New photos obtained by the show widespread damage at US sites in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after Iranian strikes, including a destroyed Boeing E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Force Base that was ripped in half. The images, provided by active military personnel, also show flattened trailers, badly damaged buildings and a radar jet with its tail section crumpled into a tangled mass of metal.
The images were published a day after a Pentagon watchdog report said Iranian strikes had damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. That report said equipment losses totalled $3.7bn, with dozens of US aircraft damaged or destroyed and five refuelling aircraft hit on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
The photos give a sharper view of damage that had already been reported in pieces. In March, damage at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait was reported, including on satellite communications hardware, and one of the new images shows a four-storey building there damaged in an Iranian strike. Another pair of undated images, said to be from Camp Beuhring in Kuwait, shows crumpled trailers and a large tent-like structure reduced to shreds as smoke rises from the site.
But the pictures also leave gaps. They are undated, so there is no way to match each image to a specific attack, and they have not been independently verified. Even so, they were supplied by active military personnel who say the damage was not being fully communicated to the American public. One service member put it bluntly: “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
There is no clearer answer yet to the question the photos raise than the scale of the losses already spelled out in the watchdog report. The Pentagon said the US spent $33.4bn on the war up to 29 June, and the damage now visible in the images suggests the strikes on US sites in the Middle East were far broader than the public saw at the time.
