Pompeo says attacks on facilities “act of war”

Tension between the United States and Iran ratcheted up Wednesday as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decried the weekend attacks on the Saudi oil industry as an “act of war” and President Donald Trump ordered a substantial increase in sanctions against the government in Tehran.

With the Trump administration linking the sanctions step to the airstrikes, Iran warned the United States that it would retaliate for any attack against it, Iranian news agencies reported Wednesday. An attack on Iranian territory would be met with a “rapid and crushing” response, the Fars News Agency said.

Five days after the strikes on Saudi oil facilities, for which a Yemeni rebel group asserted responsibility, U.S. and Saudi officials all but explicitly accused Iran of launching the attacks from its territory. They presented physical evidence and other details that they said bolstered their assertions of direct Iranian culpability.

The heightened tension comes after several months of escalating threats in the Persian Gulf, as Iran has sought to intensify pressure on the United States and its allies in response, officials in Tehran say, to the increasingly severe U.S. sanctions crippling the Iranian economy.

The initial claim of responsibility for the weekend attacks by the Iranianallied rebels, known as the Houthis, “doesn’t change the fingerprints of the ayatollah as having put at risk the global energy supply,” Pompeo told reporters, in an apparent reference to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, while traveling to Saudi Arabia. His comments set the tone for a day of developments that raised temperatures across the Persian Gulf.

The attacks on the installations in eastern Saudi Arabia temporarily cut the kingdom’s oil production in half and caused prices to jump worldwide.

The U.S. and Saudi governments have yet to provide solid evidence of where the attacks originated. In the absence of such proof, Iran has pushed back forcefully against the accusations.

The day’s first salvo came from Trump, who wrote in a tweet that he had “just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!”

Trump later told reporters traveling with him in California that “very significant” sanctions would be announced “over the next 48 hours.”

Trump warned of “a very powerful attack” against Iran on Wednesday afternoon as he toured the U.S.Mexico border in Otay Mesa, Calif., near San Diego. He said his plans are “very fluid” and that “a lot of things can happen — rough things and not-sorough things.”

Trump told reporters he was being judicious in evaluating whether to respond with military force.

“We are doing it the right way,” he said. “We’re doing it the smart way . ... We will see what we will see.”

But, the president added, “One call and we can go in.”

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have since 2015 been battling a Saudi-led coalition that backs the internationally recognized government in Yemen. The conflict has caused the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis.

The Houthis repeatedly have attacked the kingdom, using ground troops, drones and ballistic missiles, some reaching deep into Saudi territory. They have called the strikes a response to the Saudi-led coalition’s years-long air war over Yemen, which has included thousands of airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians, according to human rights groups.

U.S. officials, however, have cast doubt on the rebels’ involvement in Saturday’s attacks.

Pompeo, who met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday night, told reporters shortly before arriving in Saudi Arabia that the intelligence community had “high confidence” that the weapons systems used in the attacks were not in the Houthis’ arsenal. The attacks had also not come from the south, where the Houthis control territory, he added, citing “flight patterns” that would have explained the location of impact points at the Saudi oil facilities.

“This was an Iranian attack,” he said. “It didn’t come from the Houthis.”

The United States also did not have any evidence the attacks came from Iraq, he added, but he did not specify which country had been the launchpad.

A senior administration official familiar with Pompeo’s visit said the U.S. team examined photos and debris, including some intact weaponry.

“That equipment is not used in the Houthi arsenal, including UAVs and the light cruise missiles used,” the official said.

A Saudi military spokesman in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, also presented what he said was evidence of Iran’s fingerprints on the strikes, including remnants of drones and cruise missiles that he said were used in the attacks and were Iranian-made.

The spokesman, Col. Turki al-Malki, said 18 unmanned aerial vehicles had attacked an oil processing plant in Abqaiq in eastern Saudi Arabia. Seven cruise missiles, he added, were fired at a facility in Khurais, the site of one of the kingdom’s largest oil fields. Three of the cruise missiles fell short, he said.

The attacks were “unquestionably sponsored by Iran” and had not originated in Yemen, Malki said, basing the assertion in part on the range of the weapons recovered, which he said could not have traveled from Houthi-held territory. But Saudi officials had not determined from where the weapons were launched.

Malki did not say how the launch site would be identified but said there would be “accountability” when it was.