DUBAI ( WNAM MONITORING): The US military said that it carried out new airstrikes against Iran on Sunday to “swiftly punish” the country’s Revolutionary Guard after an attack on a base in Jordan killed two American service members, left one missing and four requiring hospitalization.
The Central Command said in a statement that the airstrikes began at 6 p.m. ET (2200 GMT), at President Donald Trump’s direction.
“The strikes are designed to further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night,” it said, without providing further details.
The waterway accounted for roughly 20 percent of global oil supplies before the war. Iran effectively closed the strait to shipping traffic after the war started with US and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.
As usual, Iran hit back at US allies in the region, targeting the base of the Kurdistan Freedom Party near Irbil with a drone early Sunday, and also two US bases in Kuwait with kamikaze drones before daybreak.
According to Iran’s stat TV, Iran’s army carried out “large-scale attacks with kamikaze drones against the US military’s ammunition depot at Camp Udairi and the Patriot radar system and air surveillance radar at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.”
The new strikes came after the US military announced its first troop deaths from direct Iranian fire since the opening days of the war, following a drone and missile attack on a base in Jordan on Friday. The dead were not identified, and Central Command didn’t offer any further details on the deaths.
Since the war began, 16 US service members have been killed and over 430 wounded.
The previous recorded death of a US service member was that of a helicopter pilot who crashed in the Arabian Sea earlier this month. Early in the war, an Iranian drone strike on a command center in Kuwait killed six soldiers. One soldier died after an attack on a base in Saudi Arabia. Six were killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq.
