An Iranian attack on the US military-operated Al Udeid airbase in Qatar may have hit a geodesic dome housing communication equipment, new satellite images revealed on Friday.
Tehran's attack on June 23 had been a response to America's Operation Midnight Hammer (in which it bombed three significant underground nuclear facilities in Iran)—an escalation of the twelve-day Israel-Iran conflict.
Notifying the US about the attack beforehand, Iran's symbolic retaliation involved firing a few missiles at the Al Udeid airbase, which were quickly intercepted by the American military’s Central Command, as well as Qatar's air defence.
Although the US had evacuated its aircraft prior to Iran's response, a $15 million geodesic dome installed in 2016—known as a modernised enterprise terminal—seems to have been destroyed, as a comparative analysis of Planet Labs PBC satellite images of the area shows, an Associated Press report said.
The satellite images after the attack show the dome has gone, with some damage seen at a nearby building—which makes the Iranian response a likely cause for the destruction—although neither the US nor Qatar has confirmed the damage to the dome.
The day after the attack, which led to a temporary shutdown of airspaces in the Middle East amid fears of the situation spiralling out of control, US President Donald Trump announced in a Truth Social post that “NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done”.
“There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and one was 'set free', because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction,” he added, calling it a “weak response” from Iran.
At around the same time, an advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei separately claimed that the base’s communications had been “completely cut” by the attack, the report added.
