• Geopolitics
• United States
• Iran

June 23, 2025, 1:36 PM View Comments ()

Iran launched a number of ballistic missiles at a key U.S. base in Qatar on Monday, the first of its reprisals for the surprise U.S. strike over the weekend that took aim at critical elements of Iran’s underground nuclear infrastructure.

Initial reports suggested Iran fired at least 6 missiles toward Qatar, with witnesses on the ground reporting explosions in the capital of Doha and video showing what appeared to be air defences deploying to intercept the incoming missiles. The attack came less than an hour after Qatari authorities closed the country’s airspace, and after the U.S. and U.K. embassies had advised their citizens to shelter in place. Iranian state media also said the country was targeting U.S. military facilities in Iraq, but a U.S. defense official told Reuters that no bases other than the one in Qatar had been attacked.

The Trump administration is monitoring the Iranian response from the Situation Room, a White House official said.

A spokesperson for the Qatari Foreign Ministry said that Qatar intercepted all the missiles and that there were no casualties. “We consider this a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the State of Qatar, its airspace, international law, and the United Nations Charter. We affirm that Qatar reserves the right to respond directly in a manner equivalent with the nature and scale of this brazen aggression, in line with international law,” said Majed al-Ansari on X.

Qatar, and particularly the al-Udeid air base, was clearly going to be in the crosshairs for the reprisals that Iran promised in the immediate aftermath of the weekend “bunker-buster” strikes. Al-Udeid, built in the mid-1990s, became the forward headquarters for U.S. Central Command and a key staging post for two decades of U.S. military operations in the Middle East. The facility hosts approximately 10,000 U.S. servicemen, and the airbase also serves the Royal Air Force and Qatar itself. U.S. planes had been moved off the tarmac days before the U.S. joined Israel’s attacks on Iran.

The New York Times reported that Iran had coordinated the symbolic reprisal attacks with Qatar to minimize casualties, similar to Iran’s response five years ago after the U.S. killing of one of its top generals. The orchestrated response could allow Iran to defuse domestic demands for retaliation while maintaining the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse.

Oil markets certainly did not take the reprisals as a harbinger of wider conflict: The price of benchmark crudes in London and New York both fell sharply after the missile attacks.

This is a developing story.