When a drone hit a British air base in Cyprus around midnight on the second night of the war in Iran, it caused a chaotic scramble that is still reverberating across Europe.
Sirens blasted until dawn as military families were evacuated to hotels and local residents fled any way they could. Before the government could order a full evacuation of the thousands of civilians living in the area, two more drones approached the base, though they were shot down into the sea.
“Everyone was in a panic,” said Pantelis Georgiou, mayor of the local municipality of Kourion, who rushed to the area after a British officer alerted him that the base had been hit. “For us, it was something totally new. I would say it crumbled the image of what we thought of as a fortress.”
The air base, R.A.F. Akrotiri, one of two base areas on Cyprus that are sovereign British territory, is home to thousands of British troops and their families. Used for training and hosting joint exercises, it is also an important staging post for British and American military operations across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa.
Situated just 150 miles west of Lebanon, it hosts personnel on short and long deployments to the Middle East who specialize in air defense, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
Despite those credentials, the drone, which the British Ministry of Defense described as resembling an Iranian-made Shahed, not only evaded the base’s defenses but found a precise target, blasting through a hangar that housed an American spy plane.
Victor Papadopoulos, a spokesman for Cyprus’s president, and officials in other countries said the drone was launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia.
By a fluke, the one-way attack drone hit the hangar but caused no damage inside it, according to the defense ministry. An official in Cyprus said it flew right through the hangar and exploded on the ground outside. The official asked not to be named while discussing a sensitive security topic.
The explosion, loud enough to wake people living near the base, alarmed the whole country, and the blaring of sirens warned that Cyprus was in the sights of ballistic missiles launched from Iran. None have reached Cyprus, but at least two missiles have been shot down while approaching nearby Turkey in the last eight days.
Tourists and international students left Cyprus in large numbers, and hotels and airlines reported mass cancellations — a concern for many Cypriots, since the country’s economy relies largely on tourism.
The attack resonated across Europe, where several leaders have criticized America and Israel for the war against Iran but jumped to the defense of allies that came under attack, as well as their own stranded citizens.
France, Spain, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands sent warships to the waters around Cyprus. President Emmanuel Macron of France flew in for a meeting with President Nikos Christodoulides of Cyprus and Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. “When Cyprus is attacked, it is Europe that is attacked,” Mr. Macron declared.
Cyprus is a rare E.U. member that is not a member of NATO. Had an alliance member been hit, it would have raised the stakes for Europe even further.
“The European Union is doing symbolic politics, shows solidarity and does the right thing,” said Hubert Faustmann, who teaches history and political science at the University of Nicosia, in the Cypriot capital. But he said he was frustrated by what he called the overreaction that caused a quarter of his students, among them Americans, to leave.
The rallying of support was welcomed by Mr. Christodoulides, who has maintained Cyprus’s clear pro-Western stance of recent years. Cyprus has enforced sanctions against Russia and deepened partnerships with the United States and Israel, while calling for Europe to reduce its dependence on others for its defense, foreign policy and economy.
Standing beside Mr. Macron and Mr. Mitsotakis, the Cypriot president urged the European Union to strengthen its collective approach to security.
“Our countries share the conviction that the E.U. must engage more actively, more strategically and more coherently with the wider region as part of a comprehensive 360-degree approach,” he said.
Cyprus considers support from Europe and other allies existential and sees Turkey as its greatest threat. Turkey invaded and occupied the northern part of the island in 1974, and the island’s northern part declared independence in 1983, a move recognized by no country other than Turkey.
Turkey maintains a large military presence there, and its deployment of F16s to northern Cyprus this week, ostensibly for protection, was met with mixed emotions elsewhere on the island.
Some analysts have questioned the rush to protect Cyprus.
Britain sent additional fighter jets and helicopters and, after some debate, has diverted its most advanced destroyer, H.M.S. Dragon, to Cyprus. That pulled it away from a planned operation in the North Atlantic meant to deter Russian aggression and protect vital undersea infrastructure, according to a report by Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute.
“We don’t know what threat assessment was made for the region, and why a single drone striking Cyprus now necessitates new deployments,” Mr. Savill wrote. Britain’s shortage of capacity means it has to choose carefully how it employs its assets, he added.
In Cyprus, the attack has renewed questions about the value of having British bases. Protesters came out to call for the bases to be closed and the British to leave.
Melanie Steliou, a former TV presenter and current candidate for Parliament for the Progressive Party of Working People, a left-wing opposition party, said that the use of the bases to wage war in the Middle East, or even to assist in that effort, was endangering Cypriots.
“I’m pro-peace,” she said. “All this militarization will just escalate the situation in the area.”
A leftover from Cyprus’s colonial history, the deal that gave Britain large areas of sovereign territory when the island gained independence is overdue for renegotiation, said Nasia Hadjigeorgiou, an associate professor at the University of Central Lancashire in Cyprus. She said the Cypriot government was closely following Britain’s discussions with Mauritius about returning the Chagos Islands to the East African nation.
Although the British have contributed to Cyprus in some ways, such as fighting forest fires, they have much more territory than they need or use and do not pay rent for the bases, Professor Hadjigeorgiou said.
But Cyprus is unlikely to change course, said Anna Koukkides-Procopiou, a former minister of justice and public order in Cyprus and current Yale Peace Fellow. She said Iran had threatened Cyprus in the past over its deepening relations with Israel and the United States.
“Cyprus has made very conscious foreign policy decisions, which I don’t necessarily think are wrong, but they come with certain repercussions,” she said. “Basically, we are faced with the consequences of the choices we’ve made.”
Mr. Papadopoulos, the presidential spokesman, refuted that, saying that Hezbollah had launched the drone in response to Britain’s announcement that it was letting American forces use of some of its bases. “It was a clear attack on the bases,” he said by telephone. Iran subsequently sent a message saying it would not target Cyprus, he said.
Despite a government evacuation order, Cypriots who live around the base were warily slipping back to their homes. Some, like a retired customs official who lives half a mile from the base, never left. The official gave only his first name, Christakis, to avoid repercussions.
“They are not going to hit my house,” he said of the drones with a grin, “they are more accurate than that.”
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.
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