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Four Crew Members Killed After U.S. Plane Goes Down in Iraq; Two Homeland Attacks Rattle Americans Amid War With Iran; Iranian Supreme Leader Vows to Keep Strait of Hormuz Closed. Aired 6-6:30 am ET

Aired March 13, 2026 - 06:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[06:00:28]

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN ANCHOR: The breaking news this morning, the U.S. military has just confirmed four more deaths in the war with Iran.

I'm Audie Cornish.

And the four fallen Americans are crew members of a refueling aircraft that went down in western Iraq. So, we're going to get right to it with CNN Correspondent Paula Hancocks in Abu Dhabi.

Paula, what are the details, if you have any, about this crash?

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Audie, this is information coming to us from U.S. Central Command confirming that four service members have been confirmed deceased. They say that this was as a part of a crash of a refueling tanker. Six people were on board at the time of the crash in western Iraq.

They say that rescue efforts are still continuing and an investigation into what exactly happened is continuing at this point. They are withholding the names of those individuals for 24 hours until the next of kin have been notified.

Now, what they have said as well is that it, quote, "is not due to hostile fire or friendly fire." So, at this point, it's unclear exactly what happened to this tanker, the KC-135 refueling aircraft. These kind of aircraft are key to the war effort by the United States. And certainly we will be waiting to hear any more details from U.S. Central Command. But at this point, they have confirmed that four of the six crew members of this refueling tanker have been confirmed dead.

Audie?

CORNISH: We're going to be learning more about this today. In the meantime, Paula, I want to ask you about this rally in Tehran because there was a massive explosion by this rally. What have you learned? HANCOCKS: So, this is the Quds Day rally, which is an annual international rally in support of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. And so what we saw earlier in Tehran in the central part of the capital were thousands of people on the streets.

We saw them burning American and Israeli flags. We heard them chant death to America, death to Israel. And many of them were holding pictures of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. So, this was a very significant rally in the streets of Tehran.

And we have heard that there have been at least one large explosion in the vicinity, so nearby, where this rally took place. We have images showing the smoke rising close to where many people were rallying. It is unclear at this point. We don't have information of exactly what was being targeted by either the U.S. or Israel in the explosions that we could see in the background. But clearly thousands of people were out on the streets pro-regime, it certainly appears, in many cases, given the chants that we heard.

Audie?

CORNISH: OK, that's Paula Hancocks. We're going to be following up with her today.

I also want to bring you up to speed on the breaking news here at home. A pair of violent attacks on U.S. soil, rattling Americans with the U.S. at war with Iran. We're going to start in Virginia, a deadly shooting at Old Dominion University. One person was killed, two more injured.

Now this is being investigated as an act of terror. The gunman was taken down and actually killed by a class of ROTC students. The shooter was a veteran. He had served seven years in prison for trying to aid ISIS.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DOMINIQUE EVANS, FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE: I can tell you that we have confirmed reports that prior to him conducting this act of terrorism, he shouted -- or stated "Allahu Akbar." And he was formerly a subject of an FBI investigation in material supporting terrorism.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Meanwhile in Michigan, a vehicle rammed into the Temple Israel Synagogue. The building caught on fire and the suspect, who was carrying a rifle and a large number of explosives, he too was killed. The FBI calls it a targeted attack on the Jewish community.

[06:05:01]

Now this suspect was born in Lebanon. Authorities are investigating reports that he had multiple family members killed in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon in recent days.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SHERIFF MICHAEL BOUCHARD, OAKLAND COUNTY, MICHIGAN: We're committed to keeping this community safe. If you think you can target the Jewish community in this county or anywhere in this state, you're wrong. We're going to not only stand in front of them to protect them, we're coming for you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Joining me now, Ed Davis, who was actually Commissioner of the Boston Police during the Boston Marathon bombing attack. Thank you for being with us this morning. You know, last night we heard from Jeh Johnson. He's the Homeland Security Secretary, of course, under President Obama. He says that we are in a heightened threat environment. I want you to hear what he told Kaitlan Collins last night.

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JEH JOHNSON, FORMER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: We are very definitely in a heightened threat environment because we have gone to war against Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. And there are several terrorist organizations that I expect and know the FBI is being very vigilant investigating right now.

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CORNISH: What does that mean for local police departments?

