U.S. military strikes Iran in response to deaths of two American service members

The U.S. military carried out new airstrikes against Iran on Sunday to "swiftly punish" the country's Revolutionary Guard after an attack on a base in Jordan killed two American service members, left one missing, and required four others to be hospitalized.

The strikes were designed to further degrade Iran's ability to restrict the traffic of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command said. The waterway accounted for roughly 20% of global oil supplies before the conflict. Iran effectively closed the strait to shipping traffic after the war started with U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28.

The new strikes came after the U.S. military announced its first troop deaths from direct Iranian fire since the opening days of the war, following a drone and missile attack on a base in Jordan on Friday. The dead were not identified, and Central Command offered no further details.

Since the war began, 16 U.S. service members have been killed and over 430 wounded.

Targets in southern Iran near Sirik, on the Strait of Hormuz, were struck around 1:30 a.m. local time, according to Iran's state-run IRNA news agency citing local authorities in southern Hormozgan province. A location near Hajiabad was also targeted, with explosions heard in Bandar Abbas. An area near Qeshm Island, inside the strait, was also hit according to Iran's state-run broadcaster IRIB.

On Saturday, Iranian state media reported that U.S. airstrikes had hit an electricity and desalination plant in Hormozgan and damaged tunnels and bridges, disrupting a main highway toward Bandar Abbas, the site of Iran's main port near the narrowest part of the strait.

Trump has threatened to target Iran's power stations and bridges to try to compel Tehran to loosen its hold on the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. in the past week also reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports to halt its shipments of crude oil, and the military said it had redirected five ships and disabled one since then.

Iranian authorities said at least 50 people have been killed and more than 500 wounded in U.S. strikes in the past three weeks, including eight killed in a strike on a bridge Friday.

In neighbouring Iraq, a base of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, an Iranian Kurdish dissident group near Irbil, was struck by a drone early Sunday, wounding eight members, according to military official Rebaz Sharifi. Residents of Irbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region, also heard explosions from air defences.