US preparing to send three more warships and thousands more troops to Middle East

Trump decries Nato allies as ‘cowards’ as strait of Hormuz impasse goes on


Comments come amid reports US is preparing to send three more warships and thousands more troops to Middle East


Peter Beaumont Senior international correspondent

Sat 21 Mar 2026 04.41 AEDT


Donald Trump has called Nato allies “cowards” for not wanting to “help open” the strait of Hormuz, with the US reportedly preparing to send three more warships and thousands more troops to the Middle East amid fears about the economic damage being caused by the war on Iran.

The US is reportedly considering plans to occupy or blockade Iran’s strategically crucial Kharg Island to pressure Tehran to reopen the strait.



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The reports from US media organisations emerged as Iran’s military threatened it would “hunt down” officials and military commanders from the United States and Israel wherever it could find them in the world including at world tourist destinations.

“We are watching your cowardly officials and commanders, pilots and wicked soldiers,” the Iranian armed forces spokesperson Abolfazl Shekarchi said, quoted by state TV. “From now on, based on the information we have on you, the promenades, resorts and tourist and entertainment centres in the world will not be safe.”

The reports that Washington is considering plans to occupy or blockade Kharg Island come despite earlier suggestions by Trump that he was not leaning towards putting “boots on the ground”.

Any attempt physically to occupy Kharg Island would probably entail high risks, exposing American forces there to Iranian drone and rocket fire in a geographically confined space.


Just 8 sq miles (20 sq km) in size and situated 16 miles (25km) from the Iranian city of Bushehr at the northern end of the Gulf, the Kharg Island terminal exports about 90% of Iranian oil and is supplied by pipes from nearby offshore fields.

Iran is heavily dependent on revenue from fossil fuels, and any attempt to seize such a key strategic asset would almost certainly be resisted.


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Writing on social media on Friday, Trump said: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!”

The Pentagon has already deployed the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, a rapid-response force of about 2,200 marines, to the Middle East. Military officials have not said what missions the marines being sent to the Middle East would be assigned to carry out.

Officials said that the USS Boxer, with the Marine Expeditionary Unit onboard, were also leaving the US about three weeks ahead of schedule. It is not clear what their mission is.


The Trump administration and its Israeli allies have given contradictory briefings about their intentions in the war. Descriptions of plans appear to change on an almost daily basis, reflected in statements by administration officials grappling with a war whose consequences have spiralled beyond their control.



Footage shows fire in Saudi Arabia's Yanbu refinery and Kuwait's Mina Abdullah refinery

A White House official said: “As President Trump said, he has no plans to send troops anywhere – but he wisely does not broadcast his military strategy to the media, and he retains all options as commander-in-chief. The United States military can take out Kharg Island at any time.”

The war showed no signs of de-escalating on Friday, with an Iranian drone attack hitting a Kuwait refinery and the US and Israel striking 16 Iranian cargo vessels in port towns on the Gulf.


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“Following the American-Zionist air attack, at least 16 cargo vessels belonging to citizens of the towns of Bandar Lengeh and Bandar Kong were completely burned in the fire,” a local official from the southern Hormozgan province said, quoted by the Tasnim news agency.

Heavy explosions also shook Dubai as air defences intercepted incoming rockets, as people were observing Eid al-Fitr, the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Separately, Israel attacked Syrian government positions, only days after US officials had anonymously suggested using the same Syrian forces to disarm Hezbollah in eastern Lebanon.

As violence continues across the region, from Tel Aviv and Haifa to the Caspian Sea, oil and gas prices are soaring and there are warnings of a spreading global economic shock that has been exacerbated by the increasingly incoherent messaging from Washington.

As a fourth week of war approached, Kuwait said two waves of Iranian drone strikes hit its Mina al-Ahmadi oil refinery, one of three oil refineries in the tiny, oil-rich country on the Gulf. The refinery, which can process about 730,000 barrels of oil a day, was already damaged on Thursday in another Iranian attack.


