The U.S.-Iran war erupted in a big way, Tuesday night, after U.S. Central Command announced that U.S. forces had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for an earlier Iranian attack on U.S. naval ships operating in the Gulf of Oman. Iran answered with waves of missiles fired at the Muwaffaq Salti and Prince Hassan air bases in Jordan and another attack on U.S. ships. Jordan claimed that its air defenses had shot down 18 Iranian missiles while two others landed in empty desert, reported AP. Videos posted on social media show some Iranian missiles penetrating the waves of Patriot interceptors fired at them as well as releasing cluster warheads. Nonetheless, Centcom said it had no information to offer about damage done by the Iranian missiles,

The Iranians had warned yesterday that if the U.S. attacked any more of their tankers, they would respond. In a post on social media published on Tuesday evening, a message said, “The aggressive US army has given Iranian oil tankers a warning to evacuate in order to attack them,” Major General Ali Abdollahi, the chief of the General Staff of Iranian Armed Forces, said, reported Mehr News. “So, I declare that any attack on Iranian oil tankers will result in the targeting of US bases in the region by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council’s Major General Mohsen Rezaei earlier said that Washington had received a clear warning from new missiles of the Islamic Republic. “In recent days, Washington has received a clear warning from Iran’s new missiles,” Rezaei wrote on his X account on Tuesday, reported IRNA. “Economic warfare will be met by a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter,” he added. “The operational posture toward US warships and bases has been fundamentally recalibrated,” he noted.