Iran hits back at multiple Gulf refineries after Israeli strike on its offshore gas field
Dubai (AP): Iran intensified its attacks on its Gulf Arab neighbours' energy sites Thursday, hitting a Saudi refinery on the Red Sea and setting Qatari liquefied natural gas facilities and two Kuwaiti oil refineries ablaze as it struck back following an Israeli attack on its main natural gas field, a major escalation in the Mideast war that has sent global fuel prices soaring.
Brent crude oil, the international standard, spiked to USD 114 a barrel as global fears of an energy crisis rose, up more than 57 per cent since Israel and the United States started the war February 28 with strikes on Iran.
A ship was set ablaze off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and another was damaged off Qatar, underscoring the ever-present danger also facing vessels due to Iran's stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway through which a fifth of the world's oil is transported.
Saudi Arabia had begun pumping large volumes of oil west to avoid the strait and ship it from the Red Sea, but the security of that route was called into question after Iran's drone hit the country's SAMREF refinery in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu.
Qatar, a key source of natural gas for world markets, said firefighters put out a blaze at a major LNG facility after it was hit by Iranian missiles. Production had already been halted there after earlier attacks but it said the latest wave of missiles caused “sizable fires and extensive further damage.”
Damage to the facility could delay Qatar in getting its supplies to the market even after the Iran war ends.
A drone attack on Kuwait's Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery sparked a fire but caused no injuries, the state-run KUNA news agency reported. The refinery is one of the biggest in the Middle East, with a petroleum production capacity of 730,000 barrels per day. Shortly after, a drone attack set ablaze the nearby Mina Abdullah refinery, officials said.
Authorities in Abu Dhabi said they were forced to shut down operations at its Habshan gas facility and Bab field, calling Iranian overnight attacks on the sites a “dangerous escalation.”
Gulf states condemn Iranian attacks on energy infrastructure
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Missile alert sirens sounded in multiple other areas around the Gulf, and Israel warned of incoming Iranian fire multiple times.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all denounced the Iranian attacks, with Saudi Arabia's top diplomat saying assaults on the kingdom meant “what little trust there was before has completely been shattered.”
But Iran showed no signs of relenting, with Saudi Arabia intercepting six drones in Riyadh and Eastern province before saying that the SAMREF refinery was hit. The Saudi Defence Ministry said damage assessment was underway at SAMREF, a joint venture between the kingdom's oil giant Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil.
In Israel, more than a half dozen waves of Iranian attacks targeting large parts of the country sent millions of people to shelters. The strikes caused damage to buildings but no significant casualties were reported.
Iran strikes back after Israel hits critical gas field
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The Iranian attacks came after Israel hit South Pars, the Iranian part of the world's largest gas field located offshore in the Persian Gulf and owned jointly with Qatar.
With some 80 per cent of all power generated in Iran coming from natural gas, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, the attack directly threatens the country's electricity supplies. Natural gas is also used to supply household heating and cooking across the Islamic Republic.
Hitting the gas field is a “clear expansion of the conflict,” the New York-based Soufan Centre said in a research note.
“Israel's target selection in this war has heavily focused on the institutions, leaders and infrastructure," the think tank said. "It now seeks to inflict additional pressure on the regime by making the living conditions for civilians intolerable.”
Iran condemned the strike on South Pars, with President Masoud Pezeshkian warning of “uncontrollable consequences" that "could engulf the entire world.”
In Washington, President Donald Trump said that Israel would not attack South Pars again, but warned on social media that if Iran continued striking Qatar's energy infrastructure, the US would retaliate and “massively blow up the entirety” of the field.
“I do not want to authorise this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran,” Trump said on social media.
Energy infrastructure targeted around Gulf region
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Qatar Energy said on X that a missile hit on its massive Ras Laffan LNG facility caused the blaze early Thursday.
A ship was also hit off the country's coast, according to the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre. It was not clear whether it was deliberately targeted or was struck by falling debris as Qatar fired off missile interceptors at incoming Iranian barrages.
Saudi Arabia also reported downing Iranian drones targeting its natural gas facilities overnight, and authorities in Abu Dhabi shut down the Habshan gas facility and Bab field after interceptions over the sites.
Another ship was set ablaze early Thursday off the UAE coast. It was also unclear whether it was targeted or hit with debris, the UKMTO said. It said the vessel was just off the coast of Khor Fakkan, near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil is normally shipped.
More than 20 vessels have been attacked during the Iran war so far as Tehran has kept a tight grip on shipping traffic through the waterway, which leads from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean.
Iran insists the waterway is open, just not to the US or its allies, and while some vessels have sailed through, it has only been a trickle.
Iran executes 3 men detained during January protests
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Iran announced the execution of three men detained in January's nationwide protests, the first such sentences known to have been carried out, the judiciary's Mizan news agency reported.
The men were accused of stabbing two police officers to death in Qom, some 130 kilometres south of the capital, Tehran, during the protests.
Iran put down the demonstrations with intense violence that killed thousands of people and saw tens of thousands others detained, and activists have warned that authorities might carry out mass executions of those detained.
Iran long has been accused by rights campaigners of extracting coerced confessions from detainees and not allowing them to fully defend themselves in court.
Death toll climbs in third week of war
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More than 1,300 people in Iran have been killed during the war. Israeli strikes have displaced more than 1 million Lebanese — roughly 20 per cent of the population — according to the Lebanese government, which says 968 people have been killed.
