U.S. military forces have carried out strikes in Iran as President Donald Trump’s peace deal implodes.
The strikes, which officials said were in self-defense, took place Monday in southern Iran, targeting missile launch sites and boats that U.S. Central Command said were attempting to lay mines.
“U.S. forces conducted self-defense strikes in southern Iran today to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” CENTCOM spokesman Capt. Tim Hawkins said in a statement to the Daily Beast. The New York Times and Fox News initially reported on the strikes.
“Targets included missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines. U.S. Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.”
The U.S. sank two boats belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that were laying mines, a senior U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal.
The official said Iran then fired surface-to-air missiles at U.S. warplanes, prompting the U.S. to strike a missile launch site near Bandar Abbas, an Iranian port city along the Strait of Hormuz.
The strikes come just hours after Trump said negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely.”
“It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all—Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before—And nobody wants that!,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The White House referred the Daily Beast to CENTCOM when reached for comment on the strikes.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters while traveling in India on Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz will be “open one way or another.”
“The straits need to be open, unimpeded, without tolls, and obviously that needs to happen immediately, as soon as anything’s agreed to,” Rubio said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Rubio suggested negotiators were still going “back and forth” on a preliminary draft of the peace deal to end the war and open the waterway.
On Saturday, Trump claimed that a peace agreement had been “largely negotiated” between the United States, Iran and other countries, and that “final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly.”
But the talks lost momentum Monday amid disagreements over Tehran’s nuclear program and demands for financial relief, mediators told The Wall Street Journal.
Senior Trump officials had poured cold water on the idea of an imminent breakthrough on Sunday, with one official telling Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany that mediators were still haggling over the language of a potential agreement.
“We don’t have a deal until there is a deal,” the official reportedly said.
Shortly before CENTCOM confirmed the latest strikes, Trump had declared that Iran’s enriched uranium would be destroyed under the deal he is pushing.
“The Enriched Uranium (Nuclear Dust!) will either be immediately turned over to the United States to be brought home and destroyed or, preferably, in conjunction and coordination with the Islamic Republic of Iran, destroyed in place or, at another acceptable location, with the Atomic Energy Commission, or its equivalent, being witness to this process and event,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The 79-year-old commander-in-chief has yet to comment on the “self-defensive” strikes, instead flooding Truth Social with a barrage of posts, including about the size of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, his latest pet project.
He shared one particularly bizarre post of a cartoon drawing comparing “Obama’s Iran Policy” with “Trump’s Iran Policy,” with Barack Obama’s approach represented by “Pallets of Cash” and Trump’s depicted as a U.S. battleship blasting Iranian missiles out of the sky.
Earlier on Monday, Esmail Baghaei, the spokesperson for the Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a press conference, “We have more important works to do than responding to the U.S. president’s posts, or the other malicious media campaigns, including caricatures posted on the social platforms,” according to Al Jareeza.
