Airstrikes across the Middle East on Wednesday drew more countries into the war between the United States and Iran, ending a few days of relative calm in the region.
Iran fired missiles at military bases in Jordan and at oil tankers. American and Saudi fighter jets targeted Iranian-linked militias in Iraq. An apparent drone attack also set ablaze two ships, including a U.S.-owned gas storage tanker, at a shipping hub in Egypt.
Since the collapse of a cease-fire between the United States and Iran this month, Iran-linked groups across the region have opened new fronts and reopened old ones, drawing in forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.
Saudi Arabia’s participation in the attacks on Wednesday amounted to an escalation. Previously, the kingdom had avoided openly becoming a direct combatant in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. (The Saudi military had launched some retaliatory strikes on Iran, but those were done in secret, according to senior U.S. officials.)
The Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement Wednesday that the country was not seeking escalation but would respond to aggression.
President Trump on Wednesday described Iran’s assault on U.S. military bases in Jordan as a surprise attack. U.S. Central Command said the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the primary faction in Iran that opposes diplomatic compromise to the war, had launched “multiple ballistic missiles” and that all had been intercepted.
Mr. Trump also suggested that the United States would soon target Iran in response to the apparent drone strike in Egypt. “We’re going to be hitting them very hard,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because it’s our turn to hit ’em.”
Following the exchanges of fire, the prices of Brent crude, the global benchmark, and West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, rose sharply on Wednesday.
This week, Saudi Arabia has faced dozens of drone attacks against its oil facilities. And strikes on Saudi tankers by Houthi militants, an Iranian ally in Yemen that controls large swaths of that country along the Red Sea, have further threatened oil shipping lanes with potentially dire consequences for the East Asian countries that rely heavily on Middle Eastern supplies.
On Wednesday, two ships, including the U.S.-owned tanker, caught fire after an explosion at a shipping hub in Egypt, according to Kpler, a maritime tracking firm. Joshua Hutchinson, the chief commercial officer of Ambrey, a maritime tracking firm, said the explosion was believed to have been caused by a drone. There were no confirmed injuries or deaths, Egypt’s ministry of petroleum said on social media.
The expansion of fighting in the Middle East appears to complicate the possibility of the Trump administration extricating itself from the unpopular war, with midterm elections now less than 100 days away. It also threatens to worsen the global oil shock and drive higher inflation.
The U.S. military said that the strikes in Iraq were in retaliation for more than 30 drone attacks by Iranian proxy groups in the past 72 hours. A U.S. official said they had targeted members of the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of Iraqi-based militias with ties to Iran. No Iraqi militia group has claimed responsibility for the drone attacks.
Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi of Iraq called the U.S.-Saudi strikes “an unacceptable aggression.” Iraq maintains close ties to both Iran and the United States and has often found itself caught between the warring sides in recent months.
Many of the militias that make up the Popular Mobilization Forces first formed after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which led to widespread anti-American sentiment in the country. Now they appear to be increasingly embroiled in the current war with Iran.
The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the U.S.-Saudi strikes killed about 20 Iranian advisers, a combination of senior technical advisers and liaisons from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The sites in Iraq were deliberately targeted for that reason, the official said, and to knock out missile and drone sites belonging to the Iraqi militias.
The Popular Mobilization Forces issued a joint statement Wednesday threatening retaliation for the strikes. Still, they said they would not act until after Tuesday, the end of the ongoing Arbaeen pilgrimage, when hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims visit holy shrines in the Iraqi city of Karbala. “Our response to the American enemy is inevitable and will come,” the statement said, “and we may target its tools in Saudi Arabia if the situation demands it.”
In Lebanon, a cease-fire involving another group supported by Iran — Hezbollah — came under threat on Wednesday when the Israeli military said the group had launched an explosive drone at one of its vehicles on a ridge in southern Lebanon.
The cease-fire has barely held as Israel and Lebanon have worked to implement a separate framework agreement aimed at ending months of fighting. Hezbollah has rejected the agreement between Israel and Lebanon.
Reporting was contributed by Erika Solomon, Abdi Latif Dahir, Lara Jakes, Jenny Gross, Rich Barbieri, Euan Ward, Pranav Baskar, Shirin Hakim, Zane Irwin, Peter Eavis and Eric Schmitt.
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