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First exchange of fire between two countries in more than a month sends oil prices rising 3%
First exchange of fire between two countries in more than a month sends oil prices rising 3%after the warring countries exchanged fire for the first time in more than a month, sending oil prices up 3 per cent.
The US president issued a warning on Monday hours after Tehran fired missiles at American assets in Jordan in response to an attack by the US on Larak Island in the“There will be a response” to Iran’s retaliatory attack, Trump told Fox News.
“We’re going to hit them hard. ” The US military said on Sunday it had struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak, saying it believed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was poised to launch rockets with sea mines into the waterway. António Guterres: ‘Superpowers need to understand things have changed’ Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles against Jordan, where the US maintains a troop presence. Trump said one missile pierced US air defences but the rest were intercepted.
The overnight attacks and Trump’s threat to escalate the conflict pushed oil prices above $90 a barrel, a rise of more than 3 per cent. Tehran threatened further responses to US strikes on Monday, with an Iranian official telling Reuters that for every US attack, the regime would deliver a response “dozens of times greater”. Iran’s retaliation for the Larak attack demonstrated that “no target in the region is beyond Tehran’s reach”, the official added.
The US attack appeared smaller and more focused than Washington’s last-known larger-scale strikes on the Islamic republic on July 29th, when “dozens” of targets were hit in a two-hour wave of bombing. US Central Command, which oversees US forces in the Middle East, described its attack on Sunday as a “limited, precise action”. The Iranian official also told Reuters that the renewed violence was a “limited and contained confrontation” between Washington and Tehran.
But the latest escalation risks a return to full-blown war in advance of crucial US midterm elections in November. Trump has struggled to end the conflict, which has stoked inflation and is unpopular with the US electorate. He has also failed to fully reopen the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flowed before the war. The six-month war between the US and Iran has become a stalemate, and talks between Washington and Tehran have collapsed.
“They want to meet so badly,” Trump said of Tehran on Monday. “I just don’t know if you can count on a deal with them. ” During the relative calm of the past month, the US shifted to prioritising economic warfare against Iran, with treasury secretary Scott Bessent expanding secondary sanctions on Tehran and threatening measures that could “blow up” the global financial system.
But so far, Bessent has stopped short of the “economic D-Day” he had threatened and has only revoked US financial access to an Egyptian bank’s branches in the United Arab Emirates . Tehran was taking US sanctions “very seriously”, and Washington would continue to exert economic pressure on the regime, Bessent added. The Iranian “economy doesn’t have to collapse. We just have to have the regime come to their senses,” he said.
Larak, located in the throat of the strait, is a strategic point allowing the IRGC navy to observe and attack commercial shipping in the vital waterway with anti-ship missiles, mines and drones.
“IRGC forces also have rocket-launched ‘smart’ programmable mines for rapidly denying the shipping lanes to the enemy,” said Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank. “Larak has a missile speedboat harbour to its north, and a mostly underground network of very discreet-looking coastal missile and rocket batteries with a number of pre-surveyed launch spots,” Nadimi added.
Iran’s reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian, who left Tehran on Monday to attend the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation security forum in Kyrgyzstan, said his country was “not seeking war”, adding: “We will never remain passive and we will give a firm response to the aggressors. ” The IRGC said it used missiles and drones to carry out a retaliatory strike on Sunday against technical and maintenance infrastructure as well as fighter jet positions at two US airbases in Jordan.
Meanwhile, Iran’s regular army said it had launched dozens of attack drones against the US military at Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE early on Monday. Denying Palestinian students academic opportunities in Ireland is indefensibleActor Olwen Fouéré: ‘I firmly believe we are in the last days of the Anthropocene’A Wicklow woman in Marbella: ‘I would make friends in the summer and they would then go home.
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