President Trump has claimed that Iran’s air defences are “gone” as the US continues bombing raids across the country.
Having already eliminated Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, on Saturday, Washington is pushing ahead with Operation Epic Fury.
While the president has previously spoken openly about the prospect of regime change, focus appears to have shifted to destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.
Indeed, on Tuesday night, US missiles struck the Natanz nuclear facility, which the regime has used to enrich a sizeable stock of uranium.
Iranian state media reported that the site had been hit, but said that no radiation leaks had been detected.
Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Trump told reporters: “We've had a very powerful impact. Virtually everything they had has been knocked out now. Their missile count is going down.”
Admiral Brad Cooper, head of the US Central Command (Centcom), the command responsible for operations in the Middle East, echoed Trump’s claims, saying that Iran’s air defences had been “severely degraded”.
He also claimed that 17 Iranian warships had been destroyed and that there were now no regime ships operational in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping lane which the regime has effectively closed with threats of attacks on commercial vessels.
"In simple terms, we’re focused on shooting all the things that can shoot at us,” Cooper added.
Such is the apparent neutralisation of Iranian air defences that US forces are now conducting overt bombing raids on the capital, Tehran.
While the initial wave of strikes was carried out over the weekend by B-2 stealth bombers, which are invisible to conventional radar devices, Centcom deployed the easily trackable B-52s for the first time in the war on Monday.
Dogfights have also broken out over the city, with an Israeli F-35 fighter, supplied by the US and modified by the IDF, shooting down an Iranian jet on Wednesday morning.
The air-to-air battle marked the first time an F-35 has downed a manned aircraft and the first time in 40 years the Israeli Air Force has engaged in combat with such a fighter.
In total, Centcom estimates that it has now struck over 2,000 targets in Iran.
Additionally, the IDF has conducted dozens of strikes as part of Operation Roaring Lion and is also hitting Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including Beirut, after the terror group launched rocket attacks on northern Israel.
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