Two U.S. service members were killed and a third is missing in action after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, U.S. Central Command announced Saturday.
The command said the deaths occurred Friday as American and partner forces worked to intercept the incoming barrage. Four other Americans were flown to Jordanian hospitals and have since been released, and personnel treated for minor injuries have gone back to work.
The deaths bring the number of U.S. service members killed in the conflict to 16. They are also the first American combat deaths since fighting resumed two weeks ago, when the president declared the ceasefire he negotiated to be finished and ordered the bombing to start again.
The Associated Press reported that these are the first U.S. deaths caused by direct Iranian fire since the opening days of the war. The Pentagon has not released the names of the dead.
What the military has confirmed
In a statement posted to social media, Central Command said the two Americans were killed in action while forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks, and that one service member remains missing. The command offered no further detail on the circumstances of the strike, the condition of the base, or the search for the missing American.
Here’s the X post:
Muwaffaq Salti is not a minor outpost. The base is operated by the Royal Jordanian Air Force and has hosted American fighter aircraft for roughly a decade, and it has been openly identified by Iranian officials as a priority target.
Weeks before the strike, a member of Iran’s parliament publicly urged Jordanians to seize the base and take American personnel captive once missiles hit it. The troops stationed there were left in the path of a threat that was announced in advance.
A regional war that keeps widening
The strike on Jordan was one piece of a much larger overnight assault. Jordan’s armed forces said they shot down 10 Iranian missiles early Saturday, while Kuwait reported attacks on oil sector facilities that caused heavy damage and injuries, and Qatar’s foreign ministry condemned the renewed Iranian attacks on Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait as a violation of international law.
Iranian missiles have also hit civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, including power generation and water desalination plants that millions of people depend on.
More than 50,000 American military personnel are now deployed across the region, according to Central Command, and Friday’s U.S. strikes hit dozens of Iranian targets using fighter jets, drones, and warships.
Every one of those troops is exposed to the retaliation that follows. That is the arithmetic the administration has refused to explain to the public.
Congress already voted to end this
The service members killed in Jordan were deployed in a war that both chambers of Congress formally voted to stop. In June, the Senate approved a war powers resolution directing the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities against Iran by a vote of 50 to 48, with four Republicans breaking with their party. The House had passed the same measure earlier in the month. It was the first time a war powers resolution cleared both chambers since the conflict began.
Trump ignored it. As legal scholars writing at Just Security noted this week, the president refused to withdraw forces after the vote, declared the ceasefire over, reinstated a naval blockade, and resumed bombing Iran.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, said Trump had promised maximum pressure and instead delivered chaos and cost to the American people, according to Al Jazeera.
Republican leaders in Congress have had months to force compliance with their own institution’s vote. They have used none of the tools available to them, no funding restrictions, no subpoenas, no binding legislation.
The GOP majority that describes itself as the party of the troops has chosen instead to let a president who lost the argument keep sending Americans into a war he cannot define or finish.
The public has never been with him
Voters figured this out long before Washington did. An Economist/YouGov survey released this week found 57 percent of voters call the war the wrong decision while 27 percent support it, a decline in support since April, with Trump’s overall approval at 37 percent against 59 percent disapproval.
Pew Research found in March that Americans broadly disapproved of the military action and of the president’s handling of the conflict, with roughly nine in ten Democrats opposed and even sizable gaps opening inside the Republican coalition, especially among younger Republicans.
Support for a war does not usually improve as the casualty lists grow, gas prices stay high, and the objective stays undefined. This administration has now spent five months betting that it will.
What accountability would look like
Two families will get a knock on the door this weekend, and a third is waiting to learn whether their service member is alive. They are owed more than a statement on social media and a round of thoughts and prayers from members of Congress who voted for the war powers resolution and then went quiet when it was defied.
Accountability starts with the questions nobody in the majority is asking out loud. What was the mission at Muwaffaq Salti, and why were American troops still concentrated at a base Iranian officials had publicly named as a target? What legal authority does the president claim for hostilities that Congress has explicitly declined to authorize? And what, precisely, would ending this war require, given that the ceasefire the president signed collapsed within weeks of the signing?
Until Republicans in Congress are willing to ask those questions of their own president, the answer to how this ends is simply more names the Pentagon has not yet released.
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