US launches ninth day of strikes on Iran as US military toll hits 17

The US military launched another round of airstrikes against Iranian targets yesterday, the US Central Command said. The latest attacks — which mark the ninth consecutive day of strikes — follow the deaths of three US service members this week in Jordan and Iraq.

Iran, meanwhile, hasn’t been holding back… Tehran announced over the weekend it would no longer adhere to the terms of the interim truce with Washington and launched a round of strikes on Jordan and Kuwait, as well as US radar and aircraft in Qatar. Kuwait bore the brunt of Iran’s weekend attacks, which targeted energy infrastructure including an oil facility, two power plants, and a desalination plant.

…and is expanding its attack radius: Earlier on Friday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched a missile strike against a US special operations command center in Syria. The attack — Iran’s first against Syria during the war — was declared to be in retaliation for an earlier US attack on an Iranian military base that killed three Iranian soldiers.

Meanwhile, Dana Gas has shut down the main production facilities at Iraq’s Khor Mor gas field after receiving what it described as “credible security threats” amid the escalation in the region, according to a disclosure (pdf). The company did not disclose the nature of the threats or say when production could resume.

BACKGROUND- This is not the field’s first security-driven disruption. While operations remained unaffected after a drone strike in February last year, a subsequent strike on a storage tank in November halted production and caused extensive power outages. The field was also shut for two weeks after the regional conflict started heating up in March before resuming operations in April.