U.S. Central Command said on Thursday a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft, which military officials said was part of the American war on Iran, had crashed in Iraq.
In a statement, Central Command said that an incident involving two aircraft “occurred in friendly airspace” and that one went down, while the other landed safely. Rescue efforts were underway, the statement said. The KC-135 has at least a three-person crew.
The KC-135s are among the most heavily used aircraft in the Air Force’s arsenal and among its oldest airframes. The planes are used to refuel all kinds of aircraft, including fighter jets, surveillance planes and cargo aircraft.
Air-to-air refueling missions are performed regularly by Air Force pilots, and mishaps are rare. But the maneuver is still challenging, especially in bad weather or high winds. Investigators suspect a midair collision may have caused the crash, but details are still murky, Air Force officials said. The inquiry is still going on, along with a search-and -rescue effort to locate the downed crew.
The western Iraq region where the plane crashed consists mostly of isolated desert.
Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil, according to U.S. officials, a move that could exacerbate the disruptions to global shipping and further rattle the global economy.
The U.S. military said that while it had destroyed larger Iranian naval vessels, Iran began using smaller boats to lay mines on Thursday, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
Earlier on Thursday, Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, had vowed to keep blocking the strait. Striking a defiant tone in his first public statement since succeeding his father, who was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28, he promised to avenge “the blood of the martyrs.”
Oil prices have surged despite pledges by the United States and other major economies to calm markets by releasing emergency reserves.
The Israeli military launched a new wave of strikes on central Beirut and Tehran on Thursday evening, sending thick plumes of smoke into the air a few hundred yards from the Lebanese government’s headquarters and setting off air-defense systems across the Iranian capital.
In a news conference on Thursday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who earlier urged the Iranian people to rise up against their government, appeared to scale back the potential for regime change.
“We are creating the optimal conditions for the overthrow of the regime, but I can’t say for certain that the Iranian people would topple it,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “A regime is toppled from within.”
He added that even if the regime is not toppled, Iran will be “much weaker.”
Israel’s heavy bombardment of Beirut, in an area near hip bars, high-end restaurants and high schools, crystallized fears that the war in Lebanon was expanding beyond the southern outskirts of the capital, where Hezbollah has long held sway. It also deepened the sense that corners of the city once considered comparatively safe were no longer off-limits.
For Lebanese displaced by Israel’s evacuation orders and relentless bombardment, the strikes in Beirut spread fear and uncertainty. “I don’t feel like there is a safe place for us to go anymore,” said Hussain Mansour, 32, standing by the site of a strike in the seaside community Ramlet al-Baida. “Where? Where should we go?”
Where ships have been struck since March 11
Iraq
Kuwait
Two tankers
attacked
Iran
Strait of
Hormuz
Persian Gulf
Cargo ship
attacked
Qatar
Gulf of Oman
Saudi
Arabia
U.A.E.
OMAN
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