Live Updates: Tehran, Beirut and Tel Aviv Are Targeted in Attacks and Counterattacks

Asked whether he was “comfortable” with the way the Iranian destroyer was sunk near Sri Lanka in terms of international law, Mr. Albanese said that was a question for the United States. Mr. Albanese was among the first U.S. allies to offer full public support of the attack on Iran.

The Australian submariners were aboard the U.S. vessel as part of the increasing cooperation and integration between the countries’ navies aimed at countering China in the region. Under a pact known as AUKUS, which also involves Britain, Australia is set to receive sensitive nuclear technology and nuclear-powered submarines from the United States in the coming years.

U.S. military officials have said that as a part of the integration, two to three Australian officers would eventually be on board many U.S. attack submarines to be trainedt.

Australia’s defense department said late last year that one in 10 of the people on U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines is Australian.

Critics of the agreement have warned that the increasingly close ties will embroil Australia in U.S.-led conflicts, a concern that has been heightened with the actions of the second Trump administration. On Friday, David Shoebridge, a senator with the Australian Greens, said the presence of Australian personnel on the U.S. ship involved in the Iran conflict was “an inevitability of AUKUS.”

“We have been dragged into this war without even a decision being made inside the cabinet room,” Mr. Shoebridge, who has long been against the agreement, told reporters in Canberra.

Australia last year severed diplomatic ties with Iran, accusing its military of orchestrating at least two antisemitic attacks against Jewish institutions and businesses in Sydney and Melbourne.

That attack made it clear to Australians that Iran was “prepared to reach across the other side of the world to promote an attack on Australian soil to promote division here in Australia,” Mr. Albanese said in the interview with Sky News on Friday.

In joining Israel to launch a war against Iran, Mr. Trump made it nearly impossible for India to get oil from its alternative suppliers, which are mostly in the Persian Gulf. Supplies from the region were cut off by the fighting, which has escalated since it began on Saturday. That leaves India with few options to feed its growing economy’s need for fuel, 90 percent of it imported. Russia looks like the obvious solution.

Sumit Ritolia, a research analyst at Kpler, which tracks international shipping, had anticipated the reversal and noted that India had not yet quit its Russian supply anyway. It takes nearly a month for tankers loaded in Russia to reach Indian ports; cargoes loaded before the trade deal was announced were still being delivered.

On Friday, Mr. Ritolia wrote that “the waiver effectively acts as a green signal.” Russia doesn’t have enough oil to fully offset the supply stranded in the Gulf, but it now has every reason to keep pumping, and should be able to charge higher prices too.

Rajeev Lala, a director at S&P Global Energy who follows India’s state-owned oil companies, said India’s recent experience buying and refining large quantities of seaborne crude from Russia proved that it could do without buying very much from the Gulf. It is well positioned to pick up where it left off when, in recent months, it started tapering its Russian purchases.

“India is better placed to restart the Russia supply chain, whereas others will need to work harder — if Gulf supplies are to stay shut for long,” Mr. Lala said.

India’s refineries are already rigged to process Russian supplies, and its shipping and insurance agents have their Russian contacts at the ready. It could ramp up imports of Russian oil.

It was just four weeks ago that India and the United States settled their trade war. In the bargain, India agreed to quit buying oil from Russia, according to the official American account.

That meant that Indian buyers would forgo the discounts that had saved billions of dollars since the start of the war in Ukraine. They had been buying Russian crude on the cheap, refining it and selling those products on to Europe, which has sharply curtailed its trade with Russia.

Barely a week later, the Supreme Court invalidated the tariffs that Mr. Trump had used to force India into that deal. There are other ways that the Trump administration can compel India to buy less Russian oil, for instance by threatening penalties on companies that buy from its biggest oil firms, or by finding some new legal basis for tariffs.

There are not many other places for India to turn for oil right now. Its main suppliers used to be Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait and Oman were expected to make up much of the balance. But the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway on Iran’s southern border that carries much of the Gulf’s energy exports, is all but closed by a barrage of drones and missile fire.

Russian oil, by contrast, sails to India by several routes. From Russia’s western ports, oil can be shipped through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to reach India’s west coast. Some has been shipped from the Russian Far East, too, though that may be diverted to buyers in East Asia who are also seeking alternatives to Persian Gulf supplies.

Shipments from Russia are slower to reach India than tankers from the Gulf, which take less than a week. But a large amount of Russian oil is sitting in tankers on the open sea — Mr. Ritolia of Kpler estimated more than 30 million barrels are idling around the Indian Ocean, enough to fulfill six days of India’s total demand, with more on the way.

