US strikes strategic island as Iran war enters its third week

A black and white aerial image of a street.

Targets on Iran’s Kharg Island are struck on Friday, March 13, 2026, in this screen grab from a video posted on X by U.S. Central Command. (U.S. Central Command via X)

U.S. forces struck more than 90 targets on Iran’s Kharg Island on Friday, U.S. Central Command said in a post on X on Saturday, the 15th day of the conflict.

The small coral island about 21 miles off Iran’s coast is the primary terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass.

The post, which included a video montage, noted that strikes hit military targets, like “naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers,” while also “preserving the oil infrastructure.”

A Friday post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social similarly said “for reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” but that the decision would be reconsidered if transit through the Strait of Hormuz continues to be threatened.

That was followed by a Saturday morning post in which the president said “many countries” would be sending warships in conjunction with the U.S. “to keep the Strait open and safe.”

His post did not offer further details. The president also said “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others” affected by the strait’s effective closure would send ships. He reiterated the call in another post Saturday afternoon that said countries receiving oil through the strait “must take care of that passage.”

Meanwhile, Iran urged people Saturday to evacuate the Middle East’s busiest port and two others in the United Arab Emirates, openly threatening a neighboring country’s non-U.S. assets for the first time as its war with the U.S. and Israel entered a third week.

Tehran said the U.S. had used “ports, docks and hideouts” in the UAE to launch strikes on Kharg Island, home to the main terminal handling Iran’s oil exports, without providing evidence. It urged people to leave areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering. U.S. Central Command gave no response to the claim that the U.S. had launched strikes from the UAE.

Hours later, there was no sign of an attack on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port — the Mideast’s busiest — or the Khalifa port in Abu Dhabi. But debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hitting an oil facility sparked a fire at the third port, in Fujairah.

A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Saturday. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The embassy complex, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic facilities in the world, has been repeatedly targeted by rockets and drones fired by Iran-aligned militias.