SerpApi.Org
Just before dawn, the bridges began to fall.
One by one, American missiles reduced them to crumpled concrete, strewn across river beds and gorges.
For a week, the US had bombed southern cities, cranking up the pressure on Iran to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz.
But now the US military was going for the transport arteries connecting key southern ports to the rest of the country.
The bombings leave Bandar Abbas, a city of 500,000 people where roughly half the country’s trade comes ashore, almost completely isolated.
By Friday morning, the roads linking the city to the rest of the nation lay broken, the railway severed, and a port that helps feed some 90 million people all but cut off from the country it sustains.
Bandar Abbas is also home to Iran’s main naval base, which is critical to the regime’s ability to control the Strait of Hormuz.
Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official, said the Trump administration was becoming increasingly convinced that cutting off the port city was the key to reopening the vital sea passage.
“There’s a growing sense, a growing conclusion inside the Pentagon, that whether the United States wants to do this or not, they really have no choice if they want this to end,” he said.
Bandar Abbas is the city that keeps Iran alive.
Its Shahid Rajaee port is the country’s “golden gateway”, handling close to half of all Iranian trade, including industrial machinery, construction materials, agricultural supplies, and consumer goods that stock the markets and feed the factories, along with steel, fertilisers, and petroleum products that move across its docks.
The bombs fell along the corridors running west and north of the city.
Local authorities said the Gariveh bridge, on the Bandar Abbas–Khamir–Lar route, was among five damaged overnight, along with a bridge past Latidan village, two on the Kahorestan route towards Lar, a half-finished bridge on the Bandar Khamir–Keshar road, and the crossing at Maro village in Khamir district.
Where traffic moved at all, it slowed to a crawl.
Authorities pleaded with residents to stay off the roads and keep them open for rescue crews, and to follow only official news while emergency workers started the rebuild.
The railway was also targeted, forcing passengers off their trains and on to intercity bus replacements.
Officials reported that the Bandar Abbas rail junction, about six miles west of the city, where the track branches towards passenger routes, freight yards and the Shahid Rajaee port itself, had been hit, wounding two people.
Bandar Abbas handles roughly 85 per cent of the nation’s container traffic and 70 per cent of its transit trade.
Bombing rail and road links in the region was a tactic deployed by Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s.
Roads were later rerouted, but the US military is seeking to cut them off again.
It would be “easier than people think” to blockade Iran because it only has a couple of major ports and one small navigable river, said Mr Rubin.
“I hope we’re not just playing whack-a-mole,” he continued. “You’ve got to knock out Bandar Abbas, and by knockout, I mean you take out the bridges.”
At the same time, Mr Rubin said Mr Trump risked undermining the US’s plans by deciding to restart negotiations without a coherent strategy.
Sina Toosi, an analyst at the Centre for International Policy, said commentators in Iran had identified three possible objectives to cutting off Bandar Abbas: “one, preparing the ground for an invasion; two, diminishing supply routes to Iranian forces responsible for Hormuz disruption; or three, increasing pressure on the public in the hope that it translates into greater pressure on the government.”
The threat from the American military operation is felt on the humid streets of Bandar Abbas, a city that in ordinary times pulses with life.
The city is a place of lenjs (traditional wooden fishing vessels) and container ships, and also of fishermen hauling in shrimp, hammour and crab before dawn and hawking the catch in markets.
It is also a working port town and a holiday coast at once – cosmopolitan, mixed with Arab, African and Indian influences carried in on centuries of trade.
Bandar Abbas has no piped gas, so residents lug cylinders through the heat and chase down refill trucks while banking outages block their cards.
Iran’s national power utility, Tavanir, admitted the southern grid had been damaged and said crews were working around the clock to restore it – official confirmation that Mr Trump’s threat to “knock out all their power plants” had begun to land.
The strikes fall on an economy already brought to its knees by sanctions and war.
Inflation runs near 60 per cent by official measures, and higher by the prices families actually pay. The war has gutted the steel, petrochemical and industrial base. And the currency convulses with every fresh shock.
Cutting Bandar Abbas off from the interior hampers an already weak economy at a time Iranians can least afford it.
“What the US is doing is escalating, but not striking targets that will cause death and suffering in the population,” said Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine colonel at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“These are the kinds of things ... that will bring the war home to the civilian population but it isn’t going to cause social collapse or collapse of the healthcare system.”
Col Cancian questioned how significant the strategy would be, however. “The leadership has shown that they are willing to endure tremendous sacrifice, and they’re willing to impose that on the population.”
Hitting bridges used by civilians once again raises questions about possible war crimes.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions, signed by 196 countries including the US, require warring parties to distinguish between military targets and civilian infrastructure.
The 1977 Additional Protocol I reinforces this by specifically protecting civilian infrastructure from attack. The US has not ratified it, but regards much of it as customary international law.
However, some legal experts argue that infrastructure such as bridges can be labelled as legitimate targets if they are not being used for purely civilian reasons.
