The United States military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers overnight, and Tehran answered within hours by firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at an American-linked air base in Jordan, plunging the six-month-old US-Iran war into its sharpest escalation yet and sending oil prices surging past $100 a barrel.

US Central Command said American forces struck four tankers in the Gulf of Oman and a fifth near Iran's Kharg Island, the terminal that handles roughly 90 percent of the country's crude exports, after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attempted to strike a US Navy warship over the weekend. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said bluntly that "for every time they do that or try to do that, they're going to lose tankers."

Iran's response came fast. State media said the IRGC fired 20 ballistic missiles at the Al Azraq air base in Jordan, of which Jordanian air defenses intercepted 18; the remaining two landed in unpopulated areas, according to Al Jazeera's reporting. Jordanian officials reported no casualties. Iran also targeted roughly ten commercial vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, and a cargo ship was struck about 52 kilometers southeast of al-Faw, Iraq.

A war that keeps widening

The exchange is the latest turn in a conflict that has run for more than six months, pitting Iran against a US-Israeli campaign that has largely spared Kharg Island's oil facilities until now while striking military and weapons infrastructure. Iran has responded by trying to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply passes daily, and has now warned it will go after tanker crews directly. "Oil tanker crews in the areas around Kuwait and Bahrain ... will be targeted," the IRGC said in a statement carried by Iranian media.

"Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they're going to lose tankers." — Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Iran's Foreign Ministry, for its part, denounced the American strikes as violations of the UN Charter and accused Washington of war crimes. CENTCOM says no American personnel were harmed in the weekend attack that triggered the latest round, and that the targeted warship evaded the Iranian strike and continued patrolling.

The economic fallout was immediate. Benchmark crude prices jumped past the $100-a-barrel mark in early Wednesday trading, a level not regularly seen in years, as traders priced in the risk of a wider disruption to Gulf shipping. Kharg Island alone can load ten supertankers simultaneously and moves close to seven million barrels of oil a day, making any sustained threat to it a direct hit on global energy markets, according to analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Washington has paired the military strikes with fresh economic pressure, with the Trump administration imposing additional sanctions this week on Iran's aviation sector, targeting both commercial and private airlines. The moves are aimed at squeezing Tehran's ability to move people and supplies as the naval standoff over Hormuz drags on.

What happens next largely hinges on whether Iran follows through on its threat to strike merchant crews rather than just vessels and infrastructure — a step that would mark a significant and dangerous widening of a war that has so far mostly avoided direct large-scale civilian casualties at sea. Gulf shipping insurers and regional governments, including Jordan and Iraq, are bracing for further strikes as both sides show no sign of stepping back.