4JUN

Artesh claims Kuwait and Bahrain strikes

2 min read

10:20UTC

Iran's regular army, not the IRGC, claimed the 16 July drone strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain and named them phase ten of Operation Saeqeh.

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Key takeaway

Iran's regular army claimed the Kuwait and Bahrain strikes under its own named operation, stepping out of the IRGC's shadow.

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.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran has two separate armed forces that don't answer to a single military command: the regular Army, called Artesh, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, which is the more ideological force that has led most of the war's retaliatory strikes. This time it was Artesh, not the IRGC, that claimed credit for drone strikes on air bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, giving its campaign the name Operation Saeqeh and calling this attack its tenth phase.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Iran's constitution establishes Artesh and the IRGC as parallel, formally equal armed forces answering separately to the Supreme Leader, with neither holding overall operational primacy over the other.

That dual-track structure gives each branch an incentive to publicise its own named, numbered campaign, Artesh's Operation Saeqeh among them, rather than issue a single joint claim.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Artesh's willingness to publicise its own named campaign suggests the regular Army wants independent credit for retaliation, rather than letting the IRGC's messaging define the war's narrative.

Sources:Tech Times

Mentions:Iranian Army →Operation Saeqeh →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Kuwait →Bahrain →Jordan →Ali Al Salem Air Base →Sheikh Isa airbase →Iran-Iraq War →Iraq →Iran →Mojtaba Khamenei →Tehran →

First Reported In

Update #155 · US bombing moves inland as blockade hardens

Tech Times· 18 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Artesh claims Kuwait and Bahrain strikes

A second Iranian force is now claiming strikes under its own banner, a sign of institutional jockeying inside Tehran's war effort.

Led to

Iran fires back across the Gulf again

The Army's named Operation Saeqeh phase 10 followed the 14 July Gulf-wide retaliation.

Occurred 14 Jul 2026

Read story →

Iran's army widens Saeqeh to three states

The 16 July Artesh claim on Kuwait and Bahrain preceded and matches the widened 18 July phase-14/15 claim.

Occurred 18 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Kuwait

Kuwait absorbed the Iranian strike that knocked generating units offline at a combined power-and-desalination plant on 17 July, the event that finally moved freight and insurance in lockstep with Brent. The strike hit essential civilian infrastructure, not a trading desk's benchmark.

Asian buyers (Singapore)

Singapore's middle distillates rose 12% month-to-date to 8.91m barrels and fuel oil passed 19m barrels on a 105% net-import surge, buyers retaining barrels as the East-West arbitrage window narrows. Cargoes are being stockpiled ahead of further Hormuz-driven freight repricing rather than released west.

Austria (Coreper holdout)

Vienna is blocking the same package over roughly EUR 2bn of frozen Russian assets earmarked for Raiffeisen, a domestic banking dispute with no connection to the oil cap racing toward its 23 July expiry. The linkage forces the whole package to wait on a bilateral compensation fight.

Greece (Coreper holdout)

Athens is holding the 21st sanctions package at the 22 July Coreper vote over Russian LNG re-export rights, a condition unrelated to the oil price cap itself, leaving the $44.10 freeze one day from expiry without a deal. Greece's own tanker registry gives it a direct stake in how any shadow-fleet measures are drafted.

Marine underwriters (Gulf war-risk)

Hull war-risk cover for Hormuz transits widened to a 3-10% band on 17 July with 5% the emerging norm, up from a 3-4% baseline set in late June, the first repricing in six weeks to track a flat-price move rather than lag it. Cover resets on actuarial evidence of loss, not on diplomatic or price signals.

Money managers (CFTC-tracked)

The CFTC's week-to-14-July snapshot, released 17 July, showed WTI managed-money net long collapsing 69% to 19,783 contracts and a standalone 60,141-contract net short on Brent Last Day (NYMEX). Both readings predate the Kuwait strike and the 20 July escalation, so any covering since is not yet visible in public data.