Iran Fires Missiles at U.S. Base in Qatar
Iran on Monday launched a military attack on an American base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East, in retaliation for U.S. strikes on three critical Iranian nuclear sites.
Qatar and the United States said that air defenses had intercepted the missiles, and the Defense Department said there were no reports of U.S. casualties at the base, Al Udeid.
The strike stoked fears that the conflict with Iran might intensify, drawing in the United States further and expanding it across the region, but at the same time there were signs that Iran might be looking for an off-ramp. Three Iranian officials said their government had given advance notice that attacks were coming, as a way to minimize potential casualties.
The officials said Iran needed to be seen striking back at the United States for its attack over the weekend -- but in a calibrated way. A similar approach was used in 2020, when Iran gave a heads-up before firing ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq in reprisal for the assassination of its top general.
Earlier in the day, as the United States and Britain braced for an attack, they warned their citizens in Qatar to shelter in place. Qatar later announced that it had closed its airspace, and the United Arab Emirates did the same after the attack. The airspace closures disrupted flights into and out of Doha and Dubai, two major hubs of international air travel.
The Iranian assault came as Israel launched wide-ranging strikes on Tehran, Iran's capital, on Monday and promised more "in the coming days," pressing on with its bombing campaign two days after the United States attacked three Iranian nuclear sites.
The new Israeli barrage, which a military spokesperson said targeted a paramilitary headquarters, a notorious prison and access routes to the Fordo nuclear enrichment site that the U.S. military bombarded, came as Iran fired salvos of missiles that sent Israelis to huddle in shelters, and as world leaders called for de-escalation.
Iran's attack on Al Udeid came after its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with a key ally, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the Russian leader called the U.S. strikes "absolutely unprovoked aggression," he stopped short of offering concrete support for Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in a televised address Sunday night, said that his country was "very, very close" to realizing its objectives in the conflict but did not say when its bombing campaign would end.
Though President Donald Trump declared that Iran's nuclear program had been "totally obliterated" by the U.S. bombings, the actual state of the program was far murkier, with senior officials conceding they did not know the fate of Iran's stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.
Here's what else to know:
-- Possible response: Trump's decision to attack Iran, and Iran's retaliatory attack Monday, dimmed hopes for a negotiated solution to end the fighting. While U.S. officials say that Iran has depleted its stockpile of medium-range missiles, the country still has an ample supply of other weapons, including rockets and drones, some of which would -- if employed -- give U.S. forces in the region only minutes of warning.
-- Economic impact: Oil prices fell and stocks climbed after Iran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar. Before the attack, investors appeared cautiously optimistic about the potential economic fallout from the U.S. strikes over the weekend, and of any moves Iran might make that would disrupt oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical transit point for global oil supplies.
-- Calls for peace: After European foreign ministers met to discuss Iran, the European Union's chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said that "the concerns of retaliation and this war escalating are huge." The International Atomic Energy Agency held an emergency meeting in Vienna, where the head of the agency, Rafael Grossi, warned that "violence and destruction could reach unimaginable levels" if Iran, Israel and the United States do not find a path to diplomacy.
-- U.S. strikes: Pentagon officials described their attack on three nuclear sites as a tightly choreographed operation that included B-2 bombers carrying 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and submarine-fired Tomahawk cruise missiles hitting a trio of sites in less than a half-hour. A senior U.S. official acknowledged that the attack on Fordo had not destroyed the heavily fortified site, but it had been severely damaged.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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