Mother of All Bombs for Iran: What It Means for Egypt

Washington has been thinning its diplomatic presence across the Gulf, but only Saudi Arabia got an order to leave now. The reason is the kind of war the kingdom is fighting. Iran, for all its threats, is a state. It strikes American targets, or Gulf facilities in revenge for American action, and a state’s war has edges that can be read. The war on Saudi Arabia does not. The Houthis are hitting airports, water stations and oil installations at the same time, with no visible red line and no sense of where their escalation ends. They are a militia, not a government with a foreign ministry and a negotiating track, so there is no one to bargain with. The State Department cited exactly this: Iran-backed Houthi attacks on civilian airports and critical infrastructure.

They are also being hit hard. The Houthis said this week that the Saudi air force struck them 80 times in a single day, a tempo more usually associated with American air campaigns; on 18 October they claimed 110 Saudi strikes in 24 hours. A movement taking that kind of punishment and answering it by hitting infrastructure is betting on one thing: that Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure breaks first.

That bet will fail. Saudi Arabia is the largest state in the Gulf and can absorb these attacks and answer them, much as Ukraine has absorbed years of Russian strikes on its power grid and kept fighting. But the State Department’s order shows that even Washington will not bet its own people on that contest. What has changed is the nature of the Saudi question. It is no longer about investment or giga-projects. It is military. When Riyadh talks to other capitals now, it is not asking for economic plans. It is asking for armies, and whoever comes knows they are walking onto a firing line.

The staff departures are one part of a broader picture. The war with Iran began on 28 February 2026 with American and Israeli strikes and has been paused, not ended. NBC News reported on 22 October, as summarised by Israel National News, that the Pentagon has quietly been moving personnel out of bases in Jordan, Qatar and Kuwait. Jordan matters most here. Through earlier rounds of this war, American forces left other Gulf bases but stayed in Jordan and Israel. Pulling people out of Jordan now means the planners expect the next round to reach places that were safe in the last one. Iran has promised exactly that: if the war resumes, it says, it will go after American bases wherever they are in the Middle East.

Trump has made the direction clear. “We are going to have something one way or the other that’ll happen fairly soon,” he said, adding: “Most people seem to think it’s after the election.” The New York Times has reported that American and Israeli military plans for renewed strikes are aimed at the period after the 3 November midterms, and ABC News reported the same post-election timing. Our reading is that there will be no return to full war before the start of November. Exchanges of fire are possible; a full war in the next ten days is not likely. But the risk is climbing fast.

The weapons will be different this time. Trump has repeatedly said that America would come back with weapons it had not used before, and the MOAB plans are the clearest sign yet. Washington has held back some of its newest munitions for a reason. Iran has said it recovered unexploded American bombs, such as the Mk 84 and Mk 82, and reverse-engineered them. Anything that falls into Iranian hands can find its way to China. If the war resumes, that caution looks set to give way.

The other variable is Russia. Washington has eased some sanctions on Moscow and is betting that Vladimir Putin will not stand with Iran as he did before. The United States will not return to war until it knows where Russia stands, because a war with Russian help for Iran is a different war altogether. (We examined Moscow’s role in Is Russia Helping Iran and the Houthis Against Saudi Arabia?)

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known by its initials as the MOAB and nicknamed the “mother of all bombs”, is the largest non-nuclear bomb in the American arsenal. It weighs about 21,600 pounds (9,800 kg), is too big for a bomber’s bomb bay and is pushed out of the rear ramp of an MC-130 transport before a parachute pulls it clear and GPS steers it to the target. It was developed in 2003 and first used in combat on 13 April 2017, against an Islamic State cave and tunnel complex in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan.

The MOAB is an air-burst weapon. It destroys what is on and near the surface across a wide area; it is not a deep penetrator like the 30,000-pound GBU-57 used against Iran’s Fordow site in June 2025. According to the CNN report, plans to strike Iranian nuclear sites, including Pickaxe Mountain near Natanz, explicitly call for the MOAB, while some officials doubt it can reach facilities buried under granite. Its wide blast radius also raises the risk to civilians. Using it would still be a signal: Washington is prepared to put weapons on the table that it has so far kept back.

