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The U.S. military destroyed five Iranian crude oil carriers after Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps twice targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles over a two-day span, U.S. Central Command said Tuesday, marking a sharp escalation in tensions between Washington and Tehran.
The warship evaded both attempts and suffered no damage, according to CENTCOM. "The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and continued to patrol regional waters. No American personnel were harmed," the command said in a statement.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to Colombia earlier Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran would keep paying a price in tankers for any further attempts to strike U.S. naval vessels. "Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they're going to lose tankers," Rubio said, adding that he expected to see further such losses "again today."
His remarks came before CENTCOM's announcement of the five destroyed tankers, framing the strikes as part of a stated U.S. policy of retaliating against Iran's oil-shipping fleet in response to attacks on American forces.
Iranian outlets offered their own accounts of the strikes. The semi-official Tasnim news agency reported that a tanker was hit near the anchorage area of Kharg Island, a major oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf, though it said no casualties occurred and that the vessel's crew had been evacuated.
State broadcaster IRIB reported separately that two oil tankers were struck near the port of Jask, on Iran's southeastern coast along the Gulf of Oman, with their crews taken off by lifeboat to shore.
The exchange unfolded against a backdrop of sustained friction between Iran and the United States centered on the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important oil-shipping corridors, through which a substantial share of global crude exports pass. The strait has repeatedly served as a flashpoint between the two countries.
The latest strikes come despite a memorandum signed in June that had envisioned a deal to reopen the strait as a step toward a broader peace agreement, underscoring how far implementation of that understanding remains from taking hold on the ground.
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