Dubai, Jul 15: The US military reimposed a naval blockade on Iran and intensified its airstrike campaign early Wednesday, hitting an Iranian army barracks and killing at least seven troops while wounding 260 people across the country, Iranian officials said.
Days of retaliatory strikes across the Middle East by Iran and the US, and both nations’ attempts to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, threaten to push the region back to all-out war.
More than 30 people have been killed over “recent days,” Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said, without elaborating. Seven of the dead came from the attack on the barracks in Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan province.
The US first imposed the blockade in mid-April and then lifted it in mid-June, a day after signing the interim deal that set a 60-day period for negotiations over issues like Iran’s nuclear program, but talks have stalled as fighting over the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas trade passes during peacetime, has intensified.
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened on Wednesday to halt all energy exports from the Middle East over the blockade.
“The export of oil and gas from the region will be either for everyone or for no one,” it said.
When US President Donald Trump announced the return of the blockade on Monday, he also said he would impose a 20 per cent fee on ships passing through the strait. But he dropped the plan to collect fees hours before resuming the blockade, citing requests from allies in the Persian Gulf.
Both the US and Iran launched attacks as the blockade was reimposed
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The US carried out another wave of strikes as it reimposed the blockade, striking dozens of targets over seven hours, the US military’s Central Command said Wednesday.
Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry, gave Wednesday’s casualty figure of over 260 people wounded, without specifying how many people had been killed. Kermanpour’s figures reported far more people injured than in any other round of recent violence between Iran and the US.
One strike targeted a barracks for Iran’s 388th Mechanised Infantry Brigade in Bampour in Sistan and Baluchestan province, Iranian state television reported. The report said the Americans fired at least 13 missiles in the attack and that the dead included conscripts and career soldiers. A number of other troops were wounded.
The army said it would make “a decisive response to this aggressive action by the American enemy,” state TV added.
The 388th operates battle tanks and armoured vehicles.
Missile alert warnings went out in Bahrain and Kuwait early Wednesday morning as they faced incoming Iranian fire, something that’s been a daily occurrence, further straining a ceasefire in the war. Jordan also said it shot down three incoming Iranian missiles. Iran claimed attacks on the three nations.
US Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, who leads Central Command, said in a statement that Iran had launched dozens of missiles and drones at neighbouring Gulf Arab countries.
“US forces are holding Iran accountable for unwarranted aggression that continues to endanger innocent lives,” Cooper said.
When the US and Israel launched the war on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz by attacking and threatening ships. That sent the price of oil, fertiliser, and other goods soaring.
Iran has more recently attacked ships moving through the strait on a route near Oman overseen by the US military that is outside Tehran’s control, setting off the recent violence. The US has threatened to reopen the strait by force — but experts say that would require a much bigger armada, if not tens of thousands of ground troops.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, criticised America’s ongoing attacks targeting his country.
“The US is the aggressor, not the victim,” he wrote to the world body’s leader, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
Trump says he’s seeking Gulf investments instead of fees
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Trump said Tuesday that he was called by the region’s “kings and emirs,” who suggested an alternate arrangement to charging ships fees to pass through the strait, as the president proposed a day earlier.
“They said we’d love to do it a different way. We’d love to invest in the United States with billions and billions of dollars,” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office.
Trump said he preferred that arrangement to charging tolls “because I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the strait.”
It was unclear if the investment deals would be new commitments relative to what Trump announced after a visit last year to the Middle East.
Trump’s plan to charge fees would have been a change to longstanding American policy and a departure from US promises that the strait would remain open to all without tolls.
Trump told Fox News Channel on Tuesday night that more US strikes against Iran were coming over the next two days and that bridges and power plants could be targets by next week unless negotiations resume. Already, the US has struck at least one bridge.
“You’d better make a deal, or you’re not going to have anything left,” Trump warned.
The interim peace deal is in peril
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Under the interim deal, Iran agreed that passage through the strait would remain free of charge for 60 days — but the agreement left open what would happen after. Iran asserts it has the right to manage traffic and potentially charge fees. The US has disputed that.
The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, briefly topped USD 87 early Tuesday, still well below the nearly USD 120 reached at the height of the war. The price dipped to USD 78 in the aftermath of Trump’s announcement that he had changed course, then went back up to USD 85 a barrel on Wednesday.
Regional mediators, meanwhile, are still trying to get the United States and Iran back to the negotiating table. (AP)
