Iran Fires Missiles at US Bases in Kuwait and Bahrain After American Strikes on Its Coast

Iran launched a salvo of ballistic missiles at United States military installations in Kuwait and Bahrain on Saturday, the most serious direct exchange in weeks of the Gulf war. The strikes targeted the Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait and the headquarters of the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the kingdom that denounced what it called "blatant aggression" against its territory and that of neighboring Kuwait, according to The Hindu's live coverage.

The attack followed an American operation earlier in the day. United States forces shot down four Iranian one-way attack drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz, then struck Iranian coastal radar sites on Qeshm Island and at Goruk, saying the installations threatened maritime traffic. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its missile launch answered American strikes on telecommunications towers on its coast. The Russian outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda framed the sequence as proof that US-Iran negotiations had reached a dead end and that the war was entering a new phase.

The accounts diverge on damage. Tehran claimed it struck the Fifth Fleet headquarters, while American officials said six of the seven missiles were intercepted, the seventh missed, and no United States personnel were harmed. Independent confirmation of conditions inside the targeted bases was not available, and the competing claims could not be fully reconciled.

What is not in dispute is that the fighting now directly involves the Gulf monarchies that host American forces and sit beside the Strait of Hormuz, the passage that carries a large share of the world's oil. The pattern fits the maximum-pressure campaign that has defined Washington's Iran policy, in which sanctions, interdiction and now direct strikes run alongside repeated talk of a Hormuz ceasefire that has yet to hold.