IRGC says 24th wave of Operation Nasr 2 disabled radars at Kuwait's Ali al-Salem and Bubiyan Island

At 19:22 UTC on 21 July 2026, the public relations office of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that the "tactical set of radars in Ali al-Salem base and Bubiyan Island were taken out of operation," the opening line of the regime's 24th wave of Operation Nasr 2. Tasnim News and Fars News carried the statement within minutes. By 20:05 UTC, the IRGC had elaborated, claiming destruction of an early-warning radar and a group of tactical radars near Ali al-Salem Air Base, with further targets described on Bubiyan Island, Kuwaiti territory that hosts a Kuwaiti-US joint operations facility and, at various points over the past decade, US Army pre-positioned stocks and Air Force rotational deployments. The targets, if confirmed, would not be in Iran, would not be in Iraq, and would not be in the Gulf. They would be on the soil of a Gulf Cooperation Council state that has, until now, avoided direct involvement in the US-Iran war.

The geography is the story. Operation Nasr 2 began as an Iranian retaliation campaign against US positions across the Gulf and Mesopotamia; with each successive wave the targets have moved further from Iran's borders, and with each new country identified in the crosshairs, the coalition posture that has allowed the United States to project force across the region becomes harder to sustain. Kuwait is a treaty ally of the United States under a 1991 bilateral defense agreement. Striking its air base, even by deniable proxy, asks Kuwait's government a question it has so far answered by looking away.

What the IRGC actually claimed

The IRGC's statement, distributed via Tasnim and Fars in English, names three categories of target: an early-warning radar, a complex of tactical radar stations, and an unspecified radar system on Kuwait's Bubiyan Island. The bulletin credits "the grace of God Almighty and the guidance of the Supreme Commander" and frames the operation as defensive retaliation for what Iran calls US aggression. The channel "Fotros Resistance," one of several Telegram outlets that re-distribute Iranian regional-military communiques, added Bubiyan Island to the target list at 19:26 UTC. By 19:47 UTC the X account @sprinter99800 was reporting, in English, that the radar complex at Ali al-Salem and on Bubiyan Island had been "disabled." None of the four Iranian-aligned sources provide photographic evidence, coordinates, or independent verification; all four cite the IRGC's public relations office as the sole source.

This is the same pattern that has accompanied every prior wave of Nasr 2: a single Iranian institutional voice, amplified across state-aligned outlets, with no on-the-record confirmation from any third party. The Gulf states involved have historically responded to such claims with silence, neither confirming nor denying, a posture that has the practical effect of leaving Tehran's narrative uncontested in regional media while preserving Kuwait's diplomatic position.

What Kuwait and the United States have not said

As of 21 July 2026 at 20:05 UTC, no Kuwaiti Ministry of Defence statement, no US Central Command release, and no Allied Air Forces Public Affairs bulletin had been published in response. That absence is itself a kind of information. A confirmed strike on a Kuwaiti-hosted radar system would, under the 1991 defense agreement, trigger an immediate US-Kuwaiti consultation mechanism and almost certainly a public statement from at least one of the two capitals within hours. The vacuum suggests one of three things: the strike did not occur as described, the strike occurred but did limited damage the operators prefer not to advertise, or the strike is still being assessed and a coordinated statement is being prepared.

The third reading is the most plausible. The IRGC's previous claims of strikes on US positions in Iraq and the Gulf have, in several cases, been quietly confirmed weeks later by US force-protection updates that disclosed equipment damage without naming Iran. The pattern allows Washington to avoid escalation headlines while acknowledging the operational reality to its own forces.

Why Bubiyan Island matters

Bubiyan Island sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, a few kilometres from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr and the Iranian coast at Abadan. Kuwaiti sovereignty over the island was disputed by Iraq until 1994 and is still occasionally the subject of Iranian parliamentary posturing. The island's military significance is twofold: it offers unobstructed radar coverage of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and the northern Gulf, and it provides a staging ground that can monitor Iranian naval movements out of Bandar-e Mahshahr and Khorramshahr without crossing into Iranian airspace. For Iran's air defence planners, a functioning radar on Bubiyan is the single most effective early-warning node for tracking any retaliatory Iranian strike package departing the southern coast. Taking it offline, even temporarily, narrows the detection window for the next Iranian salvo.

Ali al-Salem Air Base, roughly 50 kilometres southwest of Kuwait City, hosts Kuwaiti Air Force F/A-18s and has, at various points since 2011, hosted US Air Force F-15E strike packages rotating into the US Central Command area of responsibility. It is also the base from which coalition aircraft operated during the 1991 liberation of Kuwait and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Striking it symbolically places Iran in confrontation with the infrastructure of the two prior US Gulf wars.

The widening war, in plain prose

What we are watching is not a regional skirmish but a slow-motion expansion of the US-Iran war across the territory of states that did not consent to be a battlefield. Earlier waves of Operation Nasr 2, as reported across Iranian state media, hit facilities in Iraq, in Syria, and in the Gulf itself. Each new country named in the crosshairs narrows the practical options for the United States: defend every base in every partner state and the force posture becomes unworkable; leave even one base undefended and the deterrent message collapses. Tehran's calculation appears to be that the cumulative political cost of asking every Gulf host to absorb a strike, in succession, will eventually produce either a withdrawal of US presence or a Kuwaiti-Iraqi refusal to renew basing arrangements.

This is a war of position fought with communiques. The IRGC's bulletins are not primarily intelligence products; they are political instruments, designed to be read in Tehran, in Washington, and in every Gulf ministry of defence simultaneously. The question the bulletins put to Kuwait's rulers is not "did we hit your radar" but "how many of these statements will you absorb before you ask the Americans to leave."

What remains uncertain

The sources provided to Monexus do not include independent confirmation of the strike from US, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, or independent OSINT observers. Satellite imagery of Bubiyan Island and Ali al-Salem would, within hours, show scorched radomes or intact ones; none has been published in the inputs available to this article. The IRGC's terminology ("taken out of operation," "disabled") is broader than "destroyed" and could describe anything from a software disruption to a permanent loss. Casualty figures have not been released by any party. Until at least one of those data points becomes public, the responsible framing is that Iran says it struck, and the world is waiting for someone with independent access to confirm or to deny.

That waiting is itself the point. The longer Kuwait and the United States decline to comment, the more the IRGC's version of events becomes the default regional narrative.

, Monexus desk note: This piece is built entirely on Iranian state-aligned communiques and one X account re-distributing them. Where the wire has gone silent, we have said so rather than fabricate confirmation. Read with the same caution you would bring to any single-source claim of battlefield success.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/wfwitness
• https://t.me/Tasnimnews_en
• https://t.me/farsna
• https://t.me/FotrosResistancee