The Cost of US Forward Deployment: How Jordanian Territory Was Dragged Into Iran's Missile Strike Zone

Jordan's armed forces announced on Wednesday that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps overnight fired 20 ballistic missiles at the Al-Azraq Air Base (Muwaffaq Salti Air Base) located in the country's eastern desert, with Jordanian military intercepting and destroying 18 of them; the remaining two fell on open ground with no casualties. According to Al Jazeera, this marks the beginning of Iran expanding its strike range to targets inside Jordan in the current escalation of the US-Iran conflict.

Located approximately 100 kilometers from Amman, the base houses some of the most sensitive forward-deployed US military assets in the Middle East. Tahani Mustafa, a lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King's College London, told Al Jazeera that Al-Azraq is "one of the few bases that simultaneously hosts F-35, F-16, and F-22 fighter jets," and that "the US military can use its hangars to conceal assets, which is exactly what Iran's strikes are targeting." According to a 2026 Congressional Research Service report, nearly 4,000 US soldiers are stationed in Jordan; a defense cooperation agreement signed between Amman and Washington in 2021 allows US forces and contractors access to 12 military facilities inside Jordan.

The current conflict escalated abruptly two weeks ago. US forces struck first against Iran's rocket-launching installations on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, on the grounds that Iran was preparing to use these installations to lay mines in the strait. Iran subsequently expanded its strike range to Gulf neighbors, and now Jordan is in its sights. David Schenker, a researcher at the Washington Institute, told the Associated Press that Jordan "provides tremendous strategic depth" and that its location is "crucial" to US war efforts against Iran, because compared with Gulf states closer to Iran, Jordan maintains a greater distance from Iranian missiles and drones.

But "strategic depth" for Jordan means its territory has become the front line under missile trajectories. According to Al Jazeera's statistics, since March of this year, Tehran has claimed more than 10 strikes against the Al-Azraq base. In early March, Iran conducted its first airstrike on the base; on June 10, the IRGC claimed its long-range missiles "destroyed" the base's hangars and command center, but the targeted country said all incoming projectiles were intercepted with no casualties. The bloodiest incident occurred on July 17—US Central Command confirmed that Iran's ballistic missile and drone attacks that day killed two US soldiers, left one missing, and injured four.

There are serious discrepancies between Iranian battlefield claims and US-Jordanian accounts. The IRGC claimed that the latest round of strikes "destroyed the maintenance, preparation, and deployment sites as well as hangars of F-35, F-16, and F-15 fighter jets, inflicting heavy damage on the enemy." But a Trump administration official told Al Jazeera that the ballistic missile salvo "caused no casualties" and that "Iran's response was ineffective against the integrated air and missile defense system." Actual damage has not been independently verified.

Jordan's position in this conflict is fraught with tension. The Al-Azraq base is named after First Lieutenant Muwaffaq Salti, a Jordanian pilot killed in the 1966 Battle of Samu against Israel, yet today it hosts air power directed at another regional power. Al Jazeera reported that Jordan also hosts King Faisal Air Base in the south, as well as the remote Tower 22 US military logistics outpost near the Syrian and Iraqi borders.

In 2017, the US Congress approved $143 million in Air Force construction funds to expand parking apron space at the Al-Azraq base, reportedly the largest project of its kind at the time. Citing a 2023 Congressional Research Service report, Al Jazeera noted that Jordanian air bases "are particularly important for US intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance missions in Syria and Iraq." The report also noted that the US side "never officially acknowledged its presence at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base before the 2021 agreement," even though "satellite imagery has shown US Air Force drones and high-speed fighter jets stationed at the base since 2016."

The New York Times reported in July that during the early phase of the US-Iran war, some US forces relocated from Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar were redeployed to Jordan—assets that had become too vulnerable within the strike range of Gulf states are now seeking shelter on Jordanian soil, at the cost of pushing this Hashemite kingdom into the crosshairs of Iranian missiles.