ED DAVIS, FORMER BOSTON POLICE COMMISSIONER: Well, it means a lot. The Secretary, as usual, is absolutely correct in his concern for these attacks. For every action, there's a reaction. And since the bombing campaign started, I know all of my former colleagues and all of the intelligence streams have been spun up across the nation. I hate to say it, but we were expecting something like this, dreading it, but expecting it. And it's not over yet. I think that as this campaign continues in Iran, we have some vulnerabilities here that we need to address.

CORNISH: One of the things we're hearing about is a little bit about each suspect. And in one of the cases, it was a person who actually has been to jail prior. And Erin Burnett last night was talking to a book author who has studied kind of ISIS attacks in America and things like that. And he pointed out that Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, that he was actually surprised the guy was out of prison. Here's what he had to say.

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ALEXANDER MELEAGROU-HITCHENS, CO-AUTHOR, "HOMEGROWN: ISIS IN AMERICA": I thought it had to be a mistake as far as I knew he was still in jail. So, I was very surprised. And it has been confirmed. And it does raise a number of key questions about how we are dealing with terrorist supporters who have -- who are coming out of prison now.

He was inspired by Nidal Hasan, who in 2009 attacked Fort Hood. And now he has actually gone on to commit the attack that he expressed an interest in conducting to the FBI informant that eventually led to his initial arrest and conviction.

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CORNISH: Can you talk about this? It's been some years since Americans have reckoned with the idea of lone actors or people inspired by things like ISIS. It didn't even occur to me that some of them may be coming out of prison now.

DAVIS: Right. And it's a huge problem. Two things. One is in 35 years of policing, I've often been surprised at the early release of some of these criminals just in routine criminal activity that occurs. There is a large amount of redemption in the criminal justice system, even though you don't hear about that too often, for parole and allowing early release and time off for good behavior.

I don't know what caused him to get out early. But I can say that, you know, ever since I heard of this last night, I've been thinking that our criminal justice system really hasn't come up to speed with this existential threat that we have involving terrorism. They're treating this type of a case as a routine type of criminal case. There's no special rules for someone who was indoctrinated, who attempted to kill, who was a naturalized citizen.

I think that we need to talk about that. I don't know what the answer is to it, but I think if we find someone that has joined the jihad or talked about these kind of terrorist acts, we need to deal with them a little differently than the average criminal.

CORNISH: Yeah. And it's not clear, especially as we deal with more and more lone actors.

Ed Davis, thank you so much for talking with us. I'm sure we'll have you back.

DAVIS: Thank you.

CORNISH: Now, I want to turn to this breaking news coverage after the break on CNN THIS MORNING. Did the Trump administration underestimate Iran? Sources are telling CNN that the U.S. may have failed to fully take into account some of the worst-case scenarios.

Plus, the threat of anti-Semitism in America. Worse now that the U.S. is at war and we continue to follow breaking news out of the Middle East. The U.S. military confirming four service members have been killed. This happened after a refueling plane went down in Iraq.

[06:10:07]

We're going to have more detail coming up.

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CORNISH: Multiple sources telling CNN that the Pentagon and National Security Council failed to fully account for the worst-case scenarios involving the Strait of Hormuz before the war. Now, they're saying that they underestimated how willing Iran would be

to shut down the waterway, which, of course, has sent global oil prices higher. But publicly, President Trump is downplaying that threat, saying, quote, "when oil prices go up, we,' meaning the U.S., 'make a lot of money." Other Trump allies say it's short-term.

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SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): If you think gas prices are high now, give the Ayatollah a nuclear weapon to terrorize the region, to threaten the Straits of Hormuz. He will control gas prices forever, that regime would, if they had a nuclear capability.

CHRIS WRIGHT, ENERGY SECRETARY: You've got to go through short-term pain to solve a long-term problem. This is bold leadership of President Trump. This is what the world needs.

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CORNISH: Joining me now in the group chat, Noel King, Co-Host and Editorial Director of the "Today, Explained" podcast, Michael Warren, Senior Editor of "The Dispatch," and Lulu Garcia-Navarro, CNN Contributor and Host of the interview podcast at "The New York Times."

So, everybody is talking about this because we're not having a big conversation about invading Iran or doing some big land thing. It's come down to this waterway, which the IGRC is able to create havoc for. And multiple people have come on set this week and said, what's going on with our intelligence? Where is the National Security Council? Like, what are you seeing, and are you seeing people ask similar questions?

MICHAEL WARREN, SENIOR EDITOR, THE DISPATCH: I mean, CNN's reporting confirms what we've sort of known for a while in general about the NSC, which is it's not working. The National Security Council is not working the way it has.

