President Donald Trump is set to deliver a statement about Iran Wednesday at 11 a.m. ET, the White House said. He’ll speak from the White House Grand Foyer for a presidential address that will likely discuss the Iranian missile strikes that were targeted at two military bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops.
Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases Tuesday around 5:30 p.m. ET (1:20 a.m. local time Wednesday). While an official report on casualties has yet to be released, a U.S. official told CNN that there were no initial reports of any U.S. casualties from the attack. An assessment of the impact of the strikes is underway. Iraq’s joint military command said there were no casualties among Iraqi military forces.
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Iraq was reportedly warned before the attack in the form of an “official verbal message” from Iran. Iraq said the warning was reportedly passed to the U.S.
The missile attack was retaliation by Iran after its top general, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad last week. The rockets came just hours after Trump issued a threat to Iran: “If Iran does anything that it shouldn’t be doing, they will be suffering the consequences and very strongly,” he said.
On Twitter Tuesday night, Trump claimed that “all is well” after the missiles were launched.
Iran’s missile strikes were likely not an act designed to kill the most Americans possible, as the country’s leaders would have known that U.S. troops are normally asleep in the early hours of the morning. They would also have known the U.S. has a strong air defense that would likely have been on high alert, according to analysis from CNN.
The attacks make more sense as the execution of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s order to strike back openly against U.S. military targets in response to the killing of Soleimani.
Khamenei said that the strikes were a “slap in the face” to the U.S. and not sufficient retaliation for the killing of Soleimani last week. He said that Iran’s real revenge would be forcing the U.S. to leave the region. “They [America] were struck with such a slap last night,” he told a large crowd in the Iranian capital Tehran chanting the familiar “death to America” refrain, as reported by CBS News.
“Military action like this is not sufficient,” he continued. “What is important is ending the corrupting presence of America in the region.”