Iran stepped up its attacks on energy sites in Gulf Arab states after Israel bombed Iran’s massive South Pars offshore natural gas field in the Gulf on Wednesday.

Explosions could be heard in Jerusalem after the Israeli army warned of incoming Iranian missiles.

In a rare statement, Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who was reportedly wounded in the initial US-Israeli strikes, said Tehran’s enemies needed to have their “security” taken away.

Khamenei has not been seen since he succeeded his father, Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war. His remarks were part of a statement issued on his behalf and sent to the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, after Israel killed the intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, this week.

The renewed attacks followed an intense day during which Iran hit energy infrastructure around the region and launched more than a dozen missile salvoes at Israel after the attack on South Pars.


Large fire at South Pars gasfield after Israeli strike

South Pars, the Iranian part of the world’s largest gasfield, is located offshore in the Gulf and owned jointly with Qatar. With about 80% of power generated in Iran coming from natural gas, the attack posed a direct threat to the country’s electricity supplies.

Late on Thursday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the country would hold off on any further attacks on the gasfield at the request of Trump after the Iranian response sent oil prices soaring.

Netanyahu claimed Iran’s capability to produce ballistic missiles had been taken out, but the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards said in comments released on Friday that they were still in production.

“We are producing missiles even during war conditions, which is amazing, and there is no particular problem in stockpiling,” a spokesperson, Gen Ali Mohammad Naini – who was killed in an airstrike on Friday – was quoted as saying in a state-run newspaper.

“These people expect the war to continue until the enemy is completely exhausted,” Naini said. “This war must end when the shadow of war is lifted from the country.”

Father of killed US military member disputes Hegseth’s claim he said to ‘finish’ the job in Iran

Father of killed US military member disputes Hegseth’s claim he said to ‘finish’ the job in Iran


Defense secretary had said relatives of service members killed in refueling tanker crash told him ‘do not stop until the job is done’


Richard Luscombe

Fri 20 Mar 2026 23.50 AEDT


The father of a US military member killed in the Iran war has contradicted Pete Hegseth’s claim that bereaved families urged him to “finish” the job in the Middle East.

Hegseth, the defense secretary and a former weekend Fox News host, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday that he had spoken with relatives of all six service members killed in last week’s refueling tanker crash during a “dignified transfer” of their remains at Delaware’s Dover air force station the night before.



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“What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve, was the same from family after family. They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’” Hegseth said.

However, on Thursday night, Charles Simmons, the father of Tech Sgt Tyler Simmons, 28, from Ohio, said he had no such conversation.

“I can’t speak for the other families. When he spoke to me, that was not something we talked about,” he told NBC News.


Simmons said he had spoken separately with Hegseth and Donald Trump at the military base, and was grateful for the “warmth” he said both men had shown him.

But he recounted his meeting with the defense secretary differently from Hegseth’s own assertion.

“‘I understand there’s a lot of peril that goes into making decisions like this, and I just certainly hope the decisions being made are necessary,” Simmons said he told him.

Asked by NBC News if he said anything to the president or Hegseth about continuing the Iran war, which has so far seen the deaths of at least 13 members of the US military, Simmons was adamant that nothing like that had taken place.

“No, I didn’t say anything along those lines,” he said.

Charles Simmons is at least the third family member to voice unease about the Iran war, called Operation Epic Fury by the White House, or the Trump administration’s handling of it.

Stephan Douglas, cousin of Tyler Simmons, who was one of three Ohioans killed in the crash, said the conflict was unnecessary in a weekend interview with Columbus news station WCMH.


“This could have been prevented,” Douglas said. “We didn’t need to be in this war. This is uncalled for, and this is what we get.”

Bernice Smith, Simmons’ grandmother, was equally forthright. “Families are suffering right now,” she told WCMH. “Just to create a war because you want to create a war is not right.”

She said she encouraged people to register to vote if they wanted to see change.

Charles Simmons, meanwhile, told NBC that he did not “have all the data” to be able to establish if joint US-Israel bombing of Iran was justified.