CORNISH: Who's in charge of it?

WARREN: So, you have a national security advisor who happens to be the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, one of the many hats that the Secretary of State is wearing. It's not running in the normal way it has in the past. The staff has sort of been decimated at the National Security Council.

And so, it's -- you know, this is a council that's got, you know, staff members at the staff level who are working across the executive branch, supposed to be sort of having these conversations of, well, how is this going to affect things economically or, you know, on the energy sector?

CORNISH: Yeah.

WARREN: And that, if you believe CNN's reporting, which I do, that wasn't happening, and it hasn't been happening. That's the reason you have something like the National Security Council, something that I think this president has sort of dismissed and said, that's a -- that's a process that I don't need.

CORNISH: Yes.

WARREN: It turns out maybe he did.

CORNISH: Well, the other thing is that I've been thinking this week about how is this war different from other wars and even the Ukraine war, right? And we are seeing it play out with drone warfare and Iran creating a different environment in the strait by attacking its neighbors, things like Amazon cloud services.

I want to play for you. This is Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks. He actually survived a drone attack that was in Kuwait.

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SGT. FIRST CLASS CORY HICKS, SURVIVED DRONE ATTACK IN KUWAIT: Seeing the nose of that drone pop through. And as soon as it did, I knew what it was. It was either a missile or a drone.

So, I turned to my right, and that's when it blew up and just blew the whole building apart. She was literally five feet from me when that happened. I think the -- if I looked -- when I looked over my left shoulder, the drone impacted basically right above her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: OK. Speaking there on the death of Master Sergeant Nicola Moore, can you talk about Iran's response, going after allies in the pursuit of U.S. targets?

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, "NEW YORK TIMES" JOURNALIST & PODCAST HOST, "THE INTERVIEW": Yeah. Rhetorical question here. Why has no other American president done this, decapitated the regime and gone after?

CORNISH: Trump has said because they haven't had the guts.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And the answer actually is because this. Because actually saying that the NSC didn't know that this was going to happen, you know, sympathies and -- and my deep feelings for them, but every single war game shows that if you did this, this is going to be the response, because what you're doing is existentially threatening the regime. And if someone is backed into a corner and you're existentially threatening them, what are they going to do? They're going to pull the only lever that they have, and it's a big one, which is the Strait of Hormuz.

CORNISH: There was also an argument, though, clearly from Israel and others, that Iran was in a different position than it has been. Its proxies were suffering. It was not in the same position of military might. That was what we were talking about, and that this was an opportunity to degrade its long-grade missile capabilities. So, it's not out of nowhere. NOEL KING, CO-HOST & EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, "TODAY, EXPLAINED" PODCAST: It's true, and it's fair, and we still should have known that Iran would shut the Strait of Hormuz, and we'd be looking at gas prices going up, up, up. And when Trump says, and respectfully, when he says, we'll make a lot of money on this because we have oil reserves, we do have oil reserves. The people who will make money are oil companies.

CORNISH: Right, or Russia as we've learned.

KING: American consumers will pay. Right, exactly.

CORNISH: I want to play one more thing for you. We've gone in this shift from the U.S. is winning, that we have to win, and here is Steve Bannon, of course, of the famous war room, talking about how catastrophic it would be not to.

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STEVE BANNON, FORMER TRUMP ADVISER: We're at war, and we have young men and women in harm's way. So, and like I said, we're in it. I'm not happy that we're in it, but you're in it. So, you got to figure out how you have victory, because victory is what matters here. It would be catastrophic for us to not have victory in this, and I realize that may rub some people the wrong way, but I think that's just a hard reality, what we have to deal with.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[06:20:12]

CORNISH: The question is, we do not know what victory looks like to this administration.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: We don't know what it is. I mean, President Trump has said he will declare victory, he will decide what victory looks like, and I've covered a lot of wars. I have been in many, many conflicts, and it's very easy to start a war, very hard to finish it, because you actually unilaterally cannot decide that.

There are many other actors that take a look at this and decide, actually, how wars will proceed and end, and listening to Steve Bannon there, this is exactly the problem.

CORNISH: OK.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Because it feeds into this narrative. We have to keep going, we have to keep going, we have to search for this elusive victory. Think about Iraq, think about Afghanistan. You know, 10, 20 years later, we're still in it exactly for that reason, because we don't have the victory that we feel that we need.

