The regular Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Artesh), not the IRGC, claimed the 16 July drone strikes on Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base and Bahrain's Sheikh Isa air base, and gave the campaign a name: the tenth phase of Operation Saeqeh (Lightning).1
Every prior Gulf reprisal in this war had carried the IRGC's name. The IRGC fired on Jordan's Azraq base and struck three Gulf states on 9 July, and ran the Gulf-wide retaliation that answered the blockade. This time the IRGC claimed only the separate hit on Jordan's Azraq base, while the Artesh took Kuwait and Bahrain under its own banner.
A named, numbered, multi-phase operation implies sustained institutional planning, distinct from the corps' improvised strike-and-claim pattern. The Artesh has spent this war in the IRGC's shadow as the conventional-defence force; a numbered Army operation is a bureaucratic claim on the war's prestige, and such claims outlast the strikes that prompt them. Mojtaba Khamenei was installed through IRGC channels, so an Army asserting its own operational brand under a Supreme Leader it did not choose is a fault line worth watching.
Kuwait's armed forces said their air defences intercepted hostile drones on 16 July, independent, non-Iranian confirmation that the attack was real.2 A quieter reading also fits: the two forces may simply be dividing targets, with no rivalry implied. Even so, no earlier Iranian strike this war has carried a numbered Army operation's name.
