TEHRAN — Wave after wave, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has struck US air bases across four countries in a sustained campaign that has reshaped the security architecture of the Middle East and choked one of the world’s most consequential waterways. The operation, which Tehran has branded True Promise 4, did not begin with a single dramatic night raid. It has been rolling since February 28, 2026, launched hours after the United States and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in coordinated strikes that Tehran called an act of unprovoked aggression.
The targets have been deliberate and symbolic in equal measure. The Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, which houses drone command centers, aircraft maintenance facilities, and the US-led coalition’s operations hub, was declared by the IRGC to have been rendered out of service. At Mina Salman naval base in Bahrain, four drones struck command and support centers, the IRGC said. The Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, one of America’s most strategically sensitive installations in the Gulf, was also targeted, as was Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain, the hub through which the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet projects power across the Arabian Sea.
The IRGC reported deploying some of its most advanced munitions in the campaign, including Kheibar Shekan ballistic missiles, whose 1,450-kilometer range and high maneuverability are specifically designed to evade modern interceptor systems, along with Emad, Qadr, and Haj Qassem variants and swarms of Shahed-136 loitering munitions intended to saturate air defenses before the heavier payloads arrived.
The campaign escalated within days of its opening salvo. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the entire Middle East, was targeted in the early waves, along with facilities in the UAE and bases in Bahrain’s Juffair region. Iranian forces also struck the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters directly, according to IRGC statements, while separate IRGC Navy communiqués warned vessels in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Sea of Oman to report suspicious activity to Iranian naval stations.
That warning was not rhetorical. Starting on March 4, Iran formally closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s petroleum and an equivalent share of liquefied natural gas flows each year. Iranian naval forces boarded merchant vessels, attacked tankers, and laid mines in the strait’s navigable channels. Three US and British-affiliated oil tankers were struck in the Gulf and in the approaches to Hormuz within the first week of the closure. Shipping traffic, which had averaged around 3,000 vessels per month before the conflict, collapsed to roughly five percent of that level, according to reports from the British House of Commons Library.
The scale of the air base strikes grew as the weeks passed. By mid-March, the IRGC had conducted more than 60 separate waves of the operation, a pace that had no precedent in previous Iranian military campaigns. The 62nd wave struck four Israeli cities simultaneously while also hitting Al Dhafra, Ali al-Salem, and Al-Azraq facilities again. By the 67th wave, on March 20, the IRGC dedicated the operation to Brigadier General Ali Mohammad Naeini, its spokesman killed by an Israeli strike, and targeted early-warning radar systems and missile defense installations at the Al-Wafa base alongside the Ali al-Salem complex. By the 80th wave, on March 25, the IRGC’s Aerospace Force was conducting what it described as support operations for Hezbollah offensives in southern Lebanon, extending the geographic scope of the conflict from the Gulf to the Levant.
The strikes followed a pattern that the IRGC itself narrated in real time. Each wave came with a formal statement identifying the specific bases targeted, the missile systems deployed, and the political dedication — many of the later waves were explicitly framed as responses to Israeli strikes that had killed IRGC commanders or civilian infrastructure inside Iran. The statement accompanying the 62nd wave declared that the air defenses of the US and Israel had been “disabled” before the missiles landed, a claim that Western and Israeli officials disputed.
American officials acknowledged attacks on US facilities in the region but did not confirm specific casualty figures from the base strikes, a posture consistent with how Washington handled the aftermath of the January 2020 IRGC attack on Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq, when more than 100 service members ultimately received traumatic brain injury diagnoses even as the administration initially reported no casualties. The Congressional Research Service later put the direct financial cost of the 2026 conflict at roughly $85 billion, per earlier reporting by Eastern Herald, and placed the number of US aircraft lost in the conflict at 42.
The IRGC also targeted infrastructure that extended well beyond military installations. Saudi Arabia’s Jubail industrial complex, one of the world’s largest petrochemical hubs, was struck, sending oil prices surging past $115 a barrel at one point. Iranian attacks hit shipping and energy facilities in the strait itself, halted flights across the region, and forced production stoppages in countries from Qatar to Iraq. Gulf states, which had relied on US security guarantees for decades, found themselves absorbing collateral damage from a conflict they had not chosen. Arab governments began questioning publicly whether American protection was worth the exposure it was now bringing them, a fracture that European backchannel diplomats have been working to repair, as reported by Eastern Herald.
The strikes also introduced a persistent question about the Iran-Israel war’s trajectory. The IRGC closed the Strait of Hormuz, a move Iran had previously declined to take even during the June 2025 conflict. Officials of the IRGC at one point suggested that Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen could be directed to close the Bab el-Mandeb strait as well, which would effectively blockade global shipping from two directions simultaneously. The United States responded by launching an aerial campaign against Iranian naval vessels along the strait beginning March 19 and by imposing a naval blockade of Iranian ports from April 13.
Ceasefire negotiations have been underway in fits and starts. As of late May, Trump administration officials were engaged in back-channel diplomacy involving a framework that would see the Strait of Hormuz reopened in exchange for a suspension of US strikes on Iran’s remaining military infrastructure. Tehran, for its part, has insisted it will not reopen the strait without compensation for war damages, a position that has complicated the talks. Iranian forces warned that any further strikes on civilian targets would bring a response of a scale not yet seen in the campaign.
The IRGC’s statements have maintained that True Promise 4 remains active and ongoing. Each new wave has been numbered and formally announced. The operation began as a retaliatory campaign and has acquired its own momentum, with each Israeli or American strike on Iranian soil resetting the clock. Whether the eventual ceasefire, if it holds, will formally end the operation or simply pause it remains one of the central unresolved questions of a conflict that has, in three months, fundamentally altered energy markets, Gulf security arrangements, and the United States’ forward military posture in the region it has dominated since the end of the Cold War.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
