Iran launched a missile attack Monday against a key U.S. military base in Qatar, the Iranian military said, but the assault was repelled by Qatari defenses and there were no reported casualties or damage to the American installation.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confirmed the assault on Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the region, minutes after witnesses reported seeing and hearing explosions in the skies over Qatar.
Iran was widely expected to retaliate after U.S. airstrikes Saturday targeted three of the country’s key nuclear facilities. American air bases in the Middle East are expected to be the most likely targets.
A U.S. defense official confirmed that there were no casualties.
“I can confirm that Al Udeid Air Base was attacked by short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles originating from Iran today. At this time, there are no reports of U.S. casualties,” the official said. “We are monitoring this situation closely and will provide more information as it becomes available.”
The initial attack appears to have failed. In a lengthy statement on X, Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari condemned the attack and said his country’s missile defenses shot down the Iranian barrage.
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“The state of Qatar strongly condemns the attack that targeted Al-Udeid Air Base by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. We consider this a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the State of Qatar, its airspace, international law, and the United Nations Charter,” he wrote. “We affirm that Qatar reserves the right to respond directly in a manner equivalent with the nature and scale of this brazen aggression, in line with international law.”
“We reassure that Qatar’s air defenses successfully thwarted the attack and intercepted the Iranian missiles,” he said.
Iranian state TV reports dubbed the attack “a mighty and successful response” by Iran to American aggression. That framing of events is consistent with past instances, including last year when Iran’s missile and drone attacks against Israel largely failed, but were still celebrated on Iranian media as major successes.
The reports of apparent missiles in the sky, and subsequent explosions, came just hours after Qatar announced it was shutting its airspace and after the U.S. Embassy in Qatar issued a “shelter in place” order for American citizens in the country.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian did not explicitly mention attacks on Al Udeid, but he posted on social media that Tehran will answer America’s aggression.
“We were neither the initiators of war nor its seekers; but we will not leave aggression against #Great_Iran unanswered,” he wrote on X. “With all our being, we will stand for the security of this #Dear_Nation and respond to every wound inflicted on Iran’s body with faith, reason, and resolve. People, #God is watching over us.”
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About 10,000 U.S. troops are stationed at Al Udeid.
Trump administration officials expected such Iranian strikes.
“Well, they’ll attack our bases. And those are our bases, and we’re going to defend our personnel,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS’ “Face the Nation” program on Sunday.
“But we’ll do more than just defend. We’ll impose costs on Iran if they attack American personnel, whether they do it directly, or whether they do it through some of these proxies that they try to hide behind,” he said.
