A bold daytime attack struck hundreds of missile and air defence sites and eliminated layers of leadership in the Iranian regime, most significant among them the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” United States President Donald Trump later posted to Truth Social.
“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans. This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their country.”
Trump’s announcement capped a day of still ongoing US and Israeli strikes that began when US warships fired Tomahawk cruise missiles and US Navy and Air Force jets fired air-launched missiles at scores of Iranian sites.
The two allies had built an extensive target list.
Sites struck ranged from surface missile locations to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control buildings.
Israel Defence Forces said that the operation involved more than 200 Israeli jets, which dropped hundreds of munitions against more than 500 targets.
The Pentagon has so far disclosed very little about the operation - called Epic Fury - and the US military did not provide specifics on how many of its own jets were used or how many targets they struck.
In response, Iran launched broad retaliatory strikes that targeted not only Israel but US military sites in Bahrain and other locations in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates using missiles and one-way, explosive-laden attack drones known as Shaheds, according to videos posted online and verified by the Washington Post.
One key air base in Kuwait, Ali al-Salem, was attacked with missiles that were intercepted, Kuwaiti officials and analysts said.
An air base in Erbil, Iraq, where US troops are housed and conduct operations, also appeared to be attacked by drones and missiles, according to analysts from the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War.
US Central Command said no US service members had been injured or killed, and no US warship had been hit in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
The US also used for the first time its own one-way attack drone against Iranian targets.
The drones - known as the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or Lucas - are modelled after Iran’s Shahed fleet.
US military officials said they were looking into at least one strike that may have killed civilians.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said dozens of children were killed in an Israeli strike on a girls’ school in the Iranian city of Minab. Central Command spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins said the matter was being examined.
The Israel Defence Forces said in a statement that it “eliminated” seven Iranian senior officials, including the secretary of the Iranian Security Council, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and the defence minister of Iran.
For weeks, Trump has threatened military strikes to get Iran to cease any further development of its nuclear weapons programme, and the strike followed an hours-long bombing campaign in June, in which B-2 stealth bombers and other assets hit Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities at the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre.
At the time, Trump said Iran’s capability had been “obliterated”; US intelligence showed that the programme had been deeply damaged but could reconstitute.
Unlike the brief June operation, Trump said US “heavy and pinpoint bombing” would continue for days, uninterrupted, “to achieve our objective of peace through the Middle East”.
This is the second major US military operation that has resulted in the toppling of a foreign leader, following the January 3 raid that resulted in the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Much like in Venezuela, uncertainty hovered around the composition of Iran’s current and future government in the hours after the attack.
Trump was prompted to strike, a senior Administration official told reporters, because the US had seen “indicators” that Iran would strike US targets overseas “pre-emptively” with missiles and other conventional weapons.
That information compelled Trump to order his own strikes, the official said, without explaining what indicators intelligence might have picked up.
US analysis showed “if we sat back and waited to get hit first, the amount of casualties and damage would be substantially higher”, the senior official added, noting that even after the US and Israeli strikes on Saturday, Iran struck back not just at military sites, but at civilian buildings in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In a classified briefing last week to a bipartisan group of top lawmakers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not mention Iran attacking the US unprompted, according to two people familiar with the matter. He did mention a scenario in which Israel might strike Iran on its own, prompting Iran to retaliate by attacking US sites in the region and said, in that case, the US might have to strike pre-emptively, according to the people.
Amid the Trump Administration’s military surge of forces to the Middle East, there are now between 30,000 and 40,000 US troops in the region - including thousands of sailors aboard two aircraft carriers, and hundreds of military aircraft and support fleets of refuellers at allied bases.
More than a dozen US warships were in the Middle East to support the assault, a Navy official told the Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide details that had not been publicly announced.
- Warren P. Strobel, Noah Robertson, Adam Taylor and Lior Soroka contributed to this report.
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