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 alight1. 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.
