New flashes of war in the Gulf, where peace increasingly seems like a dead letter: American forces hit three Iranian oil tankers, destroying one completely, in response to the launch of Pasdaran ballistic missiles against two US ships patrolling the waters in the region, near the island of Kharg.
While fighting between pro-Iranian and government Houthis is raging in Yemen with dozens of victims.
“It’s simple: if Iran shoots at our ships, we will destroy their tankers. All they have to do is stop shooting. Iran’s tanker fleet is defenseless, our planes, our ships and our submarines can hit them all,” commented Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, with Tehran not yet responding. According to the Stars and Stripes Central Command report, “an aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer successfully avoided multiple unprovoked Iranian attacks,” American forces “permanently rendered Iranian oil tankers MT/Downy off Kharg Island, and M/T Stark 1 near Jask.” The military also “completely destroyed the tanker M/T Kylo in the Gulf of Oman, hitting it in several critical points, after ordering the crew to abandon ship.”
The Command then states that the three targeted oil tankers “are part of a multibillion-dollar covert network that finances the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies in the region.” Washington does not seem to fear Iran’s reaction, nor the continuing instability in the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on world economies: “Many do not call it a war” with Iran, “I call it a military conflict, for us they are crumbs. We carry out intermittent attacks”, said Donald Trump in the last few hours. The conflict “for us is a small thing, it is not a major issue”, insisted the occupant of the Oval Office, downplaying a war in which 18 Americans lost their lives, “even one is too many, but in Vietnam we lost thousands”.
According to yet another indiscretion from Axios, a network with many connections in both Washington and Tel Aviv, the Trump administration is working on a plan for the post-war period in the Middle East. Which seems to refer more to the chessboard overlooking the Mediterranean than to that of the Gulf. “The initiative is still in its initial stages” and, wrote Axios, “has the objective of containing Iran and extending the Abraham Accords to normalize Israel’s relations with the countries in the area”. In the background, but not too much, remains the resurgence of armed clashes in Yemen, which has already been on fire for several weeks. Over 60 people have died in fighting between Saudi Arabia-backed Yemeni government forces and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Clashes continued “for several hours” in the southwestern region, which the rebels appear to have heavily targeted. The objective could be to advance further on the ground in a strategic area of the Red Sea.