In Israel, 15 people have been killed by Iranian missile fire, including a Thai agricultural worker who died overnight after getting hit with shrapnel. Three people were also killed in the occupied West Bank overnight by an Iranian missile strike, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
At least 13 US military members have been killed.
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Trump faces his most difficult Iran war decision: Will he deploy US troops to seize uranium?
Washington (AP): President Donald Trump is facing perhaps the most daunting question of the war with Iran, one that could define his time in office: Will he put US troops on the ground in Iran to secure some 970 pounds of enriched uranium that Tehran could potentially use to build nuclear weapons?
Trump has offered shifting reasons for launching the war, but he has been consistent in articulating that a primary objective in joining Israel in the military action is ensuring that Iran will “never have a nuclear weapon”.
The president has been more circumspect about how far he's willing to go to follow through on his pledge to destroy Iran's weapons programme once and for all, including seizing or destroying the near-bomb-grade nuclear material that Iran possesses.
Much of it is believed to be buried under the rubble of a mountain facility pummelled in US bombings Trump ordered last June that he had claimed “obliterated” Tehran's nuclear programme.
It's a risky, complicated project that many nuclear experts say cannot be done without a sizable deployment of US troops into Iran, a dangerous and politically fraught operation for the Republican president, who has vowed not to entangle the US in the sort of extended and bloody Middle East conflicts that still loom large on America's psyche.
At the same time, lawmakers and experts remain concerned that if Iran hard-liners emerge from the fighting, they'll be more motivated than ever to build nuclear weapons as they look to deter the US and Israel from future military action, a dynamic that makes taking control of Iran's enriched uranium even more critical.
That stockpile could allow Iran to build as many as 10 nuclear bombs, should it decide to weaponise its programme.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., say they remain deeply fearful that the president has put the nation on a path that will require putting troops inside Iran for what he called Trump's confused and chaotic objectives.
“Some of the objectives that he continues to espouse simply cannot be achieved without a physical presence there -- securing the uranium cannot be done without a physical presence," said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Meanwhile, Republican allies of Trump stress that there are plans in place to deal with the enriched uranium. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman James Risch, R-Idaho, on Wednesday cited “a number of plans that have been put on the table”. He declined to elaborate.
Others acknowledged the complications of deploying troops into Iran.
“No one has given me a briefing on how you would do it without boots on the ground,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It doesn't mean you can't. But no one's ever briefed me about it.”
Scott added it's not tenable to allow the stockpile to remain: “I think it would be helpful to get rid of it.”
Trump and his advisers are rigidly obtuse
Nearly three weeks into a conflict that's left hundreds of people dead, tested longtime alliances and brought pain to the global economy, Trump and his top advisers have been rigidly obtuse about their deliberations over Iran's uranium stockpile.
“I'm not going to talk about that,” Trump said last week when asked about the enriched uranium. “But we have hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we're not finished yet.”
Later that day, during an appearance in Kentucky, Trump appeared to claim the strikes had already neutralised the threat. “They don't have nuclear potential," he said.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters earlier this week that the administration sees no point in telegraphing “what we're willing to do or how far we're willing to go" while asserting "we have options, for sure.”
Experts say it's doable but won't be easy
Richard Goldberg, who served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the National Security Council during Trump's first term, said that seizing or destroying the enriched uranium is certainly doable, if the president decides to go that route.
The US and Israeli forces have been making strides toward creating the conditions — namely, establishing total air superiority — that would allow for special operations forces operators, who are trained in blowing up centrifuges and dealing with nuclear material, to conduct such an operation if the president decides to go that route.
To be certain, a troops-on-the-ground effort is expected to be far more complicated than other recent high-profile, lightning-strike insertion operations, such as the January capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro or the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, Goldberg said. And the likely need to remove rubble to get to the canisters of enriched uranium adds another layer of complexity, because it would require heavy construction equipment.
"But if you actually own the airspace and you can have close air support and drones and everything else up in the sky for pretty wide perimeter, presumably you could do a lot,” said Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told reporters in Washington this week that the assumption is much of the enriched uranium remains in the trio of Iranian nuclear sites bombarded last year by the US.
“The impression we have … is that it hasn't been moved,” said Grossi, adding that a bulk of the material is beneath the rubble at Iran's Isfahan facility while lesser amounts are at the Natanz and Fordow facilities that were destroyed in last year's American strikes.
Testifying before a Senate committee on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in her prepared remarks said the US attacks on Iran had “obliterated” Iran's nuclear enrichment programme and buried underground facilities.
Gabbard said the US has been monitoring whether Iran's leaders will try to restart its nuclear programme but said that they have not tried to rebuild their nuclear enrichment capability. She added that the clerical authority overseeing Iranian government has been degraded in Israel's strikes on its leadership but remains intact.
Brandan Buck, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute, said that an effort to extract or dilute the enriched material would likely take more than 1,000 troops at each Iranian site and would take time to complete.
On the other hand, not acting to secure the enriched uranium also comes with risk. Should Iran's hard-liners remain in power, and with enriched material, they will now have greater motivation to build a nuclear weapon.
“Trump has put himself between a rock and a hard place,” Buck said. “Throughout this, he has had maximalist aims, but he's wanted to maintain minimal effort in order to keep the costs low.”
