IRAN launched attacks on Gulf allies of the United States for the second consecutive night on Wednesday and into this morning, as the chaos unleashed by the US and Israel’s unprovoked war continues. Following a series of attacks on Wednesday, sirens sounded in Kuwait early today, where air defences intercepted missile and drone attacks…
Page A2From§Eachthe noon edition — 3 September 2026
Iran apologizes for attacking Gulf allies, promises to stop, attacks them a third time since.
As it ran on the front
The sequence starts on paper. On March 1, the Gulf Cooperation Council's ministerial council issued a statement condemning Iranian strikes on its members and reaffirming that none of their own territory would be used to launch anything back at Iran — a pledge of restraint offered by the side that hadn't been attacking anyone. Six days later, President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized on Iran's behalf and said the Interim Leadership Council had agreed not to attack its neighbors again "unless an attack on Iran originates from those countries." The apology did not survive the news cycle that carried it: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE each went on to report strikes on their own territory in the stretch that promise was supposed to cover.
That was wave one. Wave two came on August 31, when Iran's Revolutionary Guard answered a weekend exchange — U.S. forces had fired on two Iranian rocket launchers — by sending drones and missiles into the King Hussein and Azraq bases in Jordan and into American assets in the UAE. Wave three opened this week and hasn't closed. For a second consecutive night, running from Wednesday into Thursday morning, sirens sounded over Kuwait as its own Ministry of Defence described what its air defenses were intercepting — missiles, drones — as "blatant Iranian aggression," the government's own word for what crossed its own airspace. Wednesday into Thursday is one continuous night, not two separate ones; the count that matters is the one that started in March, and this is the third wave of it.…
…(cont) By Wednesday, a CBS report carried the detail apparently meant to close the story down: Iran's attacks, an official said, did not reach military facilities used by the United States. The strikes landed instead on the countries that spent March being told, by Iran, that they were covered by the apology. Kuwait and the UAE are the same allies named in that promise. They are also the allies still absorbing it — the pledge's beneficiaries and its casualties are the same five governments, on the same piece of paper.
Not quite six months separates a signed promise from its third violation, and the distance was recorded each time by the people it happened to: the GCC's own statement, the apology's own language, a defense ministry's own word for what came through its own sky. None of that required a leak. It's filed under the date it happened, in the countries' own words, waiting for whoever reads the fold.
“Each promise Iran signs not to hit its neighbors comes with an expiration date under six months, and the five governments holding that paper are the ones taking the missiles. The apology bought silence for exactly as long as it took to write the next wire story, and the bill keeps landing on Kuwait's airspace, not on anyone's negotiating table.”
“Look, the CBS reporting is clear — no U.S. military facilities got touched, so functionally this is a regional matter, not an American one. I mean, Kuwait and the UAE are treaty partners we've spent decades arming and basing troops beside, so — okay, that's still very much an American problem, forget I said regional.”
The receipts
Iran on Monday struck back at the U.S., carrying out attacks on American military assets at bases in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Jordan after U.S. forces fired at two Iranian rocket launchers over the weekend. Iran's Islamic…
Iran responded to a warning from President Trump with claims of new strikes against U.S. forces in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
· Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian apologizes for Iran's attacks on its Middle Eastern neighbors and states that the Interim Leadership Council had agreed not to attack them "unless an attack on Iran from the morgue, 7 Mar 2026
· The Ministerial Council of the Gulf Cooperation Council issues an statement condemning the Iranian attacks targeting GCC countries, reaffirming that their territories won't be used to launch any attac from the morgue, 1 Mar 2026
· Kyodo News Agency reports that during his visit to mediate between the U.S. and Iran, Japanese PM Shinzō Abe asked Iran to release American prisoners held by Iran, though the response is "unclear" to from the morgue, 14 Jun 2019
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.