Mr. Lala of S&P Global Energy noted that in recent years India’s oil companies had become comfortable simply buying crude, without investing in exploration or drilling projects of their own, in the Gulf or elsewhere. “The idea was, ‘Keep calm, and keep on buying,’” he said. But with supplies being pinched in Russia and the Gulf, that may need to change.

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington.

Since the United States and Israel began attacking on Saturday, Iran has fired volleys of drones and missiles at its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Several countries in the region have closed their airspace and shut down airports as a result.

Until midweek, the State Department had mainly provided stranded travelers with basic information about security conditions and commercial travel options via a telephone hotline and text messages. Before Wednesday, desperate people calling the hotline got an automated message that said the U.S. government could not help get them out of the region.

Later, the department chartered some buses to drive Americans from countries with no air travel to ones where they could catch flights. It is unclear how many such buses have been chartered.

In a statement on Thursday, Dylan Johnson, a State Department spokesman, said that “charter flight and ground transportation operations are underway and will continue to ramp up with additional flights and ground transports taking place today.”

The department said on Wednesday that its first charter flight had left the region for the United States. But the statement did not say how many more flights might be underway or in the works.

Many veteran diplomats faulted the State Department not only for its response after the attacks in Iran began, but also for its actions beforehand.

The department did not issue official alerts ahead of the strikes advising Americans that the risk of travel in the region had increased. Given that U.S. forces been amassing over the winter and President Trump was warning of a possible attack, such notices would not have threatened any military element of surprise, diplomats said.

“This war started at a time of our choosing,” said Yael Lempert, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Jordan in the Biden administration. “It should have come as no surprise that airspace would close, and commercial flight options would be curtailed.”

Ms. Lempert, who helped organize the evacuation of Americans from Libya in 2011, noted that the Iranian strikes against U.S. partner countries were a predictable contingency and that airspace in the region had closed in previous instances of conflict with Iran over the past two years.

“It’s stunning there were no orders for authorized departure for nonessential U.S. government employees and family members in almost all the affected diplomatic missions in the region — nor public recommendations to American citizens to depart — until days into the war,” added Ms. Lempert, now a vice president at the Middle East Institute.

A State Department official, who discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity, said that pre-emptively raising travel alerts to their highest levels would be counterproductive, leading commercial airlines to cancel flights.

Department officials also firmly defended their other actions in response to the crisis, saying on Thursday morning that a round-the-clock task force had assisted more than 10,000 Americans abroad and that nearly 20,000 Americans had returned safely to the United States from the Middle East since the conflict began. Thousands more Americans have left the region for other destinations, officials said.

But critics called the numbers hollow. The count of Americans who received “assistance,” for instance, included people who were given information such as “security guidance” that some found lacking. And the 20,000 who have returned to the United States include those who found their way home without any government help.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a retired career diplomat who served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Biden administration, posted on social media that she was “shocked” by the department’s “failure to support Americans abroad.”

The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents Foreign Service officers worldwide, released a scathing statement on Wednesday highlighting the mass layoffs, budget cuts and early retirements since Mr. Trump took office last January.

“This crisis exposes real gaps in America’s diplomatic readiness,” the union said, adding that the department’s “capacity has been weakened by the loss of experienced personnel with critical regional, crisis management, consular, and language expertise, including specialists in Farsi and Arabic — skills that are indispensable in moments like this.”

The group also noted that Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all currently lack a Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador. It said that staff reductions under Secretary of State Marco Rubio “have left many of these embassies and the offices that support them critically understaffed.”

Some current and former diplomats expressed particular concern about a message sent by the leader of the department’s bureau of consular affairs, whose stated mission is “to protect the lives and serve the interests of American citizens” abroad during emergencies and disasters. The bureau has been led since late December by Mora Namdar, a career lawyer with roughly one year of State Department experience, most of it as an acting official in the department’s Middle East bureau.

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Some Americans in the region reported feeling a sense of panic on Monday after Ms. Namdar posted on social media imploring U.S. citizens “to DEPART NOW” from 14 countries in the region “due to serious safety risks.” The message said that travelers should use “available commercial transportation,” even though commercial flights from many of those countries had already become scarce or nonexistent.

Mr. Trump and many of his top officials fiercely criticized the Biden administration for what they called a failure to plan for the orderly evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies as Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Biden officials blamed staffing problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the Afghan government’s unexpectedly swift collapse.