“Who wants war? Sometimes it’s a necessity, and I just don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

In a statement to the network, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, insisted Hegseth’s conversations with the relatives were “private”, even though the Trump loyalist chose to make a feature of them during the Thursday press conference at which he also berated the media for covering the conflict in ways he did not like.

“Secretary Hegseth has the utmost respect for our Gold Star families and has pledged to honor the sacrifice of their loved ones,” Parnell said.

“While at Dover, the secretary spoke with each family of our fallen heroes and the details of each individual conversation remain private.”

Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told NBC that Trump had “grieved” with the families at Dover.

The president, she said, “shared his love and expressed the deep gratitude of our entire nation. These men and women gave up their lives in defense of our freedom, and President Trump will never forget their honorable service and selfless devotion. They represent the very best of America”.

Earlier this month Trump said he expected there will be more US military deaths before the conflict ends. “That’s the way it is,” he said in a video address to the nation.

‘Not our war’: Gulf states weigh up options as existential threat from Iran conflict grows

Arab states have so far only acted defensively, but there is growing fear war is entering new, more dangerous phase

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Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Dubai

Sat 21 Mar 2026 02.35 AEDT

The boom reverberated so loudly over Dubai marina that the windows of the surrounding skyscrapers and exclusive hotels gave a loud, disconcerting rattle.

“That sounded close, do you think a missile has hit something?” said a young man to his friend as they sipped coffees. Moments earlier, all mobile phones in the vicinity had sounded off with a shrill alarm, the new normal for those living in the Gulf, warning of missile and drone strikes in the area. Customers barely looked up.

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Another alert came moments later. The United Arab Emirates air defence systems and fighter jets had successfully intercepted “ballistic missiles … drones and loitering munitions” and all was safe in Dubai – for now. Footage from the previous night captured these systems in action, shooting down a drone in a fiery ball over Dubai’s convention centre, debris raining down like fireworks.

For 20 days, since the US and Israel began their bombing of Iran, the Gulf states have faced a relentless barrage of thousands of Iranian drones and missiles fired at their airports, hotels, ports, military bases, financial districts, datacentres and apartment blocks. Though it has represented an unfathomable attack on their sovereignty, security and economy – in Dubai, shattering an economically crucial illusion of safety and glamour – Gulf countries have so far only responded defensively, spending billions on interceptors that have managed to shoot down about 90% of Iran’s ballistics.

Footage shows fire in Saudi Arabia's Yanbu refinery and Kuwait's Mina Abdullah refinery

The overarching priority among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the political grouping of the Gulf countries – has been to avoid getting dragged into a war that is not theirs and they had tried furiously to stop.

But the past few days have been marked by growing fear that the Middle East war is entering a new, even more dangerous frontier; one that poses an existential threat to the Gulf countries – and pressure is mounting for them to retaliate. After Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gasfield, the first targeted attacks on its fossil fuel production since the war began, the Iranian regime vowed to show “zero restraint” in hitting back at energy infrastructure in the Gulf, its closest and easiest target.

Iran has been true to their word. In Qatar, almost a fifth of its liquefied natural gas export capacity was knocked out in a strike on its Ras Laffan gas complex. Authorities in Abu Dhabi in the UAE were forced to shut down operations at its Habshan gas facility and Bab field, calling the attacks a “dangerous escalation”. Kuwait’s state oil firm, KPC, said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery was hit by multiple drone attacks early on Friday, and Saudi Arabia said two of its oil refineries were targeted.

People sit by the water in Abu Dhabi in the UAE on Friday. Photograph: Ryan Lim/AFP/Getty Images

Meanwhile, Iran has continued to blockade the strait of Hormuz, through which most of the oil and gas produced in the Gulf is exported to the rest of the world.

“From the GCC perspective, this war has exposed a deeply troubling reality: all three parties involved are becoming increasingly irrational and detached from reality, each pursuing agendas that threaten to drag the region and the world into a very dark place,” said Ali Bakir, assistant professor of international affairs, security, and defence at Qatar University.

