Iran Strikes U.S. Bases in Kuwait and Bahrain as Truce Frays
A mid-June ceasefire between Washington and Tehran is buckling as both sides trade strikes over the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it fired missiles and drones at American military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain early Sunday, hours after the United States struck Iran for the second time in a week, pushing a fragile mid-June ceasefire to the edge of collapse.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its naval and aerospace forces had carried out a joint missile and drone operation against the two bases in retaliation for the American strikes, according to the state broadcaster Press TV. Washington had not confirmed any damage or casualties, and earlier U.S. accounts of Iranian salvos in the Gulf this month reported no losses to American forces.
The exchange is the most serious test yet of the interim understanding the two governments reached in mid-June to halt their four-month war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries a large share of the world's seaborne oil. Each side now says the other broke it.
The American strikes came first. U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that its forces hit Iranian surveillance, communications, air-defense, drone-storage and mine-laying sites "in direct response to continued Iranian aggression against commercial shipping," after a Panama-flagged tanker was struck by a drone in the strait. "Iran was given a chance to honour the ceasefire agreement but elected not to," the command said. It was a sequel to Friday's American strikes on Iran.
President Donald Trump framed the stakes bluntly on Truth Social. "There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started," he wrote. "If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist."
Tehran rejected the idea that it had broken the truce. Ebrahim Azizi, who chairs the Iranian parliament's national security commission, wrote that "the Strait of Hormuz is governed by Iran" and called the tanker incident "ceasefire management" rather than a violation. The Guard hardened that line on Sunday, warning that any breach of the agreement it calls the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding would bring "the complete halt of all diplomatic processes."
U.S. Central Command statement on the strikes
For all the rhetoric, the war has been fought less over territory than over a waterway. The strait had only just begun to reopen under the 60-day roadmap the two sides signed in Switzerland, and the recovery is what the latest violence threatens.
Vice President JD Vance had offered Tehran a way to talk. "But violence will be met with violence," he wrote on Friday. By Sunday morning the violence had answered for itself, and the question over the Gulf was whether a deal that neither government has formally torn up can survive what both are now doing to it. Lower oil prices, which had fallen to pre-war levels this week, hang on the answer.
