Jordan counts thirteen missiles to Trump’s eight, and the Brent curve prices Hormuz shut for months, not years

The Jordanian Armed Forces said on Wednesday that sirens sounded and air defences intercepted 10 of the 13 Iranian missiles that entered the country’s airspace on Tuesday night, with three impacts in remote areas away from population centres — the only on-the-record numerical claim from a party that was struck, reported by The Jerusalem Post. Two US officials told Reuters there were no American casualties. President Trump’s account is different: he described “the Iranians shooting eight missiles, all successfully knocked down, at our Military Base in Jordan,” and, per the Times of Israel’s liveblog, insisted on Truth Social that all the missiles fired at US troops in Jordan were shot down, having conceded the day before that one had gone through. Eight and none, against thirteen, ten and three. Neither figure has been reconciled and no US command has published a count of its own. The divergence is not rhetorical: it is a countable event on allied territory, described two ways by two governments that are nominally defending the same base.

The strikes that produced the salvo are themselves split between two narrators. CENTCOM announced on X that at 12 p.m. ET on 1 September US forces began striking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, following “recent attempted attacks by the IRGC against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and against American service members deployed to the region.” RFE/RL noted that CENTCOM provided no target details and no indication of scale; the locations in circulation — Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, Chabahar — come from Iranian state broadcasters. The motive is American, the map is Iranian, and neither has been independently confirmed. The same pattern governed Sunday’s opening move: the Washington Post reported the US struck rocket launchers on Larak Island as Iranian forces were preparing to disperse sea mines, a purpose asserted by US officials and by Axios and never conceded by Tehran. Hours before the Tuesday strikes, RFE/RL reported President Masoud Pezeshkian saying Iran would “immediately reciprocate” if Washington returned to its commitments under the memorandum.

On the water, the two governments assert incompatible physical facts. CBS News reports the Trump administration insisting that the southern lanes close to Omani shores are open and safe, while Iran insists all vessels coordinate with its military and use a northern passage close to Larak Island — the island the US bombed on Sunday. Traffic is the one thing that can be counted from outside. Al Jazeera’s 20 August data analysis found 236 ships passed through in nineteen days of August, against roughly 130 a day before the war began on 28 February: 12.4 a day, a collapse of about 90 per cent in a waterway that carried a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG. Against that, an assertion attributed to the US energy secretary and carried on ABC’s liveblog — that 17 million barrels transited on Monday, a record — sits unexplained and unverified, and should not be treated as settled until the primary statement surfaces.

The market is the least ambiguous voice in the file, and it is not pricing a permanent closure. Oilprice.com’s Brent board showed the November 2026 contract at $96.55, up 2.03 per cent on the day, with the curve stepping down to $93.01 in December, $87.15 in February and $83.54 by April 2027 — roughly $13, or 13.5 per cent, of backwardation across six months. Traders are betting on severe disruption that clears inside two quarters. Governments cannot hedge on that schedule. Al Jazeera, citing Turkish data, reports Iraqi oil exports fell by more than 80 per cent in the weeks after the late-February strikes, with monthly oil revenues dropping from around $6 billion to under $2 billion, and the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line now moving about 170,000 barrels a day against 1.5 million of capacity. In Cairo, Suez revenue has recovered to $1.26 billion in the second quarter, on CAPMAS figures — a pace that does not reach the $8 billion Osama Rabie projected to an IMF mission for this fiscal year.

Assessment: The useful question today is not who is winning but who is counting. A president’s tally, an allied army’s tally and a silent combatant command cannot all be right, and the gap is being filled by parties with something to sell: Iranian state television supplies the impact geography, CENTCOM supplies the intent, and neither is audited. Distrust three things in particular. Private aggregators — straits.live’s transit counts and “crisis pressure” index — are being cited this week as though they were wires; they are not. The claim circulating on market commentary pages that a supertanker caught fire after striking two mines has no vessel name, flag, operator or casualty figure attached, and would be on Lloyd’s List and UKMTO within hours if true. And the 17-million-barrel record has no primary text behind it. The forward curve is the honest number here precisely because nobody issued it as a statement. It says the closure is expected to end. Iraq’s revenue line and Egypt’s canal receipts say the fiscal damage will outlast it.