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In news that wasn’t, I’m sure, on anyone’s 2026 bingo card, the Greeks and Iranians are on the brink of war for the first time in over two millennia. Greece has sent two frigates and a pair of fighter jets (so, slightly less than 300 crew) to defend Cyprus from Iranian drone and missile attacks.
But why is Cyprus under attack? Why, indeed, are so many countries across the Middle East coming under a barrage of Iranian attacks? Is this the death throes of Ayatollahs? Is Iran trying to set off a wider conflict, even WWIII?
The latter is the most unlikely. And while, yes, this is likely the death throes of the regime, there is in fact a desperate strategy behind the seeming random attacks.
Iran has systematically targetted its Arab neighbours’ airports since the start of its retaliatory strikes for US and Israeli attacks, hitting commercial hubs as part of a strategy to build pressure to end the war.
For all that it has long dreamed of being the centre of a new Islamic global power, as a Shiite nation, Iran is largely isolated within the wider Islamic world. While some majority Sunnis, such as Hamas, have been willing to work with Iran’s mullahs against the ‘Great Satans’ of Israel and the US, much of the Middle East has moved steadily to normalised relations with both countries. Iran’s web of terror proxies, such as Hezbollah, are becoming less heroes of Islamic resistance and more a revanchist pain in the collective Middle Eastern bum. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, in particular, are wearing thin the patience of Gulf States.
At the same time, Israel’s strikes last year were a fatal humiliation to Iran’s projected strength.
Isolated and weakened, Iran is making a last-ditch effort at applying pressure across the region, hoping its Middle Eastern neighbours will buckle and try to convince America and Israel to back down. With so much global trade and travel passing through the region – including the world’s busiest airport, Dubai – it’s not an entirely hopeless strategy
With its survival at stake, the Iranian regime is taking aim at the globally connected nerve centre of its Gulf neighbours, largely shutting down air travel in a region that depends on it as an economic lifeline. Those countries use their airports for much of their food imports and to fly in their largely expatriate workforces.
The airports are also key connectors for global transport and cargo. More than 3400 flights were cancelled Sunday across seven airports in the Middle East, according to the flight tracking service Flightradar24.
So far Iran has hit airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the hubs for the Emirates and Etihad airlines in the United Arab Emirates, as well as others in Kuwait and Bahrain […]
Iran also targeted seaports and other critical infrastructure. Drones slammed into high-rise hotels and other buildings in Dubai and residential towers in Bahrain. Iranian threats also choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil corridor, showing how Tehran’s retaliation is starting to have a global impact.
Not least, Dubai is host to an infestation of Western social media ‘influencers’, who are panicking mightily.
The strikes on airports, seaports and other critical infrastructure show how Iran is aiming to use economic pain in the Gulf to put pressure on the US and Israel to dial back strikes aimed at overthrowing the Iranian regime.
“It is used to inflict a sense of isolation to those countries, to make their residents feel they are on their own and create a panic inside them,” said Yasmine Farouk, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula project director at International Crisis Group. “The Iranian strategy is to not only regionalise the conflict, but to internationalize this through the Gulf countries from day one.” Small and wealthy from their vast reserves of oil and gas, Gulf states including the UAE and Qatar have transformed their airports into global hubs that connect Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia and compete for the business of long-haul travellers with other important hubs like London, Singapore, Amsterdam and Istanbul.
For Iran, though, it’s an expensive strategy with low returns.
The UAE’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday afternoon that its air defenses had handled 165 ballistic missiles, two cruise missiles and 541 Iranian drones in less than a day and a half of combat.
Of those, only a handful actually got through to their targets. Five hundred-odd drones, while ‘relatively’ cheap, would still cost in the tens of millions. The cost of the missiles would run into the hundreds of millions. For a regime cash-strapped by years of sanctions on its sole major export, oil, the bills will quickly add up.
Not to mention its stockpiles run low. According to intelligence reports, Iran likely possessed around 2500 missiles at the start of the year. But not only are these mostly being intercepted before they hit their targets, the launch facilities are fast being obliterated.
Along with the rest of Iran’s military hardware. The US has already sunk 10 Iranian battleships and more than 1,250 targets inside Iran in the first 48 hours of the conflict.
If Iran gets locked into a war of attrition-by-missile, it will be shooting blanks in very short order.
For its strategy to succeed, Iran will have to outlast what is expected to be a weeks’ long American operation. Iran has already suffered the loss of key military and political leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, degrading its combat effectiveness and raising the very real prospect of regime change or military coup. Each time its missile units conduct strikes, they run the risk of detection and elimination.
And fast alienating what little sympathy they had among their neighbours.
