US accused of hitting a wedding in Iran

**Nick Mars** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Mars, and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 2nd of September, these are our main stories. Iran says US forces have hit a wedding in the South, killing four people and injuring dozens more, as the aerial campaign ramps up again, following a month-long lull. 5,000 US servicemen will shortly step on land for the first time in nine months, as their aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, docks in Thailand. Our climate editor on how many saw the early signs lead into Nepal's devastating floods.
Also in this podcast, President Putin accuses Germany of planting evidence to blame Russia for an attempted drone attack last month at Leipzig Airport and...

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Last week, Washington said it would begin a campaign of sanctions against some of Iran's main trading partners. It was an attempt to bring Tehran to the negotiating table at a time when there was a lull in the military action between the two sides. Now just a week later, with the new sanctions still largely at the planning stage, military strikes have restarted and are escalating. On Sunday, there was a US attack on Iranian rocket launchers in the Strait of Hormuz. It triggered a round of Iranian retaliations at US air bases in Jordan. Now the US has carried out a larger wave of strikes at targets along the Gulf Coast. The Iranian Red Crescent says one hit a house where a wedding was taking place, killing four people. In response to that, the US military said it does not target civilians.
White House spokesman Kush Desai gave this assessment of the overall military strategy.

**Kush Desai** (2:03)
President Trump has made it very clear that Iran should stand out and should not provoke the United States or retaliate because of what we met with the retaliation of orders of magnitude stronger. So when you look at the overall situation here, Iran's Navy has been wiped out, its air force has been wiped out, its air defenses have been wiped out. The Iranian economy is in disarray. You've had Iranian political leaders themselves admit that they're dealing with inflation, with supply shortages, even with petroleum, which is interesting for a country that has some of the largest oil reserves in the world. And so when you just look at the fact that its industrial base has also been wiped out, Iran's position is just so much weaker. And the United States maintains the upper hand here as it has from the beginning of this conflict.

**Nick Mars** (2:42)
For more on the latest US attacks, we spoke to our State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman.

**Tom Bateman** (2:47)
There's been several different locations targeted along that southern coastline of Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. One of the what appears to be most serious incidents that we've been talking about, where you have local officials in the Red Crescent in Cedic saying that a wedding ceremony was struck by shrapnel. It appears to be the Americans having targeted a telecoms tower.
Now what those local officials are saying is that at least four people were killed, including a child and up to 50 people wounded from that. Now we put those reports to the White House and the Pentagon. We've had no official word from them, although one military official is saying that they are aware of the reports, which originated from Iranian state media and says the US military never targets civilians. It may be part of the reason why we had very belligerent language from the Iranians saying that they were going to respond forcefully to these American strikes. And that was then followed by what appears to be missile fire from Iran, once again, over towards Jordan, where there are US military bases.

**Nick Mars** (3:47)
It seems that a pattern is emerging. The US strikes, it warns Iran not to, Tehran ignores that, carries out strikes, etc, etc. This is a strategy that perhaps is not working for Donald Trump.

**Tom Bateman** (3:58)
It's not working, either in a military sense or in a political and strategic sense, because remember six months ago, this all began with the stated intention by Mr. Trump that he would destroy and prevent Iran ever developing a nuclear program. But the problem that Mr. Trump has is the Iranians still have enough fighting power to create enough of a problem for the Americans that they have not been able either to achieve that wider objective about the nuclear program, nor a problem they didn't have at the start, which is control of the Strait of Hormuz. And the calculation on the Iranian side is they clearly believe that the Americans won't have the staying power because of how stretched the American military has become. And in their view, it is enough to keep using these insurgency tactics against ships, firing your drone or rocket-threatening shipping. And that then, by trying to prevent that, the Americans are bombing the Iranians, and you then leads to these cycles of escalation which are now seeing fatalities.