At least 10 U.S. troops were injured Friday, two seriously, in an Iranian attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The strike on the heavily defended base also damaged at least two U.S. Air Force refueling aircraft, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident with the news media. It was not immediately clear how badly the planes were damaged.
The attack underscored how four weeks into the U.S. and Israeli campaign, and despite a blistering assault that has hit more than 16,000 targets across the country, Iran maintains a potent missile arsenal capable of striking across the Middle East.
President Donald Trump has appeared eager to end the conflict, which has roiled the global economy — and caused gas prices to spike in the United States — as Iran has stymied the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, he has authorized the deployment of thousands of ground troops to the Middle East and declared that the U.S. would begin to target Iran’s energy grid unless it bows to Trump’s demands.
During a speech Friday in Miami, Trump said that the U.S. had 3,554 targets left to strike in Iran, a task he said could be “done pretty quickly.”
Friday’s attack was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal and CBS News.
Iran has hit numerous U.S. facilities throughout the region since hostilities began Feb. 28, and more than 300 U.S. troops have been wounded, according to the Pentagon’s latest tally. Most of the injured have returned to duty, though at least 10 troops remain seriously hurt, an official said.
To date, 13 American service members have been killed as a result of Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration’s name for its war on Iran. Seven died as a result of hostile fire. Six were killed in a plane crash.
In 2022, U.S. Central Command estimated that Iran had more than 3,000 ballistic missiles of all ranges. Despite the U.S. and Israeli campaign, the regime in Tehran still has some capability, said Richard Goldberg, a former director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the White House National Security Council during the first Trump administration, and now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“I think it’s understood that Iran has a large stockpile of short-range ballistic missiles, many more than medium-range ballistic missiles and obviously a large stockpile of drones,” Goldberg said at an event Friday. “And that they were going to use them in the manner that they are using them.”
It was not immediately clear whether Iran also launched one-way attack drones at the Saudi air base Friday. Deployed U.S. forces have struggled at times to adequately protect personnel from drones.
Trump, along with his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said the U.S. is winning the war and that peace negotiations with Iran are progressing. Speaking this week to members of his Cabinet, the president said that Iran is “begging to make a deal.”
Trump on Thursday extended the deadline to reach a compromise, saying he was “pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days” to allow talks to continue.
But despite statements the administration’s pronouncements that the two sides are close to a meeting, a senior diplomat from the region on Friday described them as still far from agreement on whether or where a meeting would be held, let alone any overlap in their demands.
“In any war situation it is a cliché that when the first bullet is fired, the first casualty is truth,” the diplomat said. “So whatever is being said by either side is at a level intended to be part of their posturing and positioning.”
Michael Birnbaum and Alex Horton contributed to this report.
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