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The 13th consecutive night of American strikes against Iran ended just before 5 a.m. local time Friday, per U.S. Central Command — and within hours, the entire regional map lit up again. Explosions rocked the city of Irbil, capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, with at least seven blasts heard around 9:30 a.m. local time near the airport base hosting U.S. forces. An Associated Press journalist on the ground observed at minimum four plumes of black smoke rising from areas in or adjacent to the installation. No U.S. casualties have been confirmed in this latest round, though the pattern — strikes on Iran overnight, retaliatory blasts near American positions by morning — has become the grim clockwork of this war.
The strikes themselves hit a Revolutionary Guard naval base in northern Iran, according to Iranian semi-official outlets Fars and ISNA, as well as targets on Qeshm Island, the heavily armed storage hub in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran uses to stage drone boats capable of attacking commercial shipping. CENTCOM said the barrage was designed to “further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten civilian mariners and commercial vessels” transiting the strait — the same corridor through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas transited before this conflict. Iran’s state media acknowledged the strikes and reported four killed and nine wounded, figures that should be treated with considerable skepticism given Tehran’s well-established practice of minimizing publicly admitted losses.
The most consequential development of the overnight cycle, however, was diplomatic — or rather, its failure. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian received Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in Tehran on Thursday. Al-Zaidi arrived carrying a Trump administration ceasefire proposal, having made the rounds between Washington and Tehran as a would-be mediator with ties to both capitals. The meeting also included Iran’s top negotiator Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to The New York Times. The result was a flat rejection.
Iranian officials told the Times they were not interested in a “temporary deal” — and the specific sticking point was the one that has defined this entire conflict from day one: who controls the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran made clear it will not accept any arrangement that leaves Washington in effective control of the waterway, which Iran regards as existential leverage. The U.S. proposal’s terms remain murky, but Iranian officials described it as failing to address that core question. Al-Zaidi, for his part, publicly promised he would not allow Iraqi territory to be used as a staging ground against Iran — a concession that will register in Washington as a significant erosion of the assumption that Iraq could be kept in the American column.
As if to underscore the futility of diplomacy, Bahrain activated its warning sirens twice on Friday morning, alerting residents to shelter from detected incoming fire. Gulf states have been struck repeatedly over the past week. The Houthis’ attack on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea — which pushed Brent crude past $100 a barrel on Thursday — appears to have opened a second front in this conflict, one that the Saudi kingdom is not in a position to ignore and that threatens to pull Riyadh into a fight it has spent years trying to avoid. There is no ceasefire coming. There is no off-ramp in sight. Night fourteen will arrive on schedule.
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