay calm and no one will have to move on to Operation Winds of Winter or Operation Dracarys or something.
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