Jordan’s air defenses intercepted five missiles launched from Iran early Wednesday, the country’s military said, hours after the U.S. military said it had knocked down an Iranian missile barrage launched against American forces in the Middle East, shattering a brief pause in fighting.
The Jordanian military said the missiles had been “intercepted and destroyed.” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency carried a statement from the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard saying the Guard’s Aerospace Force fired ballistic missiles at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and the headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command in Jordan.
Hours earlier, the U.S. Central Command said its forces “remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness,” and that they had also worked with Saudi Arabia’s forces to strike sites in Iraq that Tehran-backed militias have used to launch attacks in recent days.
In announcing the strikes in Iraq, the U.S. warned that further attacks on American troops or Saudi Arabia ’s energy infrastructure risked additional action.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi called an emergency meeting of the country’s National Security Council Wednesday to discuss the strikes.
The United States and Iran had experienced a period of calm, during which neither announced attacks for about three days following weeks of escalation over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf waterway and narrow chokepoint through which 20% of the world’s traded oil normally flows.
The fighting flared at the end of a month packed with multiple pressure points on U.S. President Donald Trump. In recent weeks, four U.S. troops died during the fighting, while the Pentagon asked an increasingly skeptical Congress for money to cover the conflict’s ballooning costs.
