This Is at Least the Second Time Iran Has Hit the Same Jordanian Base This Year

 

One A-10 Thunderbolt II lost a wing. Roughly eight F-15s took light damage and were reportedly able to fly again afterward. That's the accounting a US official gave Reuters for what Iranian strikes did this week to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, near the town of Azraq, a facility that's served as a key hub for American airpower operations against Iran since the current war began in February.

This isn't the base's first time being hit, and it's worth being clear about that pattern rather than treating this strike as an isolated event. Iran targeted Muwaffaq Salti on the opening day of the conflict, February 28, part of a coordinated wave of drone and missile attacks against American and allied facilities across the region. Jordanian air defenses reportedly intercepted 108 of the incoming projectiles that day, though debris from the intercepted weapons still caused injuries and damage. The base was struck again in July, an attack serious enough to kill three American Army soldiers and wound 29 more. Tehran has, according to multiple outlets, targeted the facility "numerous times" since the war started, which makes this week's strike a continuation of a running campaign rather than a new front opening up.

The broader damage accounting the Congressional Research Service put together back in May gives a sense of scale beyond this single base: 42 US military aircraft lost or damaged in the conflict by that point, more than two dozen drones destroyed, and additional losses from ordinary accidents layered on top of combat damage, a reminder that not every aircraft this war has cost the US actually died in combat. Eighteen American service members have been killed since February, and more than 800 injured, figures that Reuters' own reporting places alongside this week's strike without suggesting they're final.

What's actually driving this latest round is the broader standoff over the Strait of Hormuz. The US military struck three Iranian oil tankers on September 5 as both sides fight for effective control over the strait, and Iran's attack on Muwaffaq Salti this week reads as the direct retaliatory response to that. Trump has separately claimed the US is "winning" the Iran war and asserted control of the Hormuz Strait, a characterization that sits awkwardly next to a week that included American tanker strikes, Iranian retaliation against a US airbase, and reports that Iran is simultaneously building out a new network of regional proxies specifically to keep pressure on America's Gulf allies. Those don't read like the closing moves of a war one side has already won.

None of this is happening in a vacuum for Jordan either, a country that's been absorbing repeated strikes on its own soil as a consequence of hosting American forces, with its own air defense systems doing real work intercepting incoming fire even when some of it still gets through. Whatever the strategic framing coming out of Washington, the practical reality on the ground at this one air base is now a documented pattern: struck in February, struck in July with fatal American casualties, and struck again this week, with an A-10 missing a wing to show for it.