President Donald Trump said in a social media post that no Americans were harmed and “hardly any damage was done.”
The U.S. has military sites spread across the region, including in Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.
The sprawling facility hosts thousands of U.S. service members and served as a major staging ground for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the height of both, Al Udeid housed some 10,000 U.S. troops, and that number dropped to about 8,000 as of 2022.
The forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command, Al Udeid is built on a flat stretch of desert about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Qatar’s capital, Doha.
Over two decades, the gas-rich Gulf country has spent some $8 billion in developing the base, once considered so sensitive that American military officers would say only that it was somewhere “in southwest Asia.”
Trump visited the air base during a trip to the region last month.
It was the first time a sitting U.S. president had traveled to the installation in more than 20 years.
Last week, ahead of the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Al Udeid saw many of the transport planes, fighter jets and drones typically on its tarmac dispersed. In a June 18 satellite photo taken by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press, the air base’s tarmac had emptied.
The U.S. military has not acknowledged the change, which came after ships off the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet base in Bahrain also had dispersed. That’s typically a military strategy to ensure your fighting ships and planes aren’t destroyed in case of an attack.