Though small, the petrostates of the Gulf are largely very rich and armed up to the hilt with advanced weapons and aircraft bought from the US. As a collective of six states, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, the GCC countries collectively have about 2,000 F-15 and F-18 military aircraft, while other western powers are queueing up to sell them more weapons. However, only Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent the UAE, have experience in large-scale air warfare.

Bakir said Iran was “playing with fire” as it escalated its attacks on energy infrastructure in the Gulf. “The pressure will mount for the GCC states to switch from a defensive to an offensive posture – especially as interceptor stocks run low,” he said.

Since Donald Trump began bombing Iran, Washington has been pressuring the GCC states to join “his side”. Yet, as Bakir and others emphasised, the long-term consequences of military intervention could still prove too costly for the Gulf states to justify, and risked becoming a dangerous geopolitical trap.

Not only would it legitimise a war the GCC had vehemently opposed, say analysts, but mistrust of Trump now runs deep among the Gulf leadership and there is a palpable fear that GCC striking back against Iran would be used by the US as a foil to withdraw and declare victory. “The GCC would be left with a bloody, open-ended war with Iran that would scar generations,” said Bakir.

Saudi Arabia has been among the most bullish in its response to Iran. Speaking on Thursday, the foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said Saudi Arabia “reserved the right to take military actions if deemed necessary”.

Prince Faisal bin Farhan (C) at meeting on regional developments in Riyadh. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock

Yet the comments were perceived by analysts more as an effort by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, still sore after attacks by the Houthis in Yemen, to project strength domestically. Few believe that Saudi Arabia would act alone in joining the war due to the risks to itself and of blowing the conflict open even wider. Meanwhile, a GCC agreement on any collective intervention appears elusive.

Gulf states also remain suspicious that the US is acting as a proxy for Israel, and its perceived attempts to gain hegemony over the Middle East. Writing in the Economist this week, the Omani minister Badr Albusaidi said the US had “lost control of its foreign policy”. One Gulf leader privately described Trump as Benjamin Netanyahu’s “poodle”.

“I doubt very much whether any Arab Gulf state would ever join the American-Israeli war because, as they have all said repeatedly: this is not our war,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “They believe it’s not even America’s war.”

Nonetheless, as Gerges emphasised, the Gulf found itself “in an impossible situation, between a rock and a very hard place”, balancing the need to defend their sovereignty while also protecting their regional security in the future.

The reality now facing Gulf leaders is that Iran’s regime remains entrenched, and the US and Israel’s assassination of the supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the head of the supreme national security council, Ali Larijani, and intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, as well as dozens of other defence and security officials, have so far all failed to bring about a surrender.

“Iran has crossed every red line,” he said. “But Arab Gulf states have to think about the future and what a postwar Iran might look like. An injured, enraged and a bleeding Iran could really threaten Gulf security and economic interest for the foreseeable future. A military offensive only risks antagonising them further.”

He also cast doubt on the likelihood of the Gulf states joining Trump’s call for warships to secure the strait of Hormuz, which geographically favours Iran and is notoriously hard to secure. “I doubt it very much, because they don’t have the naval resources, and sending navies into the strait of Hormuz is a trap for getting engaged in warfare,” said Gerges.

But as the hopes for an imminent diplomatic solution have faded, there has also been a hardening of opinion among Gulf leaders and thinkers on Iran, and a growing push for the US to continue with a total decimation of Iran’s military capabilities.

“The GCC countries understand that this regime is now extremely dangerous, even unhinged – we don’t even know who is really running the country,” said Muhanad Seloom, assistant professor of international politics and security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and a former Qatari diplomat.

“The US decapitating the Iranian regime for good is definitely the only option we have now. Otherwise, any time Iran is under pressure, they know they can hit the Gulf, they know they can blockade the strait of Hormuz, and that will be effective. That’s an existential threat for the GCC.”

Seloom was echoed by Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, associate professor of political science at the United Arab Emirates University. “America wanted this,” he said. “So let them finish it.”