Jan Fluitt-Dupuy, a retiree from Washington State who was stranded in Abu Dhabi along with her husband, Eddie Dupuy, said the State Department had for days given them “totally useless advice,” including that they should leave by commercial means when the region’s airspace was closed.

After days of calling the State Department hotline and their congressional representatives, the couple said on Thursday that they might have secured a seat on a U.S. government flight home. Still, the timing of any flight remained unclear, and they feared that “an unusually robust barrage of attacks” audible from their hotel room might close the airspace once again, Ms. Fluitt-Dupuy said.

Christine Chung and Gabe Castro-Root contributed reporting.

Once Mr. Khamenei’s name began to circulate as the favored candidate to succeed his father, the United States said he would not be acceptable and could be eliminated.

“They are wasting their time,” President Trump told Axios on Thursday, adding that the former supreme leader’s son is “a lightweight” and an “unacceptable” choice.

“I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan vice president who became interim leader after Washington captured the country’s leader.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a social media post on Wednesday that any leader appointed by Iran to succeed Mr. Khamenei would be “an unequivocal target for elimination.”

American and Israeli strikes have so far killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and top military commanders and figures involved in defense — but not clerics. The leaders of Iran’s three branches of government — the presidency, judiciary and Parliament — are alive.

“Iranian officials will try to delay the announcement of the new supreme leader as much as they can, to avoid a pre-emptive strike on him,” said Sina Azodi, the director of the Middle East department at George Washington University. “But things are already in motion. The process has began, and a consensus reached, and Mojtaba is strongly favored.”

If Mr. Khamenei is appointed as the top religious, political and military figure in the country, it signals the continuity of hard-line conservative rule. Mr. Khamenei, a mysterious but influential figure who has operated in the shadows of power, has close ties to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

It also has a reputation for abandoning them: After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the United States encouraged a Kurdish uprising in Iraq then stood by as the Iraqi Army slaughtered Kurdish forces.

Who are the Kurds?

The Kurds are an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people spread largely across four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. They have long sought either a state of their own or greater autonomy, and are often considered to be the largest contiguous ethnic group in the world without an independent state.

In the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Kurds across the Middle East were promised a nation of their own by world powers, but it never came to be.

Many Kurds blame the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 — a secret deal between Britain and France that carved up the Middle East along often illogical boundaries — for denying them a country of their own and dividing them among states that have, at times, proved hostile.

Since then, Kurdish people have faced varying degrees of discrimination, including bans on speaking their own language, celebrating their culture or even receiving citizenship.

Those measures fueled calls for greater Kurdish autonomy. Some countries saw the rise of armed groups, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries.

How big is Iran’s Kurdish minority?

Kurds make up 10 percent of Iran’s population and are concentrated in the northwest, along its border with Iraq. They have at times been at the forefront of protest movements against Iran’s theocratic government.

In 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died after she was arrested by the country’s morality police, accused of violating the country’s strict codes on modest dress for women. Her death sparked a nationwide protest movement, which was centered around women’s rights and freedoms in Iran but also touched on longstanding grievances held by the Kurdish minority.

At one point, Kurdish protesters seized control of Oshnavieh, a city in the Kurdish region of Iran, though it was soon retaken by government forces.

The map highlights the countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

TURKMEN.

Ankara

TURKEY

Oshnavieh

SYRIA

Erbil

Tehran

IRAQ

IRAN

ISRAEL

SAUDI

ARABIA

EGYPT

400 miles

“This is not all about the head scarf,” Hana Yazdanpana, a spokeswoman for the Kurdistan Freedom Party, an Iranian paramilitary group based in Iraq, said at the time. “The Kurds want freedom.”

Some Iranian Kurdish armed groups are based in Iraqi Kurdistan, a region in the north of Iraq that broke away from the central government’s control in 1992 with U.S. support. It is recognized as a semiautonomous region by the United Nations and the United States, among others.

Will the Kurds join the fighting in Iran?

Kurdish militias have previously crossed borders to aid one another, most notably in Syria’s civil war. Kurds from Turkey, Iraq and Iran came together to fight there alongside Syria’s minority. It is unclear to what extent an armed uprising in Iran’s Kurdish region would galvanize other Kurds around the region.

For more than a decade, Kurdish forces were the United States’ closest allies in Syria, fighting against ISIS, guarding American bases and running internment camps and prisons that held tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their relatives.

That alliance has been disintegrating, however, as the United States has thrown its support behind the new government of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.