Smoke rose from Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery on Monday following an Iranian
drone attack.Credit…Reuters
Iran attacked energy installations on Monday in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both key American allies in the Persian Gulf, ratcheting up its military campaign by targeting critical infrastructure.
As Iran responds to the U.S.-Israeli assault that began on Saturday, Persian Gulf countries that host American military bases have become a prime target of its retaliation. Hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones have been fired at countries in the region, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, killing at least six people and wounding more than 100, many of them migrant workers.
The scenes that have unfolded across the Gulf countries — including luxury hotels set ablaze in the Middle East’s business capital of Dubai — are their worst nightmare. Penned in between the United States, their primary security guarantor, and Iran, their decapitated and desperate neighbor, Gulf governments are facing a war that they had openly lobbied against.
“I urge the United States not to get sucked in further,” Badr al-Busaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, pleaded in a social media post on Saturday, when the war began. “This is not your war.”
On Monday, Iranian drones targeted a power plant and an energy facility in Qatar, the Qatari defense ministry said. Soon after, QatarEnergy, one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, said that it would halt production, a major shock that sent the price of natural gas soaring.
Earlier on Monday, Saudi Arabia’s energy ministry said that a fire had broken out at the Ras Tanura oil refinery in the kingdom’s eastern province after two Iranian drones were intercepted, causing fragments to fall. Some units of the refinery were shut down as a precautionary measure, it said. Five drones near the Prince Sultan Air Base, a military complex south of the capital of Riyadh, were also intercepted, the defense ministry said.
A drone attack also struck the American embassy compound in Kuwait, according to two U.S. officials, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. In video from the scene verified by The New York Times, smoke could be seen billowing from an area surrounding the embassy. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement on Sunday night, foreign ministers of the Gulf countries condemned the Iranian attacks and affirmed their right to respond. It is unclear how much impact their response could have though, given that their own militaries remain heavily dependent on the United States.
The statement called for a return to diplomacy as “the sole path to overcome the current crisis,” and warned that escalating the conflict could “drag the region toward dangerous trajectories with catastrophic consequences.”
