Ahmed al-Jaber Air Base

Ahmed al-Jaber Air Base is a Kuwait Air Force installation in southern Kuwait that also hosts a rotational US military presence. It has been one of the American logistics and airlift hubs supporting operations in the Gulf since the 1990s, alongside other regional bases used to project power into Iraq and beyond.

The base came under direct attack early in the war: two of seven Iranian drones aimed at it struck home on 14 March, wounding three soldiers, while three more were intercepted and two fell outside the perimeter. Drones continued the same day to hit radar at Kuwait International Airport, the second airport attack of the war's first weeks.

The attack sits inside a broader pattern. Kuwait has absorbed repeated Iranian and IRGC strikes on both military and civilian infrastructure through the war, including claimed attacks on the nearby Ali al-Salem Air Base and direct hits on the Shuaiba power and desalination plant and Kuwait International Airport in July. Kuwait hosts US forces without being a combatant in its own right, a position that has made its bases and airports recurring targets regardless of Kuwaiti policy.

The strike on Ahmed al-Jaber was among the incidents that pushed the tally of wounded US personnel past 200 by mid-March, with more than 180 having returned to duty and killed-in-action then standing at 13. That toll has continued to climb through the following months as strikes on US positions across Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf have continued.

Iranian state media named the base again on 21 July 2026, claiming the IRGC and Artesh had struck it as one of four Gulf sites hit in the 24th wave of Operation Nasr-2. Kuwait's own defence ministry statement covering the same period used only the word "interception" (اعتراض), never "destruction" (تدمير), and named none of the four claimed sites, including this one; no independent source has confirmed a system lost at the base in that wave. It was the fifth dated iteration since 13 July of Iranian state media claiming strikes on the same handful of Gulf radar and air-defence installations.