Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Wednesday it had carried out a combined missile and drone attack on U.S. military facilities in Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, marking the latest escalation in a rapidly intensifying exchange with Washington.
According to a statement carried by Iran’s Fars news agency, IRGC ground forces destroyed a repair center and equipment warehouses at the base and disabled the guidance system of a U.S. surveillance balloon. The IRGC said it had separately struck American targets in Bahrain and Jordan in preceding days.
The claim follows a fast-moving sequence of strikes and counterstrikes over the past several days. U.S. Central Command carried out new attacks on IRGC targets near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, which President Trump described in a Truth Social post as retaliation for Iran’s attempted mining of the strait and a missile attack on a U.S. base in Jordan. Trump warned that any further Iranian retaliation would be met with an even larger response, saying “there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran” if Tehran persisted.
CENTCOM said separately that it had cleared sea mines from shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and that naval forces enforcing a blockade on Iran had redirected 84 commercial vessels, disabled three and boarded two.
The Erbil claim could not be independently verified, and CENTCOM had not issued a statement on the alleged strike as of Wednesday. The exchange comes roughly six months into a conflict that began in late February and has drawn in Gulf states including Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, several of which have reported their own air defenses intercepting Iranian missiles and drones in recent days.
