US and Iran Trade Strikes Across the Gulf as the War Goes Regional
The US-Iran war widened sharply overnight into Sunday. American forces carried out a third round of strikes this week, hitting about 140 Iranian targets — more than 300 in total, US Central Command said — from missile and drone sites to naval assets and coastal radars. Iran struck back at US bases and allied Gulf states, with the United Arab Emirates and Jordan reporting they had intercepted Iranian missiles and drones. “Iran made a poor choice,” the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said as the strikes were announced.
This is the escalation the week had been building towards, and the turn Mojtaba Khamenei’s written vow of “inevitable” revenge foreshadowed: from limited, calibrated exchanges to strikes reaching across the Gulf and back into Iran on a far larger scale. Washington’s framing is narrow — that the strikes are meant to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten shipping — but 300 targets in a week is a campaign, not a warning, and Iran’s decision to fire at the American bases and Gulf monarchies that host Western forces widens the war’s geography and its risk. Britain’s own forces sit inside that map, at the naval base in Bahrain and the air hub in Qatar. The Oman diplomatic track that flickered on Saturday now looks overtaken by events. Watch for casualty and damage reports from the Gulf bases, whether any Western personnel are hit, and whether either side signals a pause or the exchange ratchets higher.