Conflicts that are currently contained risk spilling out and engulfing whole regions, perhaps the world. If the Iran and Ukraine conflicts were to merge, we’d see a war that runs from Poland to the edges of India. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says that World War Three has already begun.

Iran and Ukraine are far from the only potential theaters of escalation: there is the possibility of a war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, Iran’s proxy force, and a growing anger in the Muslim world about Israel’s seizure of parts of Lebanon. Not to mention the India-Pakistan border, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Strait of Taiwan.

As the military confrontation between the US and Iran grinds on, a specific rumor has begun taking hold in both Iran and Pakistan: that the war itself is the mechanism that will summon the Mahdi, the messianic figure of broader Islamic end-times belief, back to earth to defeat America.

The same underlying rumor, that this war is building toward a divinely orchestrated climax rather than a negotiated or militarily decided end, is now circulating through two entirely different transmission belts in two different countries at the same time.