The Levant Files

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War Enters 10th Night as US, Iran Widen Target Lists Across Gulf

The war between the United States and Iran entered its tenth consecutive night of American strikes on Tuesday, with both sides expanding the geographic scope of their attacks beyond the Strait of Hormuz into a wider arc spanning the Gulf, Jordan and Iraq. US Central Command confirmed it carried out a new wave of strikes against Iran beginning at 4 p.m. ET on Monday, targeting Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, and missile and drone launch sites intended to reduce Iran's ability to attack commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Explosions were reported across nine locations — Abdanan, Bandar Abbas, Bandar Lengeh, Bushehr, Chabahar, Qeshm Island, Sirik, Shiraz and Konarak — marking a notable inland extension of the campaign, with Shiraz among the newly hit cities. CENTCOM said the naval blockade imposed on Iranian ports since mid-July had already redirected seven commercial vessels and disabled one, while noting th...

Iranian Media Pair Battlefield Defiance With Cautious Opening For Diplomacy

Coverage on Monday stressed Iran’s ability to impose regional and economic costs on Washington, while exposing a growing debate over when—and under what conditions—Tehran should return to negotiations. Iranian media presented a carefully balanced message on Monday as the war with the United States entered another dangerous phase: Iran remains capable of retaliating across the region and disrupting global energy routes, but diplomacy has not been abandoned. Reports from state agencies, conservative outlets and more pragmatic publications were dominated by overnight US strikes and Iranian attacks on American military facilities. However, alongside the battlefield coverage, several outlets gave prominent space to ceasefire proposals and arguments in favour of negotiations. The immediate focus was the ninth consecutive night of US operations. Iranian media reported attacks in several parts of the country, including a military site southwest of Tabriz, where local authorities said one perso...

Ansar Allah Declares Saudi Maritime Blockade, Putting Red Sea Trade at Risk

Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement announced on Monday that it was imposing an immediate maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, raising the prospect of renewed attacks on commercial vessels and opening another potential front in the widening regional conflict. Military spokesman Yahya Saree said the “full” embargo on Saudi maritime navigation had entered into force under the principle of “blockade for blockade.” He accused Riyadh of maintaining restrictions on Yemen’s ports and airports, seizing the country’s resources and subjecting Yemenis to a land, sea and air blockade for almost 12 years. Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthis, said its forces were prepared for “all options and possible scenarios” and warned that any comprehensive Saudi escalation would be met with a severe response. The movement did not, however, explain whether the embargo applies only to Saudi-owned or Saudi-flagged vessels, or to every ship calling at Saudi ports. It also gave no geographical limits or enforcement p...

Iran's Kayhan Daily Publishes Editorial Celebrating Bounty on Trump, Predicting His "Death"

Kayhan, the Tehran newspaper that functions as the editorial mouthpiece of Iran's Supreme Leader's office, published a piece framing US President Donald Trump as a marked man whose assassination is both inevitable and religiously sanctioned — the latest and most explicit escalation in a weeks-long campaign of Iranian and Iran-aligned media calling openly for his killing. The piece, bylined to a "Kayhan Int'l Staff Writer" and posted to the paper's English-language site, does not merely report on recent bounty announcements targeting Trump. It celebrates them, casts the president's death as a foregone religious certainty, and extends the pool of prospective killers to nationals of multiple countries and ethnic groups, describing the "promise of paradise" for anyone who carries out the act. The Levant Files is not reproducing the language, which functions less as commentary than as an incitement to violence against a head of state. An outlet that ...

Iranian Media Cast US Losses As Proof Of Deterrence Amid Fears Of Wider War

Iranian media placed reported American military losses in Jordan at the centre of their coverage of the confrontation with the United States over the past 24 hours, presenting them as evidence that Tehran can still impose significant costs on Washington despite continuing US air strikes. The prevailing message across state-aligned and conservative outlets was that Iran had restored a measure of deterrence by demonstrating its ability to hit US forces outside the immediate Gulf theatre. Centrist and opposition-oriented publications, however, gave greater attention to the risks of escalation, disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and the growing effects of the fighting on civilians in southern Iran. Mahr News⁠ prominently reported a US Central Command statement saying that two American service members had been killed in Jordan, while one remained missing and four others were wounded. The agency framed CENTCOM’s announcement as an acknowledgment that Iranian missile and drone attacks had inf...

Jordan's Second Front: How Iran Is Fighting a War for Amman's Streets, Not Just Its Airspace

While the headlines of the past 24 hours have fixed on the deaths of two US service members in a July 17 Iranian ballistic missile and drone strike on Jordan's Muwaffaq Salti Air Base — the first confirmed American combat fatalities of this phase of the war, and the trigger for Tehran's declaration that the June memorandum of understanding is now "effectively suspended" — a quieter and arguably more consequential contest has been unfolding in parallel. It is a fight over the loyalty of the Jordanian public itself. CENTCOM confirmed that two American troops were killed and a third remains missing after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck US positions in Jordan on the night of July 17, with four additional personnel medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals before being discharged. The US responded with an eighth consecutive night of strikes on Iranian targets, which it said were intended in part to "swiftly punish" the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Co...

Iran Declares Islamabad MoU Void as Gulf War Escalates, US Reinforces Israel with New Tanker Fleet

Iran announced on Saturday that it has suspended all commitments under the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding with the United States, marking the formal collapse of the fragile arrangement that had sought to end hostilities between Washington and Tehran after last month's war. The declaration came as Iranian forces struck US-linked infrastructure across Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan for a second consecutive day, and as Washington moved additional aerial refueling assets into Israel amid reports that President Donald Trump is weighing a broader offensive against Iranian territory. Tehran declares the MoU dead Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Tehran considers itself no longer bound by the 14-point Islamabad MoU, arguing that the United States had already dismantled the agreement through repeated violations. "America not only violated the memorandum of understanding but also dismantled it," Gharibabadi said, according to Iran's sta...

Nobody Claims It, Nobody Names It: The Silent War Being Fought Over Autonomous Kurdistan

Nearly every night this week, air-defense batteries over Erbil have lit up the sky intercepting drones that no one will own. On 17 July alone, Kurdish counter-terrorism forces reported downing 16 explosive-laden drones over the Kurdistan Region's capital — the fourth such swarm in three days — while a separate strike hit an ammunition depot in Sulaimaniyah province and another wave targeted a camp belonging to the exiled Iranian-Kurdish opposition party Komala, killing at least eight of its members, according to the group. Four drones were shot down near the US consulate in Erbil the same evening. In the space of 48 hours, at least six distinct attacks landed across Iraqi Kurdistan. International coverage has folded all of this into the broader US-Iran war as a single undifferentiated category: "Iran attacks Iraqi Kurdistan." That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that obscures the story's real center of gravity. Because as Iraqi and Kurdish security...

The Gulf's Quiet War: How Water Became the Battlefield No One Is Watching

Every night for the past week, the world's attention has followed the same script: American strikes on Iranian coastal and transport targets, Iranian missiles fired back at Gulf states, oil prices twitching, the Strait of Hormuz named again and again as the conflict's central prize. But buried inside the hourly bulletins of the past 24 hours is a story that deserves to be read on its own terms, not as a bullet point in a live blog — because it may prove more dangerous, in the long run, than any single round of missiles. Water has become a battlefield. And both sides are now fighting on it, in the open, without pretense. What happened in the last 12 hours In the early hours of Saturday, 18 July, U.S. Central Command confirmed a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iranian territory, hitting what it described as surveillance sites, military logistics, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities along the coast facing the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state television rep...