Iran is escalating too. According to CNN, Tehran has told Trump he will be stunned by the scale of its revenge if the war resumes. The threats are loud because Iran’s strategy has failed. Over the past month it set the Houthis on Saudi Arabia so that Riyadh would press Washington to keep the war from returning. It tried to close the Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz. None of it worked; America is coming back regardless. So Iran’s remaining bet is deterrence by pain: inflicting the heaviest possible losses on American forces and Gulf infrastructure so that Washington cannot finish the war. It is the same method the Houthis use on Saudi Arabia, hitting infrastructure to push Riyadh out of Yemen.

The latest threat is the internet. On 21 October the Revolutionary Guards’ political deputy, Yadollah Javani, warned that the cables under the Strait of Hormuz could be targeted if Iranian infrastructure is hit. Cutting deep, buried seabed cables is not easy, but the intent is clear: cut the Gulf off and you cut off American data centres in the region and disrupt communications inside American forces. Qatar answered first. At his weekly briefing on 20 October, foreign ministry spokesman Ibrahim Al Hashmi asked who the biggest victim would be: not the United States, separated from Hormuz by an ocean, and not Israel, which does not depend on Gulf waters, but the countries of the region, the Iranian people included.

Israeli outlets, meanwhile, report Israeli exercises for strikes on Iran’s energy facilities. If Iran’s energy sector is hit, Iran will answer in the Gulf. Saudi energy infrastructure would then be exposed to the Houthis and to Iran at once, at a time when air-defence stocks are already running short.

This is the backdrop against which Egypt has made its choice, and the bill has arrived before a single Egyptian unit has deployed. The Egyptian stock market lost around 1,000 points on 22 October, and some investors are leaving for a simple reason: Egypt has put itself inside the game. Brent crude climbed about 3 percent to around $112 a barrel on Houthi strikes against Saudi targets.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi spoke about that pressure himself at Egypt Forum 2026 on 22 October. He said the state carries most of the real cost of energy and that its limited resources often force it to borrow, and he warned that the burden of global oil prices exceeds what Egypt can bear. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said the budget was built on oil at $75 a barrel, against about $110 now. Egypt’s petroleum minister spoke of sector debts running into the trillions of pounds.

One Egyptian writer asked this week how a country whose borders are on fire in four directions can send an army to Saudi Arabia. The question deserves an answer, because the premise is true. Sudan’s war is not over, and Egypt does not control its course. Libya is unstable, and its authorities have signed a maritime agreement with Türkiye (Turkey) that encroaches on Egypt’s sovereign maritime boundaries. Israel wants to push Gaza’s Palestinians out, and is using the Gulf war as cover to kill and displace them.

Until now, Egypt had absorbed the costs of the Gulf war because it stood outside it. It kept channels open to the Houthis, to Iran and to every Gulf state, and that policy worked. A single statement from Sisi that Egypt will not leave Saudi Arabia alone has changed that. Egypt is paying for this war before it has entered it. It will enter anyway.

Some critics say Egypt’s support is limited and defensive, so it hardly counts. They have it wrong. Look at the others. Türkiye is still debating, and its government needs parliament’s approval before any deployment, a vote that every new American departure makes harder for a country with its own economic troubles. Pakistan is weighing its options. The United States is looking after its own interests. France has sent forces, but few of them: air defences and aircraft, not ground troops. Egypt is sending ground forces, and its parliament is due to vote on the deployment on 26 October.

That is why Cairo talks about this so often. Egypt is serious, and the Egyptian army does not deploy to make up the numbers. When it moves, it has to change the result, which means moving large military assets to a Saudi side that needs them now and faces a war on more than one front. Some American outlets have reported that Egyptian forces would guard Saudi Arabia’s northern borders rather than the southern front with the Houthis. And Iran says that if it is attacked this time, it will move on the ground. Egypt’s presence on the ground could end up larger than anyone imagines. (On how Cairo has defined the mission, see Why Is Egypt Sending Troops as US Staff Leave Saudi Arabia? and Iran’s warning to Cairo.)

Then a voice on social media declared that Saudi Arabia does not need the Egyptians and never asked for their help. The remark was a provocation, and it changes nothing. Egypt deals with states, not with a tweet or a comment. Saudi Arabia stood with Egypt in its darkest hours, and Egypt will stand with Saudi Arabia in its darkest hour. It will not abandon it.