CORNISH: OK, we're going to talk more about this. We've got some people who can talk about the politics as well, but I need to turn, as we've mentioned, to the oil prices. They are on the rise, amid the tensions with the Middle East. And the U.S., the Trump administration, is now lifting sanctions, at least temporarily, on certain Russian oil products.

Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen criticized the decision on social media, writing, "As Putin helps Iran target Americans in the Middle East, the president is now filling the Kremlin's war coffers."

I'm going to bring in CNN Anchor and Correspondent Eleni Giokos. Eleni, we've been talking this week about the effects of the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. Can you talk about why Russia in particular benefits? Is it their access to the Strait? Are there routes? Why is this a win for them?

ELENI GIOKOS, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: Well, Russian oil has been sanctioned for the last four years since it invaded Ukraine. It was an effort to try and squeeze Russian profits so that it wasn't able to fund its ongoing war. Things have changed dramatically, and frankly, I've been watching sort of the narratives that have been playing out.

The big question is, you know, is Russia going to be sending gas to Europe after that huge closure of an LNG plant in Qatar, essentially taking out 20 percent of gas supply into the global market? And then we saw that waiver for India that was going to last only 30 days so it could buy sanctioned oil, which was already floating around in shadow fleets in the seas.

Then yesterday, what we saw is oil breached that key threshold of $100 a barrel. It closed at that level. Then the U.S. Treasury comes out and says, we're lifting temporarily the sanctions on oil and petroleum products, interestingly, until April 11.

So, it kind of gives you a sense of possibly how long they believe not only this hostility will last, but also importantly, just to the extent that we're seeing of this oil price shock that has come to fruition because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that handles 20 percent of global oil supply, not forgetting the International Energy Agency has categorically called this the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets. And we need to take that seriously.

Russia has been using a lot of its revenue to fund the war in Ukraine. And now, Russian oil is essentially back in play. And that's why we're seeing a lot of pushback.

But at the end of the day, President Trump wants to ensure that energy prices remain low. I mean, he's got domestic issues that he has to worry about as well. And clearly, whenever we see conflict, it seems that energy security trumps everything else. And that is why Putin right now and the Kremlin is benefiting extensively from this energy price shock because Russia accounts for 10 percent of global oil production.

CORNISH: Eleni Giokos, thank you so much.

We're going to follow up on this after the break on CNN THIS MORNING with news of a vehicle ramming a synagogue in Michigan. But is there a link between this war and this kind of attack?

Plus, the new details we're learning about the ROTC teacher who was killed in a Virginia attack.

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[06:27:25]

CORNISH: The FBI now saying the attack on a synagogue in Michigan yesterday was targeted. Now given the rise in antisemitism over the last several years coupled with the U.S. war with Iran, the synagogue had been on high alert.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says that there is actually a nexus between the war in Iran and this attack.

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DANA NESSEL, (D) MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL: It's time for people to speak up about what we see happening in American politics right now. Both in the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. And that is people with extremist, antisemitic viewpoints being embraced by these parties, right?

So, whether you're talking about Republicans and Candace Owen or Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, whether you're talking about people on the left who openly have just sort of replaced the word Jew with AIPAC or Zionist. And then as long as you do that, you're free to say virtually anything that you want.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: All right, I'm going to bring in now Ted Deutch. He's the CEO of the American Jewish Committee and a former Democratic Congressman from Florida.

Mr. Deutch, thank you for being here because you've got a unique perspective, right, on what she just had to say. And I certainly had more questions. Looking at this timeline, I want to show you on attacks on synagogues. Pittsburgh, San Diego, Texas over the last years and months and now 2026.

And I want to ask you about what Nessel had to say because she brought it past what we talked about with the war in Gaza, students on campuses. And she spoke specifically about the modern political environment.

TED DEUTCH, CEO, AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE: Well, thanks for having me. The Attorney General is right to bring up the antisemitism on the far right and far left.

But Audie, I just have to take a moment. I think we all have to reflect on what happened in Michigan. And what happened in Michigan yesterday should horrify every American. Someone drove a truck with explosives into a synagogue preschool where 140 kids were inside.

A grandmother told me that her granddaughter was hiding under a desk. Now, thankfully, no children were hurt, but this is the reality that Jewish communities are increasingly living with. Your timeline shows that. And so when the Attorney General talks about antisemitism and where it comes from, she's exactly right. It comes from the far right. It's conspiracy theorists. It comes from the far left, people whose hatred of Israel is hatred of Jews that puts Jews at risk.

[06:30:08]

And just like antisemitism --