Iran's IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, claimed a 22nd-wave drone strike on Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, saying it destroyed an early-warning radar and an MQ-9 drone shelter and set several drones alight 1. Kuwait has confirmed none of it. The Artesh, Iran's conventional army, had already claimed Ali Al-Salem on 16 July, logging that strike as the tenth phase of Operation Saeqeh . Two Iranian services have now put their names on the same Kuwaiti base within four days, under two separate campaign banners.
Ali Al-Salem lies west of Kuwait City and hosts US air operations, among them the MQ-9 Reaper, a long-endurance armed surveillance aircraft flown without a crew aboard. Of the two claims, the radar matters more. Early-warning radars cue the air defences Kuwait has been firing since the middle of the month, and a gap in that coverage would show up as slower interception rather than as a headline. Kuwaiti radars have been targeted before: drones hit Kuwait International Airport's radar in March, on the same day two of seven drones got through at Ahmed al-Jaber Air Base .
The claim reached the public through Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, with no independent verification attached. The specificity is doing persuasive work rather than evidential work: naming a radar type and a shelter reads as more credible than a round casualty number while staying just as impossible to check from outside Kuwait. What Kuwait has itself confirmed this week runs to a plant on fire, an airport that stopped, and citizens told to use less water.
