Iran has damaged 20 US military sites since the beginning of the war, satellite images and videos analysed by BBC Verify show, suggesting the attacks are more to pronounced than publicly acknowledged.
Iran has targeted key facilities across eight countries in the Middle East since the end of February, causing millions of dollars of damage to state-of the-art air defence systems, refuelling aircraft and radars.
Tehran has targeted both US bases and shared military facilities in retaliation to the US-Israeli strikes across Iran and Lebanon over the past three months. The Pentagon says it has hit more than 13,000 targets in Iran since the start of Operation Epic Fury.
Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has sought to highlight his military’s success in striking US facilities. In a statement on Tuesday he claimed the Middle East was no longer a “safe place” for American bases.
While the White House has repeatedly claimed that Iran’s military has been almost wiped out, analysts said that the damage seen at US facilities suggests that Tehran’s counter-attacks have been more precise and extensive than American officials have previously acknowledged.
A US defence official declined to comment on BBC Verify’s findings, citing “operational security reasons”.
The US has sought to limit satellite analysis of the conflict by requesting Planet, a major provider, to impose an “indefinite” restriction on new images of Iran and most of the Middle East. The company justified the move, saying that it wanted to ensure its images were not used “by adversarial actors to target allied and Nato-partner personnel and civilians”.
BBC Verify has used satellite imagery from other international providers combined with older images from Planet to track the damage caused by Iranian attacks. The facilities are in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain and Oman. The actual figure could be higher, with some analysts placing the number of bases hit as high as 28.
Among the valuable hardware damaged were three state-of-the-art anti-ballistic missile batteries systems at the Al Ruwais and Al Sader airbases in the UAE and Muwaffaq Salti Airbase in Jordan.
The US is only known to operate eight of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries, which are deployed at bases around the globe and cost around $1bn (£766m) to manufacture. Each battery needs a crew of about 100 troops to operate it while the interceptors it fires cost around $12.7m per round.
Vice-Admiral Mark Mellett, the ex-head of the Irish Defence Forces, told BBC Verify that the batteries are at the core of a “highly complex” regional defence network that cannot be “quickly or easily replaced”.
Iranian strikes have also heavily hit US refuelling and surveillance aircraft at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia, expert analysis of satellite images show, with damaged aircraft and smoking craters clearly visible.
One aircraft was identified by a MAIAR analyst as an E-3 Sentry surveillance plane. US media reported that it could cost up to $700m to replace.
Elsewhere, Iranian attacks have also targeted Ali Al Salem Airbase and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. Analysts at MAIAR identified destroyed fuel storage bunkers, aircraft hangars and troop accommodation in satellite images of the base, which was hit multiple times over the course of the conflict.
And at Camp Arifjan the defence intelligence company Janes identified extensive damage to satellite communications hardware.
