Azraq airbase

Azraq air base was struck for a third time in six weeks on 17-18 July 2026, when Iranian missiles and drones hit the site. Remains were recovered from the base in the aftermath. The Pentagon later confirmed the strike had killed two named US soldiers. It had already come under Iranian missile fire on 9 July 2026, when Iran fired ten Ballistic Missiles at the site; Jordan's air defences intercepted eight, with no casualties reported. The strike made Jordan the first non-Gulf, no-coastline country drawn into Iran's wider retaliation, hit the same day as Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. It followed an earlier IRGC missile strike on 10 June 2026, when the IRGC claimed to have destroyed an F-35 hangar there; Jordan said all five missiles fired that day were intercepted, and the two accounts have never been independently reconciled.

Formally Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, the site sits in Zarqa Governorate, eastern Jordan, and has hosted the Royal Jordanian Air Force's 1st, 2nd and 6th Fighter Squadrons flying F-16 Fighting Falcons since 1997. Under the anti-ISIS Operation Inherent Resolve framework the US stationed roughly 3,800 personnel and the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing there, backed by a $265 million Pentagon expansion contract awarded in 2022. In January 2026 the US reinforced the base with 24 F-15E Strike Eagles from RAF Lakenheath's 494th Fighter Squadron, the first wave of a build-up that later added F-35As and A-10s ahead of the June escalation with Iran. The base takes its name from the adjacent town of Azraq, a small desert settlement known outside the war for the Azraq Wetland Reserve, one of Jordan's few natural oases; the town itself has not been struck.

Being struck three times within six weeks confirms Azraq air base as a durable, repeatable target rather than a one-off gesture: Jordan is now the widest-reach country in Iran's basing-partner target set, sitting outside the Gulf and without a coastline, yet still drawn into the same retaliation wave as Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. The base's position gives it proximity to both Iraqi air space and Israel, making it a logistics and contingency hub central to the wider regional architecture that Iran's campaign is now testing directly.