Iran Attack on Bahrain: Did the IRGC Hit a U.S. Radar?

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has claimed that its Aerospace Force targeted and destroyed a U.S. early warning radar on the island of Bahrain, presenting it as retaliation for an air attack on a telecommunications tower in Sirik, on the Hormozgan coast of the Strait of Hormuz. The Guards issued the claim in the early hours of November 13, stating that the strike had been carried out a few hours earlier and calling it “a serious warning to the aggressor enemy” over what they described as aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the strait. The statement did not identify the radar type, its location or any casualties, and neither the U.S. military nor the government of Bahrain had commented by the morning of November 13. The claimed attack on Bahrain highlights how strikes on Iran’s Hormuz coastline, even when no state claims them, are now answered with declared attacks on American military assets hosted by Gulf states.

Iranian official sources described the Sirik incident of November 12 as an enemy attack but gave no details of damage, casualties or the attacker, and no government has claimed responsibility for it. The Guards went further than the radar claim, warning that companies cooperating with the United States over oil shipments through Hormuz would face “more severe penalties” and stating that their forces were fully prepared for unlimited confrontation should such attacks be repeated. The statement follows the Guards’ claimed strike on navigation installations on Oman’s Didamar Island and a run of Iranian claims that tankers have struck mines in the strait, with the U.S. naval blockade of Iran’s coast continuing in parallel.

Bahrain hosts Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the headquarters of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and the island sits less than 300 kilometres from Iran’s southern coast, well within range of Iran’s missiles and drones. The base was among the first American facilities struck after the Iran War began on February 28, with satellite imagery taken after those attacks showing large radomes and satellite communications terminals at the site destroyed, although the Pentagon has not published a full account of the damage. Radars and communications sites were among the first targets of Iranian strikes across the region in the opening days of the war, as they provide the early warning on which Gulf and American missile defences depend.

The claim came hours after President Donald Trump said in a White House interview that Gulf states had urged him to hold off renewed large-scale strikes on Iran, stating: “Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while.” Trump added that he was not sure he agreed with that position, a day after he had said the United States did not need a deal with Tehran. No imagery showing damage at any site in Bahrain had been published by the morning of November 13, and the Guards’ claim has not been independently verified.