US military strikes Iran after Apache helicopter downed off Oman

WASHINGTON — The US military launched strikes on targets in Iran on Tuesday after President Donald Trump blamed Tehran for downing a US Army Apache helicopter off the coast of Oman.

US CENTCOM late on Tuesday said it began striking positions in Iran at 5pm ET “in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter.”

CENTCOM called the strikes “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”

Trump said earlier Tuesday that Iran had shot down the helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz and vowed that the United States would respond.

“I have just been informed by our great military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote on social media Tuesday morning.

“There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack,” the president wrote.

The US Navy rescued the Apache helicopter’s two crew members off Oman’s coast on Monday, the Pentagon’s Middle East command confirmed Tuesday.

US Navy teams rescued the two crew members using an unmanned drone boat after a search assisted by US Air Force assets and elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, officials with US Central Command said.

“The drone picked them up and transported them to another location on the water where they were then hoisted up to a helicopter for further transport,” US CENTCOM spokesperson Tim Hawkins told Al-Monitor. The US military began fielding Corsair sea drones in the Middle East in March, he said.

The incident came just a day after Iran and Israel briefly resumed fighting with mutual strikes on Sunday despite public admonishment from the Trump White House, which is seeking a negotiated end to the war with Tehran.

The US military’s initial inquiry into yesterday’s crash of the Apache helicopter found that the aircraft was struck by an Iranian drone. It was not clear whether the Apache was the intended target.

In March, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the military would have “complete control” over Iran’s airspace “within days.”

Yet Iran has shot down at least 24 and as many as 30 US MQ-9 drones during the war, roughly a fifth of the Pentagon’s fleet, at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.

Iran has also previously shot down a US F-15 over its territory, leading to an extended rescue operation involving several hundred US troops deployed deep within Iran in April.

Hours prior to the shoot-down on Monday, an F/A-18 Super Hornet launched from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln fired a missile into the “engineering and steering spaces” of a commercial tanker, the M/T Marivex, in the Gulf of Oman after its crew attempted to breach the US blockade of Iran’s ports, CENTCOM said.

Twenty-four civilian crew members were later rescued from the disabled tanker vessel by Omani military helicopter crews.

It was not immediately clear whether the Iranian Shahed drone launch that US military officials believed brought down the Apache had any direct connection to the US airstrike on the tanker, which has been under US economic sanctions over its links to Iran’s oil exports abroad. 

The Marivex was the seventh commercial vessel disabled by the US military in the Gulf region since the US initiated its blockade of Iran’s ports on April 13. Iran has recently attempted to retaliate for such strikes by launching drones into the Strait of Hormuz, leading to additional US airstrikes on Iranian soil despite Pentagon officials saying the ceasefire remains in place.

US naval and air assets have been remotely advising the crews of commercial tanker and cargo vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf due to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Last month, Trump threatened to bomb Oman, a US-aligned Gulf state and erstwhile mediator in the conflict with Iran, if its government collaborates with Iran's stated plans to impose tolls on ships transiting Hormuz.