On June 5, a satellite photograph captured around forty aircraft on the tarmac of a US airfield inside the regional headquarters for the US Central Command (CENTCOM), some two hundred miles from Iran. A second photograph taken of the Al Udeid airfield on June 20, a week after Israel started a war with Iran with a surprise strike against military and civilian targets, showed only three jets. These images indicate a major US evacuation of military assets from the Gulf unprecedented in recent history, most likely over 2,500 miles away to Diego Garcia, the joint US-UK air base in the middle of the Indian Ocean. One likely reason for this could be the threat of Iranian retaliatory power, which has steadily increased since the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and threatens American bases and interests across the region.
In its retaliation against Israel, Iran demonstrated a formidable ballistic missile counterstrike force, which it has developed from scratch for over thirty years to prepare for just this moment. Its medium-range missiles are trained on Israel. But its more accurate and larger arsenal of short-range missiles have the US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in its sights. Hitting these bases without notice and when they are filled with troops is Iran’s “doomsday scenario,” which it has developed in lieu of a nuclear bomb to deter long-standing US aggression. America has been hostile to the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and provided arms and intelligence for Iraq’s former president…
Auteur: Arron Reza Merat
