As the United States and Iran trade strikes on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz this week, Iran has also launched several ballistic missiles towards Jordan’s Al-Azraq airbase, which hosts US military assets and personnel, in what it has called retaliatory attacks. The Jordanian Armed Forces said 18 of 20 missiles had been intercepted and destroyed overnight on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning, while two fell in open areas. No casualties have been reported.
So, what is at the Al-Azraq airbase, and why has Iran targeted it? Overnight, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had launched “devastating” missile strikes at US forces stationed at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, also known as Al-Azraq base, near Azraq in Jordan’s Zarqa governorate. Missiles “struck the maintenance, preparation, and deployment sites of F-35, F-16, and F-15 fighter jets, as well as their shelters, inflicting heavy damage on the enemy”, the IRGC said in the statement reported by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
The Jordanian Armed Forces said the kingdom had engaged 20 ballistic missiles, intercepting and destroying 18 of them, while two fell in open areas. A Trump administration official in Washington, DC, said the barrage of ballistic missiles fired at US forces in Jordan did not inflict any casualties. Iran is targeting Jordanian assets in the latest round of escalation, which began two weeks ago with US attacks on rocket launchers on Iran’s Larak island in the Strait of Hormuz.
The US claimed Iran was preparing to use the launchers to scatter sea mines in the strait, and Iran responded with strikes on US assets in neighbouring Gulf countries. It has now widened this to include Jordan. The US does not publicly reveal the capacities of its foreign military sites and assets, but Jordan is known to host nearly 4,000 US soldiers, according to a 2026 US Congressional Research Service report.
Some of them are stationed at the Al-Azraq base. Jordan also hosts US soldiers at the King Faisal Air Base in southern Jordan, and at so-called Tower 22, a remote US military logistics outpost in northeastern Jordan close to the borders with Syria and Iraq. In the ongoing war, Tehran has claimed strikes on the Al-Azraq base more than 10 times between March and September.
Iran first launched air strikes on Al-Azraq in early March. On June 10, Iran again claimed to have struck the Al-Azraq airbase, as well as other bases hosting US military personnel and assets in Kuwait and Bahrain, after US forces struck Tehran’s assets in the Strait of Hormuz, a day after a US Apache helicopter had crashed near the waters. On that occasion, the IRGC said its long-range missiles had destroyed several targets at the Al-Azraq airbase, including hangars and command centres.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
