DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 The U.S. military said that it carried out new airstrikes against Iran on Sunday to \u201cswiftly punish\u201d the country\u2019s Revolutionary Guard after an attack on a base in Jordan killed two American service members, left one missing and four requiring hospitalization.<\/p>\n
The strikes were designed to further degrade Iran\u2019s ability to restrict the traffic of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command said. The waterway accounted for roughly 20% of global oil supplies before the war. Iran effectively closed the strait to shipping traffic after the war started with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.<\/p>\n
The new strikes came after the U.S. 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\u2019t offer any further details on the deaths.<\/p>\n
Since the war began, 16 U.S. service members have been killed and over 430 wounded.<\/p>\n
Strikes target southern Iran<\/p>\n
An area near Sirik, on the Strait of Hormuz, was targeted around 1:30 a.m. local time, according to Iran\u2019s state-run IRNA news agency, which cited local authorities in southern Hormozgan province.<\/p>\n
In the same province, a location near Hajiabad was targeted and explosions were heard in Bandar Abbas, according to IRNA. An area near Qeshm Island, which is inside the strait, was also targeted, according to Iran\u2019s state-run broadcaster, IRIB.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Iranian state media reported that U.S. airstrikes had hit an electricity and desalination plant in Hormozgan and damaged tunnels and bridges, disrupting a main highway toward Bandar Abbas, the site of Iran\u2019s main port near the narrowest part of the strait.<\/p>\n
An official in Khuzestan province, also on the Gulf, said a strike hit near the city of Shadegan, according to state media.<\/p>\n
Trump has threatened to target Iran\u2019s power stations and bridges to try to compel Tehran to loosen its hold on the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
The U.S. in the past week also reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports to halt its shipments of crude oil, and the military on Saturday said it had redirected five ships and disabled one since then.<\/p>\n
Iranian authorities said Saturday that at least 50 people have been killed and more than 500 wounded in U.S. strikes in the past three weeks, including eight killed in a strike on a bridge Friday.<\/p>\n
Strikes hit Iraq\u2019s Kurdish region<\/p>\n
In neighboring Iraq, a base of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, an Iranian Kurdish dissident group, near Irbil was struck by a drone early Sunday, wounding eight of its members, according to Rebaz Sharifi, a military official with the group.<\/p>\n
Residents of Irbil, the capital of Iraq\u2019s semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region, also heard explosions from air defenses early Sunday.<\/p>\n
Irbil has been targeted by drone attacks multiple times over the past four days, which coincided with a visit by new Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to Washington last week and an ongoing escalation between the U.S. and Iran.<\/p>\n
No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but in the past both Iran and Iran-backed Iraqi militias have launched attacks in the Kurdish region, where both U.S. troops and armed Kurdish Iranian dissident groups are present.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s supreme leader warns of \u2018unforgettable lessons\u2019<\/p>\n
Minutes before the U.S. announced the troop deaths earlier Saturday, Iran\u2019s supreme leader warned of \u201cunforgettable lessons\u201d if the U.S. keeps attacking the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n
The remarks read out on state TV and attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, still unseen since the war began, called President Donald Trump\u2019s signature \u201cworthless and invalid.\u201d An Iranian negotiator said Tehran was suspending its commitments to the interim deal signed about a month ago and aimed at permanently ending the fighting.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s joint military command said that U.S. \u201ccovetousness, bullying, totalitarianism or brutality\u201d would meet with a \u201cdevastating response.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tehran\u2019s declarations snapped another fragile thread as the war shows no end in sight. Now Khamenei warns of \u201clessons\u201d not only from Iran but also its armed proxies in the region, calling them the \u201cAxis of Resistance.\u201d The U.S. issued a global travel alert over the rising tensions.<\/p>\n
The battle has focused on control of the Strait of Hormuz. The widening strikes now threaten civilians and infrastructure, including desalination plants for drinking water, while the global economy again is on alert.<\/p>\n
The U.S. has violated its commitments under the deal and now Iran is \u201cno longer implementing them,\u201d Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran\u2019s deputy foreign minister, told state TV.<\/p>\n
There was no new word on mediation efforts.<\/p>\n
US soldiers face growing risks<\/p>\n
The last recorded death of a U.S. 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. Another soldier died after an attack on a base in Saudi Arabia, and six were killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the most significant damage from Iranian strikes occurred in Kuwait, where a water desalination plant and an oil facility were hit, according to the Kuwait authorities and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Both declined to provide locations.<\/p>\n
It was the second attack against a desalination plant in two days in the tiny desert nation that depends on desalination for 90% of its drinking water. The strikes injured several people at the oil facility and caused a fire at the desalination plant, forcing several power generation units offline.<\/p>\n
Several firefighters and a worker were injured while battling two other blazes sparked by Iranian strikes, according to the Kuwait Fire Force. Kuwait briefly closed its airspace due to missile threats, and Kuwait Airways said it was rescheduling most flights to and from the capital.<\/p>\n
Jordan\u2019s state-run Petra news agency said the kingdom\u2019s air defense systems had downed Iranian missiles, while air sirens sounded multiple times in Bahrain throughout the day and in Saudi Arabia in the morning, according to their governments.<\/p>\n
The secretary-general of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, accused Iran of war crimes for strikes on infrastructure and civilian facilities.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
This story has been corrected to change the day to Sunday from Saturday to reflect the Dubai, United Arab Emirates Dateline.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Ezzidin reported from Cairo and Toropin from Washington. Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran; Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel; Stella Martany in Irbil, Iraq; and Matt Lee and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 The U.S. military said that it carried out new airstrikes against Iran…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[61830,61832,61833,61831,102,61828,61829,6631,61827,101],"class_list":["post-213009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-strait-of-hormuz","tag-2-troops-are-dead","tag-2-troops-are-dead-in-jordan","tag-2-troops-killed-middle-east","tag-2-us-troops-are-dead","tag-hormuz","tag-iran-attacks-us-troops","tag-iran-attacks-us-troops-killed","tag-iranian-attacks","tag-iranian-attacks-us-troops-killed","tag-strait-of-hormuz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116944927